Internet friends

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . March 25, 2010 . 10:30AM

At CPAC, every time you turned around you could find someone you knew.  By this I mean that if you didn’t know them personally, you would recognize them from television, their blog, twitter or from pictures with your friends.  For me, this meant that CPAC felt like one big family reunion.  I’ll admit it:  I felt like a cool kid. 
 
My friends and Leon’s friends were there and those that were not were keenly missed.  Though there were thousands of people there, you couldn’t wander around without seeing someone you knew.  Even online friends were instantaneous friends.  This is the nature of and the intricacy of internet friendships.  You spend so much time speaking with someone online that it builds an immediate sense of comraderie and bond. 
 
This is not always a positive thing.  I’m fully aware of stalking and the like.  In this case, it was a delightful experience.  Please be careful who you talk to online.
 
By the end of CPAC, we’d formed our own mini-group.  The group was consulted before meals and definitely before going out in the evening.  Like-minded people who enjoy spending time together and who are at the same event sharing food:  what could be better? 
 
One evening, we headed out to get a very late bite.  Some of the participants wished to get a drink and we headed on to the bars on the strip to find a place to eat and settle down to talk for the night.  After walking for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, but what was really only around a couple of blocks, we found the place that 3 different iphones had placed as THE place to be for the evening.  As we started to head in the door, with all of us pulling out our IDs, there was a problem.  Caleb’s license has expired.
 
Caleb is well beyond the legal age.
 
Caleb looks like a logger.  Caleb looks like his picture.  Caleb’s picture ID states that he is above the legal age.  The kid at the door, who couldn’t have been all that much above legal age himself, refused Caleb entry.  He stated that it was the “new thing” for kids to use outdated IDs to get into bars.  Clearly, the ID was Caleb’s.  The kid again refused and stated that “in the DC stings bars were being busted for things just like this.”  At this point, Caleb’s brother Ben came to his defense and we left after words were exchanged. 
 
Be aware.  You might not be who you really are.
 
The silver lining was that the experience bonded the group even further and we returned to the hotel where we started and the bar and restaurant there.  This was also the place I’d suggested in the first place.  Before the walking and the argument.  To say I was smug would be true.  But we had a great “war story” and the group had a great evening. 
 
Yes, internet relationships are interesting.  I’ve met some of the best people of my life on the internet.
 
Here is to meeting many, many more.

Vague memories of an Irish pub

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . February 26, 2010 . 8:19PM

When we last left our heroine, she was at an Irish pub in the awful land of Washington, D.C.: a land full of people with agendas and horribly arranged streets…

We’d moved to a larger room in the back of The Dubliner and our group was gaining people like crazy. By this time, many in the group were inebriated. I was drinking my Coca-Cola (yeah, yeah, I’m drinking caffeine again–I’ll pay for it later) and enjoying the show.

It’s not my job to tell you everything that they did or said. It’s really not fair to them. Truly. They desperately need to be tattled on, but they all have their own blogs and if they can remember, more power to them. What I remember most keenly was our waiter. In an Irish pub, anyone with any kind of European accent sounds Irish. This is particularly true when everyone in the room is inebriated. What happens is that everything is much funnier than it really is.

Because of this situation, when it came to conversing with the waiter, I thought that it was hysterical that he wasn’t really Irish (look, he SOUNDED IRISH–if it looks like a Lucky Charm and walks like a Lucky Charm–yep, I’m kidding and yep, someone is gonna take that personally and yep, someone is gonna call me names). If you’d like to call me sauerkraut, go ahead.

Anyway, I made it my mission to discover the heritage of our waiter. As such, I refused to give him my order until he would disclose. What? I was in Washington. Disclosure is the name of the game. You can’t live there and not carry around your birth certificate, right?

Eventually, he gave it up to me and my friend Sarah that he was English and French. Sarah is French so this was an incredibly delightful conversation that ended with us holding our waiter up for ten minutes while we compared family histories and had a new best friend who was now required to serve all of our food “with love” because it was inevitable that we were somehow related (me being 1/4 English and Sarah being French).

And yes, I required him to say that everything had love in it.

This was much better than the experience we had at a bar later in the week where they wouldn’t allow us in because Caleb’s license had expired and they refused to believe he was over 21 even though he was supporting a full logger beard and it was clearly him on the license. And then when the guy who refused to let us in mouthed off to Caleb and Ben and made the situation ten times worse… Oh, you want to hear about that, too?

It was a long weekend. And I met a girl named Beer.

On the Road Again

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . February 23, 2010 . 11:30PM

As an introvert, I just don’t travel well. I need a lot of sleep and a lot of time to myself. By that, I mean I need copious amounts of quiet time or I turn into a raging witch who will poke your eyes out if she doesn’t eat on time or stay warm or get enough entertainment…you get the picture.

However, there are times that even the thought of travel isn’t so daunting that I feel like I need to avoid trips. This is especially true when I know that I will see many of my friends and that the people I’m spending time with are those that have similar belief systems to mine. Well, that and I LOVE a good hotel room. Don’t you? All the little soaps and clean towels and beds that are made and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Leon and I had been looking forward to our trip last weekend for months. We were heading to CPAC and it was our first real trip ever without AJ. The plan was to be gone for 5 days and to leave AJ with our friend Bryan. AJ was thrilled because for him this meant: No bedtime, all the soda he could drink, video games and hanging out with the coolest person he knows. For me this meant: coming home to a spoiled child, worrying about whether he was getting enough to eat and wondering if his eyes were going to rot out of his head from playing video games.

I got over it and we went to D.C. There are so many things to blog about and they overrun everything I truly want to say. What this means is that you are going to have to deal with me blogging about it in spurts, as it comes to me, instead of a nice block of cohesive posts.

Washington D.C., from the point of view of someone whose city has little traffic issue, is a beast. I have never had to pay so much money to go such a little distance in my life. I will never, ever live there. Luckily, both Leon and I decided that there will be no politicians in this family. For the first two nights, we stayed outside of the city in a complicated little place called Silver Spring, Maryland. It was full of older homes and streets that are similar to something a 12-year old Sims player might put together. The goal was to make it to the Dubliner in D.C. Even the Jesus phone that our friend Allen had was confused as to how to get there from where we were. The miles of snow piled upon the cars and on the sides of the street didn’t aid in getting us to food any faster.

Remember when I said I don’t travel well and I get angry like the Hulk if things aren’t perfect? I was hungry. And I’d just realized I left my phone charger at home. My driving companions were fearful, but Allen is very laid back and Leon was looking forward to seeing his friends at The Dubliner. I’m pretty certain both of them were ignoring me because I was in the back seat, too, but neither would cop to this.

When we arrived, around 8pm on a Wednesday night, the place was packed. Luckily, a friend of ours thinks ahead and had reserved a whole area for our large group. Unfortunately, the staff at the Dubliner didn’t take us seriously because we had about 5 stools for 20 or so people. This led to copious time at the bar.

Which means no one remembers what happened the rest of the night.

I kid!

Or do I?

To be continued…