Eastercon 2023 diary – day three
The formal duties for the day are done; the Milford panel has been panelled and we sold more copies of the Eclectic Dreams anthology today, though I will be taking a few home tomorrow.
I will keep coming back to this point, but it’s good to see people. That said, there is one topic that keeps coming up in conversation, which is that engaging and interacting with large groups of people takes a remarkable amount of energy.
This is something I’m used from teaching, and the occasional feeling of dragging the class through the journey from blissful ignorance to understanding, but just interacting takes a lot of energy. Meeting new people, remembering names and context, fitting them into the growing context of the community, takes more energy than I’d remembered.
This is perhaps because in the Before Times, it was just a cost that we didn’t think about; I dealt with people every day, new and old, and I never thought to put a cost on it, because it was just part of what the days involved.
But the calculation is different now, if only because it is more explicit. And the question I’ve been asking myself today is, how to build that cost into future considerations. I like people, at least as much as any extroverted introvert likes people (namely, until we don’t).
In my work life, and my aikido life both, the group of people I deal with is constrained, mainly people I already know and work with (or throw around, respectively), and I don’t do much in the way of Eastercon people. So something to think through.
multijimbo 