My Level of Awareness

Folks, THIS:

Is not sexual. 

This is a mother feeding her kid. 

There are medieval religious paintings of Madonna and Child more provocative than this. 

Get over it already.

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I hadn’t forgotten Sabine. So - here is one more totally-SCA Q&A:

“As someone who has sat on the Thrones thru 2 Gulf Wars – What do you think about Opening Ceremonies? Wouldn’t it be great if we put more effort into them? Enough effort that people would want to show up? And to start down the path to improvement do you think we should remove the horses that hinder us so much from the equation? (we can always give them their own parade…)”

First (I mentioned that vanity, right?) THREE.  (insert grin and wink here - where are emoticons when you need them?) Okay.  Deep Breath.

I agree with you.  The horses REALLY hinder what we can do in terms of pageantry and audience participation.  And I think the attendance over the years shows that.

What I personally would like to see?  A mass muster.  Each Kingdom massing in full Kingdom colors at their muster point and marching their armies with banners, singers, drummers, you name it, down to the Fort. Each would start at a different point and end up on the main drag.  This would need to be coordinated to avoid a cluster-well-you-know at Five Points, but a few people on radios should be able to manage that.  The next Kingdom could get the “go” as a preceding Kingdom hit the crossroads.  And largesse, there must be largesse.  Nothing says “I love you” like a good pelting with trinkets.

This would have to be accompanied by some sort of equestrian review later in the week - like perhaps move Great Court up and have the Royals arrive at GC on horseback.  More on that later.  But back to the Processional.

What’s it going to take?  And now here, you can see why this has not changed…

First, the Autocrat is going to have to announce the change in venue to all the participating Kingdoms, far, far in advance.  Planning for the next GW starts as soon as the gates close on the old one.  As a Crown, and knowing my fellow Crowns, Rule #1, above all other things, is never, NEVER blindside your Royalty.  I have been a volunteer, a shift head, a Staff Head, and a Crown at Gulf Wars, and I know that people on staff tend to underestimate the sheer amount of things a Crown has to do to Prepare for the War.  If you are conscientious about it, it is a herculean task.  Gift baskets, Teas, Socials, Scheduling, Fundraising, Army planning, War conventions - not to mention the clothes, oh-my-god-the-clothes, and at least two Courts that are expected to be the largest and grandest of the year.  And that’s in a non-Treaty year.  It’s a LOT to do.  In fact, so much Gleann Abhann has appointed a 5-member advisory committee to provide the Royalty with checklists and status reports to keep them on track as host Crown. 

You will also have to convince the Royalty to ditch the horses.  I will be frank - Royalty love horses.  This is one of the few opportunities they get to have for a Pageant like that.  Me, I am “eh”, mainly because I stiff and uncomfortable in a center position.  But largely, the Royalty LOVE to be seen riding regally on a barded horse - even if they can’t ride a lick and the horse is being led.  They will have to be bribed with another opportunity to do it.

And, you need a willing Autocrat.  One of Gulf War’s greatest strengths IS the level of continuity in Staff.  Most Staff Heads serve at least one war as a Deputy prior to stepping in.  Most have a much longer history of involvement.   On one hand, it means that the nuts and bolts of the war run smoother every year.   On the other, it means that we can have a tendency toward entrenchment.  And this is not discouraged by the Royals because they comfortably know what is expected of them every year.

So in short, it is going to take a clear vision - well planned and pitched to the Royalty in terms even they can understand - and a cooperative Autocrat.  Yes, I can see more effort being put in, but we need somebody who can fire them up - and Crowns that can fire up their populace.  It takes a cast of hundreds to pull it off.

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I had a weekend breather - an absolutely fabulous weekend, actually.  Bambi and Charles came.  There was an event TEN MINUTES from my doorstep, which we daytripped.  I aquitted myself respectably, despite having NO sleep the night before and breaking my greatsword.  I did take it easy and knocked it off early because during the breaking of said greatsword, I wrenched my arm big-time.  My child was an angel at the event (even though a sunburn made him CRANKY the rest of the weekend), and we grilled and ate steak on the deck in amazingly cool and beautiful weather until we couldn’t eat anymore, and then we sat around and watched the bats swoop until the stars came out.  In short,  it was all quite perfect.  PERFECT.

And then I took a hiatus from SCA related questions that really needed to happen for my own sanity. But now? I really have no excuse for not tackling Artos’s question.  And throwing in Finna’s for good measure.

So, asks my Knight, “Why do you fight?”  A question not unexpected from one’s Knight.  One would even say rather anticipated.  This does not explain why it has taken me so long to puzzle out a reply.

As always, there is a trite answer - Because I like to hit people with sticks.  Few are willing to come right out and reduce it to that level, but there is a primal satisfaction to full force combat with a fellow human being.  I mean, how often do you really get those opportunities in a legal forum with minimal risk of long-term physical consequences?  But, as Sarah guessed, there is a little more to it than athletics.

I guess, it’s like they say about climbing Everest - I do it because it’s hard.  No skill that is easy to master has ever captured my attention for very long.   Fighting has been hard. 

I am not a natural athlete.  I was a small girl when I started - about fifty pounds and 26 years ago.  I am impatient.  I anger quickly.  I have a woman’s upper body strength issues.  There have been a lot of things to conquer in order to be competitive, and just as I start to get control of them life issues have conspired to set me back.

But I can’t walk away.  As I said before, it’s not in my nature to do so.  It has never occurred to me to think that there was something I could not do if I put my mind to it and developed the self-discipline necessary to master it.  Fighting has proven to be the most difficult skill I have had to master.  And I am still working on it. 

And surprisingly, the physical part of the game has proven far easier to get a grip on than the mental discipline necessary to excel.  That has come hard and late.  I got used to losing for so long while I trained my muscles to move “that way” that I didn’t even notice when I stopped losing.  The idea that I can win and not just give somebody a damned good run has been hard to get used to.

Count Seth has been harassing me on and off with the “why isn’t being a Pelican good enough” issue.  The answer is “because it isn’t what I trained for”.  This isn’t about prestige.  I am thinking that considering I hold every Royal rank, and one Peerage bearing a Patent, that there really isn’t too much more to gain in that arena.  And, frankly, it also isn’t what I signed on for.  Power? That’s a bit laughable considering we are dealing with a make-believe power structure.  No, it’s because I have spent a lifetime training myself for a goal.  It’s about the fighting.  And yet, it isn’t.  It’s about the person that the journey makes you.  And I am not there yet.

So, why did I decide to squire to Sir Artos?  That’s a far simpler question to answer.  Because he IS the Knight that I aspire to be.  And he believed in my ability to be that Knight at a time when I desperately needed somebody to believe.  And, as long as he still does, I will keep on doing it.

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What is it about hair stylists that they hate long hair?

I will admit to one vanity.  The only really good feature that I think I have is my hair.  It’s auburn and wavy and long.   It had finally reached my waist and was full and thick, and I am proud to say, was a completely natural color.  Until the year of Katrina, I was fairly religious about keeping the ends trimmed so that it didn’t take on that unkempt kind of look that long hair often gets.

Let me stop for a moment here and make a point:

It. USED. To. Reach. To. My. Waist.

When I lived in New Orleans, I always spent a ridiculous amount of money every three months to have a trim.  It was the one beauty item I did not skimp on.  Only the best salons.  Only the best stylists in those salons.  I would be almost embarrassed to tell you what I spent on a cut.  I rationalized it by the fact that I only went in every three months - you can get away with that when you have long hair.  I also spent a completely ridiculous amount on leave-in-conditioners and shine solutions to keep it from tangling and breaking. 

This year has engendered a certain degree of neglect on the hair front.  We have moved A LOT.  Plus, we are now on a single income, and I can not bring myself to justify the kind of money I was used to dropping on a cut.  And, I have NO knowledge of the Little Rock Salon scene. 

So here is where I made my fatal mistake.

I went to Regis to have my hair cut. 

I can hear my more fashion conscious friends groaning now.  Now, in my defense, I was not expecting miracles, here, but I was not expecting a complete HACK job either.

A trim for me is about three inches.  About a palm width.  That’s what it takes to take off the damage - long hair is old hair, by the time the ends reach those kinds of lengths they are three years old at least.  Apparently, the stylist I got has some very serious depth perception issues. 

The final toll - AT LEAST six inches gone.  I am thinking probably more like eight.  EIGHT.  That waist-length hair?  Barely hits the bottom of my shoulder blades.  Oh, but at least it’s not even because she didn’t undercut it to account for the curl in my hair.  So, it’s eight inches shorter and jagged.

Would it be reasonable to sit down in the middle of my office and cry?

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Today the trash people came and took away my hope chest. Luckily I was not there to see it.  Kris was.  He said they had to bust it up to dump it in the garbage truck.

I guess I knew it couldn’t be saved when I insisted on pulling it out of the house during salvage.  None of the guys, God bless ‘em, had the heart to tell me to leave it. They silently unscrewed the hinges so I could pull out all my soaked and molding homemade sweaters (another sentimental keepsake, Lord knows I never needed them in Louisiana), and let me load it on the truck, even though it took up a ridiculous amount of space.  We paid to store it, then drag it across the country, and my husband never said a word.  Finally this weekend, I had Charles help me drag it out to the curb in a sudden last-minute decision before he and Bambi left to go home, and I tried not to look at it, sitting forlorn and peeling, next to the mailbox to be picked up and consigned to the landfill.

The chest was my last tangible link to my grandmother.  It was hers when she got married in 1942 - a real Lane cedar chest, with beautiful mahogany veneer.  It was a perfect example of 1940’s furniture - heavy and sleek.  It went from my grandmother, to my mother to me, and still had the original dated “moth insurance” tag affixed to the inside of the lid.  I loved it.  It fit my grandmother to a T.

She herself was almost an icon.  Tall ,lean, and redheaded, and impossibly tanned for being so, she was the image of the 1940’s “We can do it” woman worker poster.  Everyone in the neighborhood called her “Toots”, even her grandchildren.  I can still see her with her halter top and shorts, sunning on a chaise, cigarette in her long red laquered fingernails.  She had a big voice, a big laugh, big hair, and a biting sense of humor.  She was a woman of bold patterns, and bolder jewelry.  She filled every room she entered, and everybody at the local beauty salon knew her and her unerring sense of style.  I adored her.  

The counterpoint she played to my grandfather was complete.  Miserly in his affection, taciturn and dark, their relationship mystified.  I remember her slipping us a fiver as children with a wink - “Don’t tell your Grandfather”.  She loved life, and it loved her.  I think he was rather a moth to her flame, but her dedication to him never waivered.

She literally dropped dead shortly after my first marriage, suffering a massive aneurysm while walking down the staircase.  She was braindead before she ever hit the floor.  It took her body a couple more agonizing days to catch up.  She was buried on Easter Sunday in Rochester.  I remember it snowed.  And she was gone. 

To someone who has lost everything, I will never again say “They are only things. You have what’s important”.  First, it’s trite, and it’s dismissive of a person’s loss.  And sometimes things are not things.  That chest was a love song from my grandmother to my mother to me.  It was hope in a box.  Not just for one life, but for all the lives that will come and go in its wake.  It is faith that something will remain when you are gone.

I miss that chest.  I miss her.

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Of the emergency blogger system.

Seriously, folks, I am going to get back to it, but I am taking a blogging break for a few days.  I have had a series of communications recently that have shaken my faith in the Society as an organization, and I need time to sort it all out.  I am afraid that anything that comes out of my mouth (or, more accurately, fingers), is going to be seriously unpretty.

For now, I am falling back on my own feel-good standby and I leave you with this:

I need me some Harry-love.

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After all that gut spilling, I need something on the light side. I got another couple of deep thought blogs left, but it’s Friday, and I just can’t be that serious.

Sara’s and Stephanie’s questions go hand-in-hand, so I will run with that, at the risk cutting the length of time I can milk this material.

After about, um, 19 or 20 or so years in the SCA, I decided several years back that it was actually time to pick a persona and show a little bit of coherence.  This was precipitated by Radu winning Crown tournament and the sudden realization that I had better start taking this shit seriously.

In the past, I had become quite proficient, even expert, at making Italian Renaissance clothing.  It’s what I got the OVO for. The red and gold dress that Sara referred to was a vestige of that time.  Kane used to call it my knock-me-down-and-F—-me dress.  It actually survived Katrina because I gave it to Finna who was actually thin enough to wear it.  This postpartum bod was NOT going to squeeze into that sucker.  I love that dress.

However, I was on the downside of the SCA clothing trajectory - it is often said that you start out early period because it’s easy, progress to late period because it’s flashy, and then back to early period because, well, it’s easy.  But on the downside of the trajectory, you do early period right.

Well, I kind of stuck halfway.  I am not really early period - 10th-11th century - but it’s a far cry from Italian Ren.  Culturally, I am Hebridean, which was a thorough mix of Norse and Irish cultures.  The Hebridies was where they found the casting blocks that had both a Christian cross and a Thor’s hammer - a real equal-opportunity culture.  So, there is no inherent dichotomy to the fact that I have an Irish name and dress Norse. 

 Radu is a 10th-11th century Magyar - they are a nomadic horse-culture that settled Hungary.  He is a bit harder to outfit because his clothing is basically caftans, coats and pants, and it is hard to cut them large enough for his frame to keep him from looking like he is wearing a sheet.

Since we are starting from scratch, we have the opportunity to really do it right - which means lots of handstitching.  So the projects on the table right now are:

Norse hangarocks and underdresses and a new coat for me - we have YARDS of linen and wool in the sewing closet.

New coats and pants for Radu, and a new wool overcoat for winter.  I also need to put his new Knight’s belt together.  We bought over $300 in Magyar metal fittings.

A new Rus gambeson for me.  And a dress squire’s belt.

Some calligraphy for TRM’s - just general scrolls.

Glass bead making - I am making Norse beads for myself.

And, in the planning stages - new Silk banners.

 And, yes, as soon as I get my shit together (we have been concentrating on home improvements over the last few months), I am going to have workshops for anyone to come over and work on this stuff with me.

There should be PLENTY of opportunities!

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Just took a massive leap for the better.

Yay, Me!

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Okay, I am going to tackle a couple of the hard ones.  Now we are getting into deep-thought-self-examination territory.  It’s not that I don’t DO it.  I just don’t often write about it or talk about it - somehow whenever you try to explain your own motivations or ideals, it always comes out as pompous or conceited.  The best you can hope for is that people see enough of the passion to know that it is the real deal.  Bambi’s and Sarah’s questions are not interchangeable, but are definitely related, so I will treat them as a package deal.

There is a general catch-all toss-off answer that deals with both - I am a person whose prime motivating forces in life revolve around guilt and obligation.  Want to know how to manipulate me?  Make me feel responsible. 

But, that’s rather a cop-out, huh?

So, Bambi asks “What has kept you from just saying ’screw you guys, I’m going home?’”  I could be terribly glib here and say that if I had a dime for every time I asked myself that question over the last nine months, I could buy a vente skinny latte at my favorite coffee establishment (if said establishment hadn’t disappeared under 8 feet of water), but I am pretty sure that’s not what you are looking for.  And besides, it just makes me sound whiny.

I guess the answer lies somewhere in that it is simply not my nature to do so.  I say what I am gonna do, and I do what I said I would.  I am a woman of remarkably little original imagination, I am not a scintillating conversationalist, and I am not a particularly tactful diplomat.  My only virtues are persistence, patience, and a deep, deep comittment to fairness.  Even when I am GRITTING my teeth in frustration (yep, I’m a tooth-grinder and got the crown to prove it), I believe that everyone is entitled to a fair hearing IF THEY CHOOSE IT.

I have to emphasize this because, well, if you don’t have the cahones to come to the table to express your opinion and engage in fair discussion, well, excuse the French, but I got no F—ing use for you.  And yes, I feel that strongly about it.  If given the opportunity to have input, you decline to take it, you lose the opportunity to be righteously pissed.  You may be pissed, but you ain’t righteous.  But come at me with a direct question and opinion, stated upfront and honestly, and you got my respect whether I agree with you or not. 

And that is what helps me weather the storms of the SCA in the long term.  I am a person of almost painful self-examination.  Nobody can criticize myself or my actions or my motives more brutally than I do. I am not afraid to express an opinion when I reach one, and that gives the impression that I am a bit quick to form them.  Nothing is further from the truth.  I obsess.  I agonize.  I call every human being I respect and grill them mercilessly.  Ask anyone close to me and they can probably relate anecdotal evidence to this behavior in painful and gory detail. But the payoff is that by the time I am done with myself, there isn’t any skin left to scour.  I will happily offer myself up as a whipping boy for any decision I have made. I made a commitment to the Kingdom when we decided to fight in that First Tournament - and it was a commitment to a Kingdom I loved, and I believed in before it even had a name.  I wanted to give it the absolute best start it could possibly have with every bit of experience I could bring to it.  No, I am not conceited enough to believe that Radu and I were the ONLY couple that could have smashed that champagne bottle and launched that ship, and thankfully, blissfully, we weren’t.  It was a cast of hundreds.  But we got to help steer the ship, and I was not going to abandon it in a storm. I. was. not.

Now, that being said, I have come closer to walking away in the past few months than any other time in 26 years of my SCA experience.  That includes some pretty stormy episodes in SCA history.  And what has kept me in, ultimately, was you.  And Ben.  And Birgida.  And the Monkeys.  And My Knight.  And we are back to that guilt and obligation thing…

So that’s basically how I have survived this long, but it really doesn’t answer the WHY, Which is a segue to Sarah’s question of “If it were *just* the family and friends and athletics, there’d be no need to work your butt off for the Society like you do. So- what’s that goal you’re working towards, whether it be for you personally, or some vision you see for the SCA that you hope you can help implement?”

I have to divide this into two parts, which works, because it’s a two-part question.  There are my goals as a Peer (my SCA vision), and my goals as a squire (personal vision).

First, when you accept a Peerage, you pretty much accept that you are willing to set aside a huge portion of the time that you dedicate to personal goals in favor of a commitment to the SCA as whole - whether you define it as the organization, the Kingdom, the Crown or the Populace.  I have heard somebody say “nobody get’s a peerage without wanting it”.  Well, in a word, Bullpoopy.  The decision to accept the Pel was, for me, a decision that a very dear personal goal was to be, for the most part, set aside.  I was not going to accept it unless I was willing to be the kind of Pelican I felt the Order deserved (I am sure for the most part, they feel ‘afflicted’ at this point, but you will have to ask them).  But I was forced to recognize that I had a role I felt I could play, and that role could help a whole lot of other people get from the Society what they deserved.

As I mentioned, I am NOT a woman of original imagination.  Really.  It’s not false modesty, it is absolutely positively true.  I am NOT a “Big Idea” person.  But what I have recognized over time is that Big Idea people are fabulous on coming up with some really, really breathtaking stuff, but are generally crappy on the follow through.  Dreamers have a role to play - they can look at the horizon, and see the mountain.

Now, here is where I come in.  Show me where you want to go.  Convince me it is a paradise.  I will move heaven and earth to get you there.  I am not a person who is comfortable being the talking head.  I am far more comfortable being the “woman behind the curtain”.  Truth be told, I was a better Chancellor than I was Queen.  I see my role in the SCA being that of showing OTHER people how to get where they want to go.  I am a facilitator, and I am damn good at it. And I have found that not only is this a supremely useful skill, but because it does not matter to me who the “Idea Man” is - Crown, Peer, or NewGuy Joe - it keeps my interest and love of the SCA vital and fresh over the long haul.  And I get the vicarious satisfaction of seeing the pride it gives others.  My definition of leadership is not showing everyone how good you are - my definition of leadership is showing others how good THEY can be.  That’s what drives me as a Peer.  That’s what drove me as a Queen.

And there is that other thing.  That set-aside personal goal.  Fighting, for me, is far more than athletics.  The Quest to be a Knight, and I am going to be honest and blatant about it because everyone who puts on a red belt SHOULD be aspiring to be one, is not all about the quest to be the best fighter on the field.  Although, for obvious reasons, the struggle for prowess has been a major one for me, because I want to be good.  Not good-for-a-girl.  Good.  But more than that, it is an exercise in mastery over the self in the honest pursuit of Chivalric virtues.  The inward journey has been even more of a struggle.  I want to be a Knight because it is the recognition of what I have spent literally a lifetime working toward.  And I am one who believes that Knights ARE made, not recognized.  You can have every Knightly virtue in the book, but until the accolade is bestowed, you are still a squire.   Believing otherwise, even in your heart, too often leads to a sense of entitlement and bitterness that has no place in a struggle for virtue.  So, until such a day shall come, I shall work at being a very good squire - within the bounds that are allowed me by my duties as a Peer.  And that’s the rub.  I made a promise.

And we are back to that guilt and obligation thing… (and I am getting perilously close to answering my Knight’s question, which deserves its own blog).

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This is your real-life interlude amongst the SCA-focused trend my exercise in material generation seems to have taken.  Boy.  I can see where the readership comes from.  Or at least the vocal portion. (Edited to add a personal note to Glas and Charlotte - your answers are in the comments section of the original blog.  Didn’t want you to think I was ignoring you.)

How did I get from Arkansas to New Orleans?  I guess to really answer, I should go a bit further back from that and tell you how I got to Arkansas in the first place. 

I have been told that natives of Texas or New York will find a way to tell you that within the first five minutes of any introductory conversation.  I have managed to a certain extent to quell that impulse over time, but I have to abashedly admit that the cliche holds true.  I am not the kind of New Yorker that most people associate the term with.  I am not from the city.  I did not live in a loft apartment or a brownstone or a high-rise.  I grew up in Upstate New York, dividing my time between Rochester - the city that Kodak built - and my grandparent’s dairy farm in Livonia.  Upstate is everything you don’t think of New York being.  Green. Rural. Quiet. Conservative.

My Dad’s company relocated us to Missouri in 1980 during one of the biggest droughts in decades.  When we got there, my mother took one look at her brown lawn and cried.  I swear I had never seen anything so dusty and brown in my life (okay, not true, I had already been to Albuquerque, NM).  And, the culture shock.  Oh. My.  Since then, I have grown to love both St. Louis (lived there in ‘86 to ‘88) and Columbia (grad school, ‘94-2000), but I have never been overly fond of Kansas City.  Too much like a western city - all sprawl and obsession with progress at the expense of the past.  They say St. Louis is the western-most eastern city and Kansas City is the eastern-most western city - believe it.

From there, I went to Tulsa to go to college, and from this point onwards, my travels have been dictated equally by boys and education.  So….

1984 - Kansas City again (boy, several other boys, back to the original boy)

1986 - St Louis (running away from a boy, toward a few more boys)

1988 - Little Rock (well, Pine Bluff, to be accurate - a boy.  This time I married him)

And now actually begins the answer to your question, Sheila.

1994 - Columbia, MO - Grad school (Leading to divorce and eventually a new boy, who moved for ME for a change)

2000 - NEW ORLEANS!!! 

I moved there for my post-doctoral work - so, file that under education.  There were probably other, more prestigious (and paradoxically lower-paying) post-docs I could have taken, but at that point I wanted to come home to Gleann Abhann/Meridies SO badly I would have promised my first-born, had a first-born been on my radar yet.  So incredibly glad it didn’t come to that.

And, well, I would be there still if it hadn’t been for that little storm…

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