Midsumma Madness!

Well my lovely queers and heteros, another Midsumma has come to an end. And what a girlwind it was! From spending a week in the mountains with 30+ ladies, to hitting the clubs, to checking out the shows, to pashing some girls, to making new friends, to catching up with old friends, to marching with Pride... It's been a busy month!

First of all: drama camp was AWESOME! I had such a great time and met many, many amazing women. I also got to cook some insanely delicious food and be loved and adored for it. While hanging out in the mountains. I felt like I was being spoilt! I even managed to get some quality work done on my thesis, which, as you'll remember, was the whole point of me going on this trip!

Oh, and the best part: I finally got to make use of my valid Victorian driver's licence and drive someone's car!! It seems that leaving out the whole "I've never driven on the left before" thing is key. I didn't have to drive far, and it was on a small mountain road with very little traffic. I'm so used to traffic moving from the left here now that I thought I'd be fine to drive. But I was not prepared for all the signals and gears and stuff to be on opposite sides!! It was way more disorienting than I had anticipated. BUT, I am an entirely competent driver and we made the trip without issue AND I did a fabulous job parking upon our return. I waited a couple of days before informing the owner of said car that she'd inadvertently popped my driving in Australia cherry. ;)

Like most things I do, I had no idea what I had signed on for. Our days started early and ended late. There were three of us on the kitchen crew, and hubby proved to be not only a great cook but an efficient and organised leader. He planned the meals, I just chopped what I was told to chop, stirred what I was told to stir, set out food and plates and cutlery where I was told to set them out, and grilled some sausage when I was told to grill some sausage! (I seriously hope the sausage was not completely disgusting; turns out I still can't stomach the thought of eating beef.) What I did take charge of was the clean up crews. After every meal I supervised the clean up crews as they did all the actual work of scrubbing up all the mess we'd made in the kitchen throughout the day. I had so much fun with the clean up crews that I actually started applying for work as a dishwasher when I returned to Melbourne. (Alas, a career as a dishwasher does not appear to be in the cards for me: instead I'll be doing some data entry at ARCSHS.)

I didn't know what to expect from the girls, not being from a drama background myself. The vocal warm ups freaked me out, at first, but then I got used to them and even missed the chorus of weird squawking and chanting at 9am when camp was over. The singing I did not miss so much. It took me about 4 days to get the songs out of my head!! But otherwise, I was quite delighted to find that they were all friendly and curious about my thesis (although after having the same conversation for the 20th time I may have started to wish they weren't) and good eaters! We made a lot of food and very little went to waste! I ate like a freggin' king! I mean, being on the kitchen crew, we had to make sure everything was fit to be served...and sometimes we had to check more than once, you know, just to be sure.

Girls Do Gertrude was a double bill of Gertrude Stein plays. The idea was to go away to the mountains for a week of intensive rehearsals, then come back and put the plays on. One group rehearsed downstairs in the lodge, and the other rehearsed in the space beside the kitchen. So we got quite familiar with the goings on of that particular play. With the singing, and the circles... *ahem* The second play, however, was a total mystery to me. Except, every now and then we'd hear these blood curdling screams coming from downstairs. Often the screaming came when we were reaching the breaking point of hearing Ain't We Got Fun yet again, so I wasn't entirely sure if they were related to the play or not! ;) It was actually really cool to see the play come together over the course of the week, and to know that there was this whole other play happening that I'd get to be surprised by when it was all finished.

I went to see the show last weekend, though in a funny twist of events I actually ended up at Northcote Town Hall with a couple of friends to check out another Midsumma event earlier in the week, and ran into the girls after their show. That was quite fun! Anyways, I went to see the show on Saturday and I of course had to get dressed up for it! 1920s style! I just so happened to have the perfect outfit lying around for the occasion. I even broke out the iron for it!

From what I'd seen in the rehearsal week I figured the plays were going to be good, but honestly, they were so much better than I expected! The first one, A Circular Play, was really witty and fun - and the costumes were incredible! I don't really know how to describe it, other than that it gave me a whole new appreciation for the art of acting. And directing! And the difficulty in learning the words to a song! The second play, Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, was amazing! It was a play repeated three times, each time a bit differently, and each time I got something different from it. It had this incredibly fun opening part where the girls were all being little kids playing and their play turns violent. It was dark and twisted, and yes, the screaming was part of the play. I have a new found appreciation for theatre after that week!

There is much more that I could update on, but I don't want to sit at my computer forever. So to do a quick summary: I have reached exciting new depths of poverty. It's been an interesting experience to have so little money to see me through the month. I've agreed to let hubby cut my hair for free, which he did last week...with his beard clippers and some kinda dull scissors. He actually did a rather amazing job, and may possibly be able to turn a small profit on offering niche market lesbian haircuts. I'm also on this exciting new diet called eating what other people give me for free! It is supplemented by another diet called eating food I can get for cheap. The health nut in my cringes at this, but the social scientist in me sees this as an interesting new experiment and is excited to see where it leads. Meanwhile, the student in me says as long as there is money for coffee and beer, I've got nothing to worry about.

I started my classes with the Women's Circus last week. That is quickly shaping up to be the most fun I have ever had, and possibly will ever have, in my life! My trainers are fantabulous, the women in my class are awesome, AND I get to learn cool tricks that involve me looking like I'm ridiculously strong. My guns aren't too shabby, but I'm not quite at llama status yet!

Now that Midsumma is over, I'm under official lock down to get my thesis over and done with! I've only got six more months to go, and a mountain to climb in that time. It can be done, but it ain't gonna be easy! I just have to keep reminding myself that the sooner I get my first draft completed, the sooner I can get the tattoo I've been planning for the past two years! I may barely be able to afford groceries, rent, or electricity, but I'm saving up my pennies for that next tattoo. There's no fucking way I'm completing that draft only to find out I don't actually have the money to afford the ink!!!

Until next time...wish me adventures!

Everything's Better With A Police Escort

Remember when you were a kid, in primary school, and a police officer came in to your school to teach you about what police officers do? Police are there to help you, you can trust them, all that business? Well, what I remember most about that talk is the big, strapping man informing us that we are never, under any circumstances, ever to touch a police officer's gun. And from that moment on, every single time I saw a uniformed police officer, I have wanted to touch their gun. It is, in fact, an item on my bucket list.

For a brief period I considered becoming a cop myself. It was a brief period. As anyone who has ever employed me, lived with me, dated me, or possibly had any interaction with me, can attest, I am not one for following the chain of command. There is, at least within the BDSM community, a term for people like me: topping from the bottom. I discovered this term last year when one of the women at my uni was giving a talk on her experiences researching a BDSM community. Someone asked about bottoms who are not willing to relinquish control to their tops, and when she informed us of the term for this, Gary, the man who is solely responsible for my Australian invasion turned to me and said "Yes, we see that with some students, don't we?" It has become an ongoing joke between us. Well, maybe not a joke, but a reality over which we can share a chuckle.

I considered becoming a criminologist (whatever that is) for a longer period of time. I developed an obsession with serial killers and could often be found haunting the 'True Crime' section at bookshops. I showed up for my first day of orientation at uni completely convinced that criminology was what I would be doing with my life. And I left my first day of orientation completely convinced that it would not be what I would be doing with my life. On that day I chose a different path, and I've never looked back.

But the police force remained a point of intrigue for me. I like to understand how things work, especially social things (that's why I am now a sociologist, whatever that is), and I always wanted to get an inside understanding of how the police force works. I mean, they are the ones who are responsible for upholding whatever values it is us academic types decree should be upheld. How could you not be fascinated by this?

Unfortunately, my life hasn't really involved all that much interaction with the police (on duty police, anyways). And when it has, it's been largely dismissive, which I now know is because of an intense professional loathing of paperwork, something I can very much relate to. When it comes to filling out forms, I have severe academic syndrome: "What does this mean when it asks for my address?", "Which social construct do you want me to use to describe my pain level?", "None of these tick-box options reflect my response to this question, is there someone I can speak to about the inadequacy of your forms?"

I've only actually been inside a police station twice: once when I found a pager on the street outside of the police station and bringing it into the station seemed like a sensible thing to do, and once to file a police report when my bag was stolen. Though, the best prank I ever pulled did involve me and another guy pretending to have been arrested for not having the money to cover our bar tab in order to get back at a third guy for not leaving enough money to cover his share of the tab (we won't get into the fact that I was covering exactly $0 of this rather hefty bar tab).

Obviously, meeting Lady Cop was like discovering my own personal gold mine. I think I managed to keep my cool about just how awesome I thought it was to have a cop in my life, at least until the other day when she came by my office whilst on duty. Back when we were dating she had promised to pop in to see me the next time she had work to do in the city. So when she informed me that she would be coming into the city this week, I held her to her promise!

As the day approached, we joked about her coming in and interrogating me. As I thoroughly enjoy giving people the wrong impression about me, I was really looking forward to giving my colleagues something to be concerned with. The only problem is, neither of us are particularly good at keeping a straight face when we're playing a joke on someone; though she is infinitely worse than me. So when a helpful woman from down the hall directed Lady Cop into my office and I smiled and said, "What can I do for you constable?" She just said, "Nah, can't do it." SO DISAPPOINTING! And I was really looking forward to heatedly calling her 'cuntstable'. Oh well, there's always every other day.

Fortunately, the rest of her visit proved to be entirely awesome. My favourite part was when Gary happened past my office as we were talking. The look of concern and alarm on his face definitely made up for LC's inability to carry out our little joke. So after she inspected my office, violated my fish, and refused my offer of a beer, she took me for a spin around the block in her police car! I sat in the front, and still people were looking into the car going "Who is that criminal?" Suddenly cars that would zoom through the pedestrian crossing outside my office were stopping, as were pedestrians as we tried to turn the corner. We went into my favourite lunch place, which was filled with construction workers. And while I was beaming from ear to ear to be getting a police escort to lunch, she was looking around nervously and saying, "You know that most people don't like the police right?"

We sat in her police car outside the front of my building for a bit, chatting and testing out her handcuffs. She waved her OC spray at me and pretended to yell at me whenever someone walked past the car. Several people from my uni walked past, though I'm not sure if any of them realized it was me in the cop car. Oh well! That's why I got pictures!

It was a good play date!

**Edit: Gary just popped by my office to inform me he thought I was being arrested for shoplifting. What a mundane crime to be suspected of! Although, perhaps he figured I was shoplifting because I am a poor student and will therefore let me work for him again??