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herooftheage
Remarkably well, and better than I deserve. While I know you think religion is a scam, I'm finding it works very well for me. I'm also able to fill a position of leadership in the community, which I find very exciting. I even get time from a wonderful rabbi for one-on-one talmud geeking. :-)
Professionally, I have a position that ideally matches my skills and interests; it's pretty much the best tech-writing job I could hope to have. I have every expectation that this will continue to be true.
Artistically, I'm stagnating a little bit and need to get back to some things. But that's ok.
Personally, I have a marriage that mostly works and a great set of friends, and I've been growing closer to some of the local ones over the last few years.
In terms of the SCA my participation has dropped off a lot, but I'm still around. More about that in question 5.
2) Is On The Mark still a group?
Yes and no. We're currently taking a break to allow various members to deal with life stuff, but we have every expectation of getting back to making music in the coming year.
Membership is a little fuzzier. The core trio that's been there from the beginning is still there. Other members have passed through the group, as you know; we're not sure who will fill out the group when we re-form. The trio is scheduled to discuss that in the spring.
3) What caused you to take up fighting?
I was a 17-year-old D&D-playing geek who thought fighting for "real" sounded way too cool. I'd heard of people doing that, but had been in college for a year before I actually saw SCA fighting. That's what got me into the SCA.
I was in the tail end of the "old Cawdor" batch, a couple years behind Sebastian and Viktor and Mitch (whose SCA name I'm blanking on). I was roughly contemporary with Maria de la Flor, the only other woman to take up fighting in our batch. (Marian wasn't yet living here.) Looking back on it, I think one of the things that kept my interest is that no one coddled the women; I could just be "one of the guys", albeit not a very talented one. That said, I did sometimes pick up a vibe of "fighting isn't for girls", but I chose to ignore it.
4) What caused you to put it down again?
Several things in combination:
I was, at the peak, spending five days a week doing SCA stuff not counting events; it was too much.
While I had been fighting for many years, I wasn't very good at it. I could generally expect to be knocked out of a double-elim tourney in two or three rounds. That was kind of discouraging, even though I'd been told that my form with my favorite weapon (polearm) was somewhat good. For some reason, I couldn't seem to figure out how to apply it.
I hated melee fighting, and stopped doing that a few years before I stopped fighting one-on-one. (Melee is nifty in principle, but requires better vision than I have.)
I didn't really make a decision to stop fighting per se; I just allowed other things to crowd it out, and finally admitted what was happening about six months after the last time I had fought.
In some ways I'd like to get back into it, but between the calibration (higher than when I was fighting), the fact that I'm an out-of-shape 40-something, the time commitment, and some minor misgivings about the blue-card waiver, I don't see it happening. It was fun for a while, but I have other things to occupy my time and attention now.
5) Do you still suffer any negative consequences from having
been part of the suit against the corporation?
Only the ones I bring on myself; I think most SCA folks have forgotten about that by now, and no one has said something like "oh, so you're the one who..." to me in years.
I'm saddened by the whole thing, because in the end it didn't make much of a difference. I like to think that maybe we forced the corporation to be a little more open and honest, but then I turn around and see the kingdoms and local groups doing things almost as misguided. Most groups seem to be eager to do the corporation's bidding and to willfully ignore legal outs. I think the general attitude toward non-members is worse now than it was in 1993 when the board passed the first of the offensive rules. I live in the Debatable Lands -- home of the Three Bad Peers -- and even we aren't holding donation-funded events to reject the corporate tax, for example. It's very sad.
That's not what the suit was about, but it all ended up getting tied up together in people's minds. Our goal was to force the corporation to open its books and in that we semi-succeeded; we did get the books and they were a tangled mess that no one was able to figure out, but since then they've gotten a little better. Not a lot better; I'm close to someone who was on the finance committee for several years and he couldn't get useful information from the corporate office either. But at least the ledgers started balancing and expenses were sorted into broad categories. That's progress.
But we didn't bring any reform to the board, and we certainly didn't get the membership to start thinking about things in different ways. Once the board rescinded the rule that was most offensive to the majority of the populace, people stopped paying attention. The board never rescinded the illegal bylaws change, and most of the membership doesn't see why that's a problem. The board didn't look at real financial reform after the turned-out-to-be-bogus crisis, and again, no one made them pay attention. It all just faded away for most people, and it takes more than a few to make an issue big.
In 1993-94 the board took control of things that were not properly in its domain. Ten years later, the board isn't as grabby but the populace is happily offering up tribute. No one's questioning the disposition of this tribute or whether there are better ways to run the club. Well ok, some people are, but not enough, not loudly enough, and not effectively enough. I'll admit to being part of the problem; I'm tired and I don't want to relive 1994. It's easier to move to the periphery and let those who created the mess live with it. I have real friendships in the SCA, but I don't need the SCA to preserve them.
In a way, it's kind of liberating. While I sometimes feel bad that I'm not helping out at events or as an officer much, I'm having fun when I do show up, and I still very much enjoy Pennsic (especially now that I have comfortable accommodations). I'm not dropping out of the SCA, but for the last couple years, since the tax, I've dropped back to mostly being just a participant, and that's kind of refreshing. (I have a policy about helping with events: any event that unnecessarily charges the tax has declared that I am a freeloader because decades of contributing means nothing absent $35/year to Milpitas. Thus, I will be what they say I am, and just show up and have fun. Conversely, I will do as much as I can to help events with acceptable pricing models.)
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You forget. I've been on a Temple Board!
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