(also, it occurs to me when selecting my Suikoden names, that I shouldn't use characters I want to discuss!)
My first real adult job (so it seems to me) was doing data entry for a property insurance company, which I did for two and a half years. I was involved in Xena fandom for most of that. Toward the end of that job, I met Lepanta and began to grow closer to her, and started to plan my first convention.
I was laid off from that job (as were most of the staff when the office moved), and went immediately to a string of temp jobs. The first two were a bath warehouse and a hearing aid warehouse respectively, both of which were awful. The second two were filing for an engineering company and filing for a nonprofit scientific company, both of which turned out very well (the engineering company would end up rehiring me twice). My time with the nonprofit company would turn out to be especially significant for me. During the afternoons I was filing, but during the mornings, I was occupying the front desk, and able to get on the Internet with my supervisor's permission and blessing provided that no one else had any work for me. My friendships with Lucia, Wakaba, and Rina all grew and blossomed during this time. Wakaba would text me every morning just to say "good morning," then call to keep me company as I drove home in the rain.
After the nonprofit company job ended and before the engineering company hired me for the second time, I had a month and a half or so where I was unemployed. This was the time when the Grand Canyon trip took place.
I didn't have a lot of warning, just a couple of notes from Tengaar. And (like so many other board events), it was originally supposed to be a larger group, but just ended up being three of us. Tengaar visited Sasarai from England. They spent the first half of their trip around Sasarai's home, but also wanted to come to see the Grand Canyon, and invited any of us in the area to come along. I agreed quite eagerly -- it would mean a six hour or so ride in Tengaar and Sasarai's rented van with their ipod dock, then a visit to the Canyon for as long as we wanted, and then -- for plan A, a ride back at night, then they would stay over at my apartment.
I'd spent a bit of one on one time with Tengaar at the convention and exchanged a few emails afterwards, but I still felt like I was at the very beginning of my friendship with her. It tended to be a pattern with a lot of Xenites: have a couple of close one on one conversations, then take the whole discussion to email. She had coined the term (at least to me), "magical mystery tour of my brain." I hadn't spent any one on one time with Sasarai at all. She told me about her desire to eventually create videos, and explained her idea for a video for Within Temptation's "Angel." Not a fan-music-video with clips from some show or other, but an actual story video for the song. She had some really good ideas -- it was the sort of thing you could make seem easy on the surface, but she made me see each moment with her words, and that's not the sort of thing that's at all easy to invent. I put the pieces together with some very in-depth posts the two of them had made over the past couple of months. That was another thing that seemed unique to our Xena board. Lepanta had started it with a thread called "tell your secrets," and both Tengaar and I had some pretty heavy stories in there, while Sasarai had started an unrelated thread all her own. It was doing friendship in reverse order -- first you found out some of the deepest, most hidden secrets about the other person, then you found out what he or she looked like, what his or her favorite color was and how he or she traveled. I know that reverse order sounds a little weird, but I found it comfortable in a very odd way. Paradoxically, having my deepest secrets out there already made it less of a risk -- the people who would eventually be scared off by the darkness in me didn't even try to get to know me, and the people who could not only handle it but love me for it reached out to me, and then we did all the surface level things.
Tengaar had created a playlist for the occasion. I was first noticing that when I'm unemployed, I feel music-deprived (since I listen to music constantly at work, but I don't have the same occasion to listen when I'm at home doing other things). There was one point when Evanescence's "My Immortal" came on. Sasarai said it was karaoke time, so we all sang along. If I had to choose just one favorite moment from the trip, it would be that -- the road flying by, and the thrill of creating a song (however clumsily) and my new close friends' voices mingling with mine.
The trip was tainted for Sasarai especially because she didn't feel at all well (she wound up going to urgent care the next day and receiving antibiotics). It didn't hinder it for either of the others of us, except that we felt bad for her.
The Grand Canyon itself is as beautiful as everyone always told me it was, and my determination is greater than ever that someday I am going to hike across it. I guess it won't be with "Xena" fans now ... but I had that dream before I ever watched "Xena," and the Canyon is ... deep and huge and majestic and utterly wonderful. We did hike down past the rim just to say we'd done it, since such a high percentage of visitors never make it past the rim. All the pictures show me in my Xena community t-shirt. I still have that shirt -- I try not to wear it too often since it'll wear out with the washing and I can't get another. There's something on that graphic, "friendshippers," that was put on especially for me. When I posted the pictures later, our community leader said that she was pleased that our community had now made it to high places.
I bought a notebook at the gift shop so I could write poetry out on one of the rocks. We had specifically designed that we would be there at sunset. The colors are amazing. I think we're all lucky that we're not afraid of heights, since we were able to go out and see things that would have been too frightening if looking down induced dizziness -- nothing dangerous, but still, you know, exposed nature. It's even more majestic from that viewpoint.
We only got a couple of hours on the way home before we all had to get off the road, so we did end up spending the night at a hotel. I wasn't used to being in bed before midnight, so I listened to music in the dark for awhile before falling asleep. I still remember those moments as well ... stillness and blankets all around me, and nothing in the way of the glory that is music itself.
We had some equally good conversations the rest of the way back in the morning, and through the rest of the next day. I was sorry to have to say goodbye. I never saw them in America again, although I'd see them in England in the year following.
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