When Faraway Things Seem Close

This post is long overdue.
Originally intended to be a cross-post with Emily, this was written by both of us at various points throughout the 24 hours leading up to Pride Weekend. Intoxicated and driving around my hometown and the surrounding highways aimlessly, we stopped at a CVS to purchase a notebook. And by that I mean I got nervous, shoved two dollars in Emily's hand, and made her go buy a notebook. I don't think we kept this up as long as we intended. Nevertheless, I present to you the chronicle of two really anxious girls overwhelmed by possibility. And Tegan and Sara a little bit.

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June 26 2009 10:30 pm (Emily)

I GOT INTO Katrina’s house last night at 1 am. I went 24 hours without sleep and woke up at 1 pm.

We drove around Rockland aimlessly listening to Tegan and Sara which was so epic it cannot properly be described. We should ideas and dreams and things that would make us happy. I’m having an I-Thou relationship with the road. The roads in America are all the same.

We have the same idols and we constantly bring the conversation back to autostraddle. We auto-dance. We are auto-hot. We are auto-blazed, auto-drunk. We auto-win.

We don’t know how to get there. All we know is that City Girl is the best Tegan and Sara song and it’s possible to be nowhere and not lost at the same time.

The road is magnificent.
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June 26 2009 10:45 pm (Katrina)

WE'VE BEEN ON the highway searching for the overlook for about 20 minutes. It probably would have been only ten, but as I am probably in no condition to be driving, I’ve been going at a steady 40 mph on a 65. This adds a new element to auto-blazed.

I look over at the clock. 10:40. There is so much night to be had. It reminds me of DC, of the apartment, where we’d be too high on uppers to sleep but too stoned to have a real conversation. It’d be 2:30 and we’d feel like the night was so new. 10:40 is so early and I wonder if this is what it’s like to not know you’re young.

If someone asked me how long I’d been young for, I’d say my whole life. If you asked me when I’d stop being young, I would tell you that’s not up to me. When does one stop being young? Do you wake up and know, or is it something that only occurs in retrospect? And if youth is defined by behaviour, I plan to always be young. If growing up means giving up your voice and forsaking your selfish desires , and well... being no fun, then, regardless of the number of years we've actually been around.. well, I’m gonna be forever young. So suck it, Rod Stewart.
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June 27 2009 1:51 pm (Emily)

DRIVING IN THE CAR with Katrina’s parents. We’re listening to The Clash. My heart was pounding at the beginning, thoughts like “holy shit” kept going through my head and I almost forgot where we were going. To be honest, when “Rudie Can’t Fail” came on I felt relaxed, it was a little sound from home, something familiar. Because everything here is new. Every step I take is one into the unknown and it is both exhilarating and terrifying. In fact the past two days have been exhilarating and terrifying and these next two should be so intense I’m expecting my heart to explode at any time.

Except I’ve got this feeling we’re all in this together and together we can deal with anything.

Katrina joked about me sleeping in the car to avoid questions but now her brother is passed out next to me.

We’re about to get on the highway and it’s end to end traffic. My heart begins to pound again. I just want to get there.

I don’t know if the nerves are from pretending to be from Boston and going to AU or from meeting autostraddle and really Riese really. Both options are plausible.

I am having a heart attack again. We are on Lexington.

2:34 pm we are on the corner of Lexington and 56^th.
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June 27^th 2009 2:44 (Katrina)

WE JUST DROPPED EMILY off at Brooke’s which means we pulled off this incredible charade.

Waking up at a quarter to noon and laying on top of the sheets listening to “City Girl” on repeat, we knew we wouldn't be this still again.

Tegan and Sara were singing about me when they said “I know you’re scared even though you say that you’re not”. They know this as I try to stride confidently through my house in my baptism-ready dress and heels, sending secretive, self-assured smirks to Emily, trying to convince her we’ll make it through the car ride.

We will, and we do. Off I go to the house of God.

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Also, if you just read that and thought to yourself, "Well that was cool, but I'd prefer it as a stoner comedy," here's a badly edited video that was never really supposed to see the light of day, due to its bad jokes and continual breathless laughter over nothing.

I'm working on a lot of things right now. While you wait anxiously for them, check out how the rest of this weekend turned out by clicking my link at the top or reading Emily's exceptionally beautiful coverage of the same event. You could also do both.

They Call It Way Too Rowdy, We Call It Finally Free

It's like my notebooks threw up on my wall.
My notebooks hide the contents of my head, thoughts, scrawled out in code, meanings revealed by ink color or placement on the page, once sandwiched into a leather binding, are now hanging up over my desk. Pinned up against the wall as if they escaped from my notebook and found themselves disoriented by the explosion with which they were released.
My lists are on my walls. I can look at them all at the same time. Even if I can't understand what they're trying to tell me. They're overwhelming, but as they sit there staring at me, they remind me...something's happening.

Something's happening. Something's fucking happening.

I should have known it because lately I've been so restless and eager and anxious in the very best way, but also in a way that totally keeps making me nervous. Toward the end of the school year, I used to do this thing where I'd take present me and look back on past me, and almost feel envious. It would never be distant past me, it'd just be like...me three months ago before I knew that such-and-such was going to happen, like I never knew I'd stop caring about money or I never knew I'd end up on the floor of this total beatniky apartment, or hey, I never knew I wouldn't regret coming home for the summer.
Anyway, what really characterized the me in the past was that she never knew that her life had the potential to go somewhere else. I mean, she knew that there was growing to do, and that growing meant change, but this girl never felt what I feel now...like I'm on the brink.

Things just keep fucking happening.
Before I was always expecting my luck to run out or for things to slow down or for me to try to have to be a real person. But it's been all ups. And I'm finally starting to believe in it.

What I'm trying to say is, I just had one of the best weekends everever, the weekend that was supposed to be the peak of my summer, and though I did go through this two-and-a-half day period of real/fake/real devastation when it was over, what I'm beginning to realize is that what happened this past weekend isn't over at all.

So here we go. Starting off with a little vocabulary:

gaygrounding (n) - a common punishment for teenagers of the homosexual persuasion, where the subject in question is not forbidden from leaving her home, but from leaving her home to...do gay shit. This may include Pride events, hanging out with that girl with the short hair from down the block, or secretly running downstairs to watch Logo every time the parents leave. This last part, of course, still continues, as that is the point of secretly running downstairs. Gay grounding is usually highly ineffective and tends to promote increased homosexual behavior, but with a sexy, vindictive edge.

See: X, KC Danger

Gaygrounding is what I narrowly escaped this weekend after a blowout of sorts with my parents that almost kept Emily out of my house and me out of a momentously absurd pride weekend.

But. There are some things that are worth modeling through it for.
And one of those things is Autostraddle.

I think I mentioned before a few of the reasons why I love this fucking site and how I can't possibly believe I'm lucky enough to be working (I've been told that's sort of an inaccurate verb, interning perhaps?) for them. It always turns into gushing. Just to be sort of repetitive, this place isn't just a website, it's a community. A community run and organized by some of the smartest, wittiest, most interesting, self-assured, and unapologetically fucking crazy (and potentially superattractive, who knows, oh wait I do) queer ladies I've yet had the privilege of knowing. Like, I thought in a group of lesbians, there's always the one really cool girl who sort of rallies and carries the rest. But in this group it's all of them. And they're the ones giving a new kind of lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise inclined women a voice. They can have fun and get shit done. And it's just nice to know that that exists.

Oh, and did I mention that the interns are totes bomb-ass too?

And did I mention that both those groups of people hauled ass to New York (or, y'know, bused in like 20 miles like me) for dinner and a parade and a spoof on Tyra mail and a Rodeo Disco Party? Because that happened. And it was glorious.

Here are the vague concepts:
1. Meeting People from the Internets
So bitches always be like, "Isn't it weird that you don't really know any of these people? Like, won't that be weird?" Well, let me answer that for you. I do know these people, and they are weird. And crazy as shit. But there's too much love to deny it. The thing about meeting people on the Internet and then meeting them in real life is that you've already got it out in the open--we're weird. Like, yep, we exist pretty functionally in 3D, and maybe we've got jobs and friends and school and shit, but at the end of the day, I don't have to second guess what you're doing, because I read it on Twitter. I didn't have to be there for your last significant experience. Read it on your blog. Let's just talk about it, how we're all kind of weirdos who feel the need to broadcast our lives online. And we're unapologetic, because we wish other people would do it too. Give 20 people like this a weekend together, see what happens.

2. Drunk
The number one feeling of the weekend. There was little/no time to not be like this. I think most of the interns ingested their daily amount of grains through liquids this weekend. But why not? I mean what better way to get to know someone than by getting all loud and getting all touchy and getting all honest and covering each other while peeing because the line in the men's room is shorter and ending up in a room full of juice bottles in the corner of Stonewall Inn? Were those last parts just me? Woops, sorry then. What I'm trying to say is good times all around.

3. Persistence
In flyering alwaysalwaysalways, in getting up before noon despite wicked hangovers, in believing that eight people can stay in one hotel room. In fighting gaygrounding because we that what we did wasn't wrong. And in sneaking back into a bar over and over again, only to be escorted out by the same cowboy bartender three times.

4. Embarassing Honesty
I've got this tendency left over from DC that goes like this: amphetamines + alcohol = rambling honesty and an abundance of feelings/the need to tell them all to you. And so I did. Sitting outside Mason Dixon for two hours while the party reached its peak and eventually cleared out, Emily and I were visited by various members of Team Autostraddle who shared a number of drunken gems and relics from their young gay past (no, we totally heard everyone's coming out story, and it was all really cute, especially since everyone was in cowboy hats). We sat out there for two hours and watched everyone go by, half dazed, never sober, always talkative, and half in love with everything and everyone and the feeling of a dream finally realized, though realization didn't mean an end.

And it's all just so fall-against-the-wall-and-take-it-in-because-what-if-you-never-feel-this-new-or-real-again. ((But you do and you will and you know it, but you don't thikn you're allowed to admit it just yet)).

5. Withdrawl
It was like having everything happen at once. And the fastest of events make for the slowest of goodbyes, and after two straight days of being surrounded by peoplepeoplepeople (rather, girlsgirlsgirls), waking up alone in an all-too-spacious bed just doesn't do it. All day I can talk and work and run around my town, but when I finally stop, all it is is, why is my bed so big, and why am I the only one in it? And where are the other ten people I've attached myself to in these two days? And why aren't we getting stared at in public? Where are those naked feathered guys who walked behind us in the parade? Why aren't the following my car around? (Actually, if someone could arrange this, that'd be great). I miss everyone; I never wanted them to go back to 2D.

Everything's a little duller now, a little muted. But at the same time, everything's a possibility. Everything is what it could be, or could be again (and again and again), because maybe the apex is just a plateau, and we're all just really into climbing.