Shmengfest Date Thursday, April 18, 2024 - 05:42 AM PST Topic Cult Shmengfest was a blast. Nine people that knew each other mostly by email all got together, and let their hair down. Or tried to put it up to get a breeze on their neck. I was telling someone about it about a month before it happened and they thought it was a crazy idea. “Everyone is different in person than they are online. I hope you all still get along when you have to actually TALK to each other.” I know its true for a lot of online communities and I guess that person is right when it comes to most online friendships, but not for us. I think that is really where most of our new people get it wrong. They don’t believe that we are really like this all the time, not just online in this one place and only when we think we can live up to the persona we have created. While I had not met 3 of the people that came face to face before, I had no reason to think they would be “different” in person. And it was great to finally meet those three! One of the best moments for me was getting to the B&B and Hugging Meranda like she had only been away for the weekend, not the year and seeing Kira and Paris at the top of the stares looking at me like “What took you so long?” like I was late meeting for dinner, not like I hadn’t seen them in almost a year. Another great thing was getting to wear a crimson ball gown at the airport. Meranda was in black lacy stuff and Daria was also in (I think) mostly black, so I really stood out next to them. Not like I wouldn’t have stood out anyways wearing yards of glowing red, but you know what I mean. It looked like we MEANT to look like that. We were like some comic book version of “Charlie’s Angels”. One of the reasons I picked that B&B was because it had one of those old wooden bench swings on the second floor patio. Sitting in it feeling the evening start to cool off and watching the sky change while listening to everyone talk and get ready was great. I wanted to cover some of the things that haven’t been talked about so much yet. The peaceful moments: sitting outside just feeling the air move, the quiet mornings before it got so hot, the fact that we had water pressure in the showers, the moments of standing the market watching people swirl and jostle around, the afternoon light on the slate flagstones, and all those little things that were the background noise to us. I also wanted to thank Kira and Paris for coming so far for such a relatively small thing when they were so busy, Devin for facing the heat and the crowds, mrd for finding the time, Daria for her faith and friendship (and not going to Mississippi!), Curtis for taking the time off, Shade for his support, and Meranda, last but not least, for making it happen at all. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=712