So I was planning to go to the National Book Festival again this year. It's free, it's a day out on the Mall, I can geek out over books and fangirl authors - not really seeing a downside here. I was planning to pack a lunch, take an early Metro train, meet up with anybody who wanted to meet up, hang out and maybe go to a museum if the literary stuff started to pale. It's the Saturday, Sept 24, and activities start around 10 AM, although people will probably start lining up for Neil earlier.

Then, in my Katrina wallowing, I came across references to this: There's a large peace rally scheduled for the same time, farther down the Mall, and past experience + the mood of the country the past few weeks suggests that I should not count on it being completely, um, orderly. (although we could all be pleasantly surprised. Or it could be arbitrarily cancelled by the gov't, although given aforementioned mood, I doubt that would be wise.)

My instinct says that I have two choices: Go despite the rally, or go because of the rally. My mother, who attended college during the height of the Vietnam protests (and, in fact, got out of exams her senior year due to Kent State) spent the peace movement hiding in her dorm, complaining that the scent of tear gas was distracting her from her studies. I've not been involved in the modern protest movement, beyond whining on LJ, reading the Diamondback, and attending a few very lackluster rallies on campus. My sister says we should go dressed in hippy gear. I'm torn between not believing anything will happen, hoping it does, and deciding to pack tear gas countermeasures and emergency gear anyway just to say I did. q-: And I was planning to dress in my Goth Hippy outfit, black lace peasant skirt and peasant blouse and black kerchief and ankh and stompy boots, but you know, I might lose my nerve and go for the respectable career girl look instead.

(Note that my only news source the past few months have been lj, NPR, the Baltimore Sun, and the Daily Show, so my knowledge of current events is a bit patchy. Still.)

In other news, I'm intrigued by the fact that the National Book Festival seems to have folded F&SF in with general fiction this year. Not sure whether that's a good sign or a bad one for my favorite genre.

this is officially the Best Thing Ever This Week.

Public Access Cable always cheers me up.

On a completely unreated topic, it's starting to look like there might actually be a bunch of people I know at the National Book Festival. Anybody in the broad DC metro area who wants to be there, I would love to arrange to meet in person. (There aren't going to be nearly as many authors I fangirl there this year, so it would be neat to get to meet a bunch of real people I fangirl.)

I am also going to be at the Baltimore Comic-Con next weekend, at least on Saturday. My first real con ever, yay!

If that goes well, I've been meaning to make it to Capclave every year for the past four years, and it looks okay this year. (P&H Nielsen Hayden, the makinglight people, are the guests of honor!)

... and would like to fit Renfest in there sometime too, maybe.

We spent today driving with my sister around Leesburg, VA looking at apartments. She has a real, grown-up person type job now, *using* her colloge degrees, with pay that puts her *above* the poverty line. Alas, she's moving just far enough away to make it inconvenient to borrow DVDs off her. If she gets the apartment she wants though, it is a very awesome apartment. Fireplace! (And didn't we say that the year after she got a real job and real apartment, she'd be doing Thanksgiving?)

Tomorrow I get to find out whether I have a Sunday School class to teach, and then we're going to Catonsville Arts&Crafts Festival with some old friends of the family.