First off, I’d like to say Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S. and big apologies for being so late on posting. The reasons why fit in perfectly with the theme of this post. Life is always filled with changes – some more drastic than others. I’ll confess that I’ve had a roller coaster nightmare of a year dealing with family emergencies (yes – multiple ones) and not being at home for the better part of four months. In the past month alone, I’ve been in so many different parts of the country, my body can’t decide which allergies it should plague me with.
So I arrived back in town then collapsed for a day. It was like my entire system was shrieking at me ‘enough already’. Now that things are calming down – certain issues have been taken care of – I feel as if I can finally get my life back. I can go back to doing what I was doing before I received the first of many phone calls telling me I was needed somewhere else. As other things wound down and I saw the proverbial light, I got hit with another blow that while not anywhere near as upsetting as what’s been going on, it hit me when I was down already, so hit me hard.
I won’t be able to go to Euro Con Pride this year. It’s a long, convoluted story regarding an aka I used prior to 9/11 on my passport. Back in the day, you could do stuff like that with nary an eyelash being batted. By taking two trips to a music festival in France where the name on my festival badge had to match my passport name (and as a performer, I vainly wanted them to match) and it’s come back to haunt me. In going to renew my passport, despite all the legal documentation a human can possess, all the flights I’ve already taken (over a dozen in the past year alone), every other legal document that matches my birth name, it still won’t erase the specter of that one place where my previous aka was documented: my passport. Oops.
I tried to resolve everything over the phone and by sending required documents via express mail. In the end, the one piece of paper the government requires to resolve this can only be gotten in person because apparently I’m old enough now that some of my information is on microfiche. That’s depressing all on its own. That would’ve required yet another plane trip that was impossible due to the final family emergency I was in the process of dealing with. End result? I can’t go and it makes me sad. There were several of you I was looking forward to meeting and I was excited to get to visit Germany for the first time as well as being there during Pride. I am however, determined to attend next year!
Right now, I’m in the middle of preparations for Rainbow Con. I have a lot of panels to prepare for and a lot of final details to handle. I’ve decided to go a couple days early to spend some time writing and to decompress from all the drama I’ve been surrounded by. When I return home? I really will be returning home. I’ll be going back and in essence starting over, finding my place back in my own corner of the world. All of the extra writing projects I’d planned on beginning back in February can finally be added to my workload. The reconfiguration of my office can be done. I can follow through on the daily schedule I’d set up for myself at the beginning of the year when I began writing full time. And finally, I can get back in the groove.