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I don't even know where to begin to start. Did I even mention I was going to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear? I probably didn't. It kind of didn't register in the midst of the giant Thing that was the Paris trip, and then the middle of October went pchoooo and suddenly I was on a bus populated by Redditors and hippie liberals. (Now with pictures!)
So, this whole thing got its start in a number of places, depending on which part of the internet you inhabit. I have my vacation home at Reddit, so I heard of the whole idea as "Let's lobby Colbert to hold a rally to counter Glenn Beck's!" The actual truth appears to be that this was in the works for much longer, but who am I to say that Reddit didn't influence 200k+ people? Anyway, point being Redditors were out in force about this, and eager to make a big showing, so it was easy to find a group of people From the Internet chartering a bus out of Chicago, plus I already sort of knew some of them from Reddit.
Of course I should've known, from the many times I've met the internet before (for example, when I met 4Chan back in 2006), that the internet is awkward in person. And I am awkward around the internet. The internet seems to be happy when it is quoting memes at itself and being self-referential, and I am happy lurking and listening, even in realpeople space. In fact, I took care not to out myself... mostly because, with a total of three comments to my name on Reddit, I'm not really a Redditor. I get the jokes, but am I going to fistbump and brohug anyone with a Reddit alien pinned to their bag? ...Probably not. Also, a geek girl travelling alone in a largely male bus and seeming interested in the same things said males are interested in? I learned long ago that this doesn't end well, so as much as it prevents me from having any new interesting friends, I tend to play aloof and clueless. I was fortunate enough to end up sharing my seat with an older guy who was happy to just sit and read (he was, in fact, part of the contingent that was not from the internet, which I'll get to later). I was, however, unfortunate enough to have claimed a seat in the back of the bus, in the middle of a bunch of people who had (against our self-imposed group rules) brought alcohol. They proceeded to get very drunk and while it mostly just resulted in awkward conversation I had to tune out, one of the guys in front of me kept glancing back at me even though I wasn't involved in the conversation. I pulled my hat down over my face and pretended to sleep, doing my best to ignore the creeping sense of dread I felt.
tl;dr I hitched a ride with the internet.
And it was fine until we made our dinner stop somewhere on the far eastern end of Indiana. The internet was good and sloshed by that point and, I suspect, rather more bold than it would have otherwise been. I had a few passes made at me by someone while I was in the line at McDonalds. It was mostly about my poor choice of food, though, and I pointed out that, since everything else in the rest stop was closed, I didn't think 'choice' really figured into it. He tried to buddy up and cut in front of me, I told him he was being impolite, he shrugged and left. Minor incident, I felt like a jerk for snarking at him, but he was a bit sloppy drunk and I didn't want to deal with him getting cozy. I got my fries and a bottle of water without incident and headed outside to find a quiet place to sit.
And this is probably where I went wrong. I didn't have a sandwich, but I guess sitting on a bench alone is just something you don't do in front of Redditors. Because the guy who'd been staring at me on and off soon appeared, a bit unsteady on his feet. He stood over me, wavered a bit, and said "Hey, you sit behind me, right?"
"I do..."
"Look, you need to get back on the bus. I don't want us to leave you behind."
I gamely looked around. Most people were still in line at McDonalds. I told him so.
"No, you need to get back on the bus."
And here's where I made the mistake of humoring him rather than just ignoring him or telling him to sod off. "Look, [the guy who organized the bus trip] is right over there. We can't leave without him, he's got the itinerary."
There was a brief hesitation, an inhale, (oh come on, let's not do this, please): "But you're just... impossibly cute. I have to make sure you get back on the bus."
I come very close to facepalming. (Why do I think this is funny? Why don't I tell him to beat it?) "Hey, look, if they try to leave without me I'll just run in front of the bus, I'm sure they'll stop. No need to worry."
He gives me a rather intense stare. I respond by saying, "Cool it, it's fine, I'm almost done with my fries anyway, then I'll get back on the bus."
And so he grabs my bag from my hands, still with two fries remaining, and throws it petulantly to the ground. To which I say ಠ_ಠ. I then pick up the bag, throw it out, and get back on the bus. Mercifully he doesn't follow me, and I figure "Okay, that was bizarre but at least it's over.
Except it isn't. Once everyone is back on the bus and we've started the movie again, he lays down across his seat like he's going to pass out. But instead of doing the sensible thing and passing the heck out, he reaches his arm around the back of his seat and starts touching my legs. I forgive this for approximately three and a half seconds while I'm busy mistaking it for drunken flailing, and then it turns into squeezing my knee which is a bit not okay. I curl up as small as possible and tuck my legs underneath myself and try very resolutely to watch the movie. Unfortunately in the back of my mind the little part of me that finds every absurd awkward situation hilarious is cracking up and so I'm biting both of my cheeks just to keep from laughing. And then he sits up, turns around in his seat, and just stares at me. I think he said a couple of things to me, but they were all pretty much drunk and incoherent, and this is when his friends jumped in with a lot of "Oh, this is so embarrassing, will you just sit back down? Is he bothering you?" At which point I couldn't just say "Dude, turn around" because I felt like I'd led him on a bit by joking with him about getting on the bus. In fact, I couldn't say anything because I was busy biting my cheeks to keep from laughing, so the situation quickly devolved into heckling from his friends, and the two of us staring each other down, he kind of babbling incoherently and me probably looking ridiculous attempting to both suppress laughter and look annoyed. I made a few weak attempts to get him to just let me watch the movie so we could defer the issue until he was less drunk and I could speak to him rationally about not caressing my knees, but he was unflappable in his ogling, so in the end I just set my jaw and said "Hey, I'm still going to be here in 12 hours, so you can turn around." Which is rather meaner than I needed to be but seriously. (I also think it made his two female friends hate me, because they didn't offer me any more snacks or share their hand sanitizer with me anymore after that.) But whatever, this is exactly why nobody wins in drunken nerd flirting and I'd been hoping I was done with it after college.
tl;dr Some guy threw my french fries on the ground in an attempt to flirt at me.
We actually got to DC about an hour earlier than estimated, which was great because, even though we were going in to the city from the end of the blue line (out in the suburbs), there was still a massive line waiting for tickets and the trains were packed. The only stop where no one got on was the Pentagon (hmm) and everyone got off at the Smithsonian. This was my first glimpse of the demographic at large for the rally. On the bus I thought it was strange that we were almost evenly split between "internet" kids my age and greying probable former hippies and other sorts of activists. But it turned out to hold true for the train, as well. And, as we walked across the mall into the massive crowd, it still held true. There was a decent minority turnout (Muslims, Hispanics, People in Guy Fawkes Masks), but it was largely a group that looked like a standard political protest taking place in the middle of an Anonymous Scientology protest, but with fewer scatological jokes. (Though we did all shout poop at one point.)
It was impossible to get a sense of the numbers from within the crowd. I'd wedged my way in to the crowd just south of 9th street, probably about 100 yards back from the lower-right jumbotron screen here, in front of the tent. I figured the stage wasn't too far in front of us, and it wasn't until the Mythbusters came out and had us all do the wave that I got any idea of how many people were there. Because the wave started, and we waited for it. And waited a bit more. And then, after a few more seconds, the wave came. (Also, I wish I could describe the sound of 200,000 people jumping up and landing at the same time. It's the most fantastic WHUMPH I've ever heard.)
As for the performances and things themselves... you'll probably get to see those when they re-air the crap out of this later on. In my part of the crowd they hadn't exactly worked out the speakers for the first fifteen minutes or so after the Roots played, so it was quiet and we were mostly left chanting things to ourselves ("Louder! Louder!" "Texas lower your flag!" (to the people who were waving their flag in front of the screen). The people behind me were all loud snarky 20-somethings who wouldn't shut up until the speakers started working. The people in front of me were at least 65 and had brought their own stools. To my right was a mother and her daughter. I don't remember what was to my left, other than the signs. (Most of which are on this page, which has 100 of them and is not terribly friendly for dial-up. I'll get my pictures up eventually, but they are mostly of the inside joke ones, like "Rational Discourse: the Way of the Time Lord..." and, on the back, "...Most of the time, sort of. Well, I try. Got to get credit for trying." There was also a great sign that said "More Para-Sailin', Less Sarah Palin," with a tiny stick-figure Sarah declaring "I can see Russia!" I didn't get a picture of it, though I told the people carrying it they were cool. In trying to find a picture, I found a (supposedly) comprehensive list of all the signs, which might make for an interesting read. But they obviously didn't find them all yet.
During one of the waits for the wave to arrive, we also crowd-surfed Waldo. (Someone else got a much better photo than I did. Mostly because you can't crowd-surf someone and take a picture at the same time.) Waldo later treed himself while everyone was leaving.
So, as for the meat of the thing: Stewart and Colbert are both fantastic showmen. Having Yusuf (Cat Stevens) and Ozzy Ozbourne perform dueling train songs, wearing matching pull-overs, general bombastic grandstanding... it was well put-together. And by the time the rally was over, having witnessed my generation at its most obnoxious (on the bus, and chattering behind me) and its best and most interesting (in costume, waving ironic signs while un-ironically joining in to sing the national anthem), mixed in with my parents' generation, and all sorts of other American odds and ends; having seen big-name singers willingly used for nonsense; having seen straight-up nonsense; having seen Stephen's giantstraw man paper maché persona vanquished by a chant of "Will this help?" led by a British man in tights... I had lots of Thoughts. On how strange it is that this crowd came out in such strong numbers for who-knows-what, for who-knows-what reasons, to watch a couple of comedians make completely sensical arguments against the state of the media in the form of mockery and jokes, and mostly just to show that a lot of us would rather talk about things in ways that make sense. (And how absurd is it that it's been comedy pundits that have kept this nonsense in perspective?) I had Thoughts on what it Meant and What Could Be Done and then freaking Jon Stewart came back out and said all of them. And then some. (In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it was a Speech for the Ages, especially given the way it un-self-consciously centered on a metaphor about the Lincoln Tunnel (which I'm sure was a self-conscious way to keep it from being a Speech for the Ages), but it definitely tied the rally together remarkably well. Well-written, well-spoken, and I can't even imagine how surreal it was for Jon Stewart to wield his power over people in person, to a crowd that could react immediately in such a very large way.)
And then everyone made their way out. Some hipsters climbed trees and traffic lights, some people sat on the lawn and threw tea parties, but mostly everyone just filled the streets (that's from three blocks away, already) and every restaurant for what must've been miles, because it took me so long to find lunch I didn't even have time to walk all the way down to the White House (which I intended to visit just to spite Obama for coming to hang out on the Midway while I was partying on the Mall).
My lasting impression is mostly one of a strangely fragmented group in my own generation, straddling serious/un-serious and ironic/unironic in a way that isn't meant to be resolved. I used to think this was just an internet thing, but I run into the internet doing Big, Visible Things all the time lately and really, who isn't from the internet these days? So I'm starting to think that this is really who we are. Some kind of post-modern, tongue-in-cheek imitation of apathy which is secretly concerned, but with all kinds of bells-and-whistles inside jokes attached. I don't even know! But I think this might actually just be... us. We weren't the only ones with ironic signs, but we were the only ones with ironic signs that were meant to be understood only by ourselves.
tl;dr Rally was good! And freaking Generation Y, how do we work? (At least we're fun to watch?) (Are we Generation Y? I kind of forgot to keep track. Interesting side note, though, is that there seemed to be a lot of 20-somethings and a lot of people in their greying years, but not a whole lot in between.)
Also, since I'm here: Happy Halloween, guys!
So, this whole thing got its start in a number of places, depending on which part of the internet you inhabit. I have my vacation home at Reddit, so I heard of the whole idea as "Let's lobby Colbert to hold a rally to counter Glenn Beck's!" The actual truth appears to be that this was in the works for much longer, but who am I to say that Reddit didn't influence 200k+ people? Anyway, point being Redditors were out in force about this, and eager to make a big showing, so it was easy to find a group of people From the Internet chartering a bus out of Chicago, plus I already sort of knew some of them from Reddit.
Of course I should've known, from the many times I've met the internet before (for example, when I met 4Chan back in 2006), that the internet is awkward in person. And I am awkward around the internet. The internet seems to be happy when it is quoting memes at itself and being self-referential, and I am happy lurking and listening, even in realpeople space. In fact, I took care not to out myself... mostly because, with a total of three comments to my name on Reddit, I'm not really a Redditor. I get the jokes, but am I going to fistbump and brohug anyone with a Reddit alien pinned to their bag? ...Probably not. Also, a geek girl travelling alone in a largely male bus and seeming interested in the same things said males are interested in? I learned long ago that this doesn't end well, so as much as it prevents me from having any new interesting friends, I tend to play aloof and clueless. I was fortunate enough to end up sharing my seat with an older guy who was happy to just sit and read (he was, in fact, part of the contingent that was not from the internet, which I'll get to later). I was, however, unfortunate enough to have claimed a seat in the back of the bus, in the middle of a bunch of people who had (against our self-imposed group rules) brought alcohol. They proceeded to get very drunk and while it mostly just resulted in awkward conversation I had to tune out, one of the guys in front of me kept glancing back at me even though I wasn't involved in the conversation. I pulled my hat down over my face and pretended to sleep, doing my best to ignore the creeping sense of dread I felt.
tl;dr I hitched a ride with the internet.
And it was fine until we made our dinner stop somewhere on the far eastern end of Indiana. The internet was good and sloshed by that point and, I suspect, rather more bold than it would have otherwise been. I had a few passes made at me by someone while I was in the line at McDonalds. It was mostly about my poor choice of food, though, and I pointed out that, since everything else in the rest stop was closed, I didn't think 'choice' really figured into it. He tried to buddy up and cut in front of me, I told him he was being impolite, he shrugged and left. Minor incident, I felt like a jerk for snarking at him, but he was a bit sloppy drunk and I didn't want to deal with him getting cozy. I got my fries and a bottle of water without incident and headed outside to find a quiet place to sit.
And this is probably where I went wrong. I didn't have a sandwich, but I guess sitting on a bench alone is just something you don't do in front of Redditors. Because the guy who'd been staring at me on and off soon appeared, a bit unsteady on his feet. He stood over me, wavered a bit, and said "Hey, you sit behind me, right?"
"I do..."
"Look, you need to get back on the bus. I don't want us to leave you behind."
I gamely looked around. Most people were still in line at McDonalds. I told him so.
"No, you need to get back on the bus."
And here's where I made the mistake of humoring him rather than just ignoring him or telling him to sod off. "Look, [the guy who organized the bus trip] is right over there. We can't leave without him, he's got the itinerary."
There was a brief hesitation, an inhale, (oh come on, let's not do this, please): "But you're just... impossibly cute. I have to make sure you get back on the bus."
I come very close to facepalming. (Why do I think this is funny? Why don't I tell him to beat it?) "Hey, look, if they try to leave without me I'll just run in front of the bus, I'm sure they'll stop. No need to worry."
He gives me a rather intense stare. I respond by saying, "Cool it, it's fine, I'm almost done with my fries anyway, then I'll get back on the bus."
And so he grabs my bag from my hands, still with two fries remaining, and throws it petulantly to the ground. To which I say ಠ_ಠ. I then pick up the bag, throw it out, and get back on the bus. Mercifully he doesn't follow me, and I figure "Okay, that was bizarre but at least it's over.
Except it isn't. Once everyone is back on the bus and we've started the movie again, he lays down across his seat like he's going to pass out. But instead of doing the sensible thing and passing the heck out, he reaches his arm around the back of his seat and starts touching my legs. I forgive this for approximately three and a half seconds while I'm busy mistaking it for drunken flailing, and then it turns into squeezing my knee which is a bit not okay. I curl up as small as possible and tuck my legs underneath myself and try very resolutely to watch the movie. Unfortunately in the back of my mind the little part of me that finds every absurd awkward situation hilarious is cracking up and so I'm biting both of my cheeks just to keep from laughing. And then he sits up, turns around in his seat, and just stares at me. I think he said a couple of things to me, but they were all pretty much drunk and incoherent, and this is when his friends jumped in with a lot of "Oh, this is so embarrassing, will you just sit back down? Is he bothering you?" At which point I couldn't just say "Dude, turn around" because I felt like I'd led him on a bit by joking with him about getting on the bus. In fact, I couldn't say anything because I was busy biting my cheeks to keep from laughing, so the situation quickly devolved into heckling from his friends, and the two of us staring each other down, he kind of babbling incoherently and me probably looking ridiculous attempting to both suppress laughter and look annoyed. I made a few weak attempts to get him to just let me watch the movie so we could defer the issue until he was less drunk and I could speak to him rationally about not caressing my knees, but he was unflappable in his ogling, so in the end I just set my jaw and said "Hey, I'm still going to be here in 12 hours, so you can turn around." Which is rather meaner than I needed to be but seriously. (I also think it made his two female friends hate me, because they didn't offer me any more snacks or share their hand sanitizer with me anymore after that.) But whatever, this is exactly why nobody wins in drunken nerd flirting and I'd been hoping I was done with it after college.
tl;dr Some guy threw my french fries on the ground in an attempt to flirt at me.
We actually got to DC about an hour earlier than estimated, which was great because, even though we were going in to the city from the end of the blue line (out in the suburbs), there was still a massive line waiting for tickets and the trains were packed. The only stop where no one got on was the Pentagon (hmm) and everyone got off at the Smithsonian. This was my first glimpse of the demographic at large for the rally. On the bus I thought it was strange that we were almost evenly split between "internet" kids my age and greying probable former hippies and other sorts of activists. But it turned out to hold true for the train, as well. And, as we walked across the mall into the massive crowd, it still held true. There was a decent minority turnout (Muslims, Hispanics, People in Guy Fawkes Masks), but it was largely a group that looked like a standard political protest taking place in the middle of an Anonymous Scientology protest, but with fewer scatological jokes. (Though we did all shout poop at one point.)
It was impossible to get a sense of the numbers from within the crowd. I'd wedged my way in to the crowd just south of 9th street, probably about 100 yards back from the lower-right jumbotron screen here, in front of the tent. I figured the stage wasn't too far in front of us, and it wasn't until the Mythbusters came out and had us all do the wave that I got any idea of how many people were there. Because the wave started, and we waited for it. And waited a bit more. And then, after a few more seconds, the wave came. (Also, I wish I could describe the sound of 200,000 people jumping up and landing at the same time. It's the most fantastic WHUMPH I've ever heard.)
As for the performances and things themselves... you'll probably get to see those when they re-air the crap out of this later on. In my part of the crowd they hadn't exactly worked out the speakers for the first fifteen minutes or so after the Roots played, so it was quiet and we were mostly left chanting things to ourselves ("Louder! Louder!" "Texas lower your flag!" (to the people who were waving their flag in front of the screen). The people behind me were all loud snarky 20-somethings who wouldn't shut up until the speakers started working. The people in front of me were at least 65 and had brought their own stools. To my right was a mother and her daughter. I don't remember what was to my left, other than the signs. (Most of which are on this page, which has 100 of them and is not terribly friendly for dial-up. I'll get my pictures up eventually, but they are mostly of the inside joke ones, like "Rational Discourse: the Way of the Time Lord..." and, on the back, "...Most of the time, sort of. Well, I try. Got to get credit for trying." There was also a great sign that said "More Para-Sailin', Less Sarah Palin," with a tiny stick-figure Sarah declaring "I can see Russia!" I didn't get a picture of it, though I told the people carrying it they were cool. In trying to find a picture, I found a (supposedly) comprehensive list of all the signs, which might make for an interesting read. But they obviously didn't find them all yet.
During one of the waits for the wave to arrive, we also crowd-surfed Waldo. (Someone else got a much better photo than I did. Mostly because you can't crowd-surf someone and take a picture at the same time.) Waldo later treed himself while everyone was leaving.
So, as for the meat of the thing: Stewart and Colbert are both fantastic showmen. Having Yusuf (Cat Stevens) and Ozzy Ozbourne perform dueling train songs, wearing matching pull-overs, general bombastic grandstanding... it was well put-together. And by the time the rally was over, having witnessed my generation at its most obnoxious (on the bus, and chattering behind me) and its best and most interesting (in costume, waving ironic signs while un-ironically joining in to sing the national anthem), mixed in with my parents' generation, and all sorts of other American odds and ends; having seen big-name singers willingly used for nonsense; having seen straight-up nonsense; having seen Stephen's giant
And then everyone made their way out. Some hipsters climbed trees and traffic lights, some people sat on the lawn and threw tea parties, but mostly everyone just filled the streets (that's from three blocks away, already) and every restaurant for what must've been miles, because it took me so long to find lunch I didn't even have time to walk all the way down to the White House (which I intended to visit just to spite Obama for coming to hang out on the Midway while I was partying on the Mall).
My lasting impression is mostly one of a strangely fragmented group in my own generation, straddling serious/un-serious and ironic/unironic in a way that isn't meant to be resolved. I used to think this was just an internet thing, but I run into the internet doing Big, Visible Things all the time lately and really, who isn't from the internet these days? So I'm starting to think that this is really who we are. Some kind of post-modern, tongue-in-cheek imitation of apathy which is secretly concerned, but with all kinds of bells-and-whistles inside jokes attached. I don't even know! But I think this might actually just be... us. We weren't the only ones with ironic signs, but we were the only ones with ironic signs that were meant to be understood only by ourselves.
tl;dr Rally was good! And freaking Generation Y, how do we work? (At least we're fun to watch?) (Are we Generation Y? I kind of forgot to keep track. Interesting side note, though, is that there seemed to be a lot of 20-somethings and a lot of people in their greying years, but not a whole lot in between.)
Also, since I'm here: Happy Halloween, guys!
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From:
no subject
Loved the list of 100 signs; I think my absolute favorite was of the little girl in the princess dress that said, "I'm taking back tea parties!" TOO CUTE!
Also: in any gathering of nerds, the Who fans will be out in force! (Is it wrong that if there were a Doctor Who political party, I would totally consider forgoing my independent status?)
From:
no subject
I saw that little girl on my way out. She was adorable! There was also a similarly-young girl who was sitting on the fence with a sign that said "I can see America from my backyard."
I think my favorite might be the Under-Appreciated Super Heroes one, though, just because... Super Grover is my favorite. (-:
(I don't see anything wrong with that! In fact, it'd be completely in line with my hope that we'll eventually let our politics wander in the direction of British politics, which openly allows for odds-and-ends fringe parties. There's so much potential for something like the Party of Rassilon. We would have the best rallies ever.)
From:
no subject
Aside from him, I am jealous! I'm generally too shy/suspicious/lazy to meet the internet, but these things always sound so awesome. I would probably feel inadequate for not being able to think of something clever to put on a sign, though. Did you have a sign?
my generation at...its best and most interesting (in costume, waving ironic signs while un-ironically joining in to sing the national anthem)
Yes! This is my favorite part. HEY GUYS LIBERALS LOVE AMERICA. I KNOW, RIGHT?
From:
no subject
I did not have a sign... mostly because I couldn't think of anything clever, but also because I didn't want to accidentally end up on TV or something. I was definitely content to just be an observer.
I was so very much expecting people to go "Omg, why are we singing the national anthem?" but instead they sang and I was kind of flabbergasted. So much so that I remembered to take my hat off and be respectful before I joined in as well. (-;
From:
no subject
That guy sounded like a super creep. You handled it a LOT better than I would have.
From:
no subject
I still have no idea how people are supposed to handle those situations. I mean, I'm downright terrible at it, but if I could even conceive of a reasonable way to deal with it, I'd try it. I just stumble into the situation and draw a complete blank, so I have to sit there trying not to laugh at how awkward it is.