Joy Attracts Joy

San Francisco is too good to me. 

For you all to fully understand the story that I'm about to tell, I have to give everyone some weird general background on my life. Which means, unfortunately, I have to talk about fandom. 

So here we go!

I get really attached to things. Books. TV shows. Movies. Etc etc etc. I like characters. I like relatable characters that you can root for. I like stories about how good people are, about the inherent goodness of people, about the human experience. I always have. It's kind of how I function.

Fandom, for those who don't know, is like, the group of people who are devoted to the same thing. There's a Star Wars fandom for people who like Star Wars. There's a This Is Us fandom for people who watch the show. There's technically like, a fandom for cheese, because who doesn't love cheese. But fandom is something that you can sort of control how involved you're in. There's a sliding scale. There's like, casual viewers of things (someone who likes Marvel, for example, could go see a Marvel movie and then leave) and then there are people like me. 

Fandom, in general, is really cool. It used to not be. In fact, sometimes it still isn't. To be really devoted to something like a TV show to the point where you're reading articles about the plot and voting on internet polls is a little different than someone who just turns off the TV once they finish an episode and then moves on with their life. The best part about fandom, of course, is the friends that you make. I've said it before, but there's something really pure about meeting people who love the same thing that you love. 

So on the scale of fandom things, I generally lean toward the "it's been three days since the season premiere and I'm still thinking about that One Line That Was Said" type of person, or the "I will see this movie Eight Times and You Can't Stop Me" type of person. In all honesty, I'm not as involved in fandom as I used to be. I work a 9-5 now and I come home and want to immediately crawl into bed, and watching TV shows where anyone could die at any point in time is super anxiety producing so I've switched to mostly feel-good comedies (The Good Place owns my heart), but anyway...

I used to watch this show called The 100. Many of you have probably heard of it. Some of you have probably even watched it. If you knew me in college you might know that I used to switch my RA on duty shifts so I could watch it live every Thursday night, or that I would change my magnet to "out" so my residents wouldn't bother me. I would express my love for characters on Twitter, or vaguely tweet about the show, and sometimes give updates to my friends who didn't watch as to what was happening so they were clued in. 

The 100 is the show that led me to that retreat last year, where I met ~16(?) radical ladies from the internet, who also love the show and the characters quite a bit, where I've met some of my best friends and favorite people.

The season 5 trailer came out this past Wednesday (happy Pi day everyone!) and, even though I didn't watch season 4, I trekked to the back office and plugged in my headphones and watched. The 100 is a show about survival, and in shows about survival, characters die. So I've stopped watching, because I am way too invested in these characters. And it's a good thing, because in season 4, a character that I really love and was really rooting for died, and I didn't have to watch it. Thus, that character is still alive in my head and no one can change my mind. 

But anyway. Season 5 trailer, looking great, yadda yadda. I watched it and moved on with my life, as I've expressed, because I'm not really emotionally involved anymore. Like, I am, but not as bad as it used to be. You know? 

So if we think about this show, The 100, that I love so much, and the characters that I love so much, you will find that I tend to gravitate toward background characters. I really love background characters. Main characters get all of the love, and there's a reason for that, but for some reason I always get really attached to the characters who are most likely going to be written off because they're not Really Involved. Background characters, I feel like, are more fun, because you don't always know their motivations or their thoughts or their backstories, so it's a little more up for interpretation when things happen. Following? 

Anyway, my favorite background character on The 100 is Nathan Miller, the snarky asshole who was sort of in season 1, stepped up in season 2, and finally got a plot with a lot of substance in season 3. (I'm assuming that Miller was also heavily involved in things in s4, but again, I wasn't part of that so who can be sure.) The best part about the background characters, a lot of the time, is that the actors who play them get a little more free reign to do whatever they want. They're not as in the spotlight, they're not as easily recognizable, all of the above. 

Okay so now that we have some background on my life and the context of where all of this is coming from, let's return to Wednesday, where I was not having a great day. 

It's pretty rare that clients get worked up with me. I think that I'm a pretty calm human being in general and good at addressing the feelings of whoever it is that I'm talking to, but every now and then people get angry. I had to deny a client for the time being for various reasons, and they were Not Happy With Me. By this I mean they proceeded to cuss me out, gather their things, and then leave in a huff as I tried to explain everything. While this was happening my co-worker called me because they needed me to look something up, so I had various things going on at the same time and was feeling crummy and distracted and a little bit twitchy, when I got a notification.

One of my very first fandom friends, who has literally seen me grow up from high school to the person that I am now, sent me a message on Twitter. 

"you have probably already seen it," the message read, "but I wanted to make sure" - followed by a tweet from Jarod Joseph that read "San Francisco, I'm inside you."

(Jarod. the wording. seriously why.)

REGARDLESS. San Francisco really is not that big. The city is seven miles by seven miles, okay? Everything is easily accessible via any form of public transit, and there's a lot of public transit. So, still kind of twitchy from everything that just happened related to work, my blood pressure shot through the fucking roof. 

The likelihood of me meeting this actor was not a high one. This was something I had accepted. The guy is like, generally very good to fans and meets up with a lot of them but come on. This is not something that happens to people like me. So I wasted my one tweet trying to be witty and clever while I was actually freaking out at the concept of just being in the same city of this guy. 

I need to stress now that Jarod Joseph (please forgive me if you ever somehow find and read this mortifying blog post) is like, my actual literal celebrity crush. Like 100%. Like, if I ever get married and my spouse is like "pick one celebrity to have a pass with" it would be Jarod Joseph. Literally days before me and my friends were joking around about our celebrity soulmates and Jarod was mine. How did he become my actual literal celebrity crush? I really have no idea. It's not like I know his birthday or middle name or favorite color or anything like that. I don't have photos of him hanging on my wall like I'm in middle school again. Nothing like that. He's just generally very beautiful to look at (his eyelashes are too long it should be illegal) and would actually call out people on Twitter when they weren't being great people and somehow that morphed into my celebrity crush. 

Normal. Totally normal. We all have one, it's fine. Shut up. 

So I tweeted at Jarod Joseph, who then was responding to other fans on Twitter about a potential meet up so people could meet him and get a photo, and somehow I also happened to be one of the people that he responded to, so like, here comes my entire freak out at work over the possibility of meeting this human. That feeling alone, of being in the same city of someone that you admire a lot, is a very overwhelming feeling. My co-workers who are all older than me and don't understand how Twitter works were all very excited about the possibility of a meet up. But like, in general, I didn't think this would happen. 

Jarod's last tweet was "Let me see what I can put together" and if that isn't a write off, I don't know what is. So I immediately fled the city as I was literally going to have an anyuerism from the stress of this entire situation. From the stress of the possibility of something happening.

Hilariously I agreed to help dog-sit for Amanda, so I got on bart and traveled way out of the city. Very far out of the city. The farther the better. I needed to calm down. Really calm down. I took Yolandi the dog for a walk and I turned on the Great British Bake Off and did some deep breathing, because ha ha ha what a funny weird thing that almost happened to me, right?

Anyway, Jarod sends me a DM with an address and a time and ha ha ha ha ha ha HOLY SHIT

I'm way fucking far out of the city now and here is my heart in my goddamn throat again and I literally just set my phone down. I set my phone down and I stared at the table for a really long time and then I called, like, six people because I needed someone to convince me that I needed to get on the train and go BACK into the city so I could meet this fucking actor at a fucking pizza place where he and his mom would just be hanging out.

I'm cussing a lot. Sorry. This was a very overwhelming experience for me.

So OBVIOUSLY I got back on the train and went back into the city. 

I looked up the place and it wasn't too far to get to and I had ample amount of time to get there and like, okay, yeah. Yep. This was happening. This was happening? This happened, this is a thing that happened. Can you tell I still haven't fully recovered? I haven't recovered from this yet. Will I ever recover? Um probably, but give me like a week.

Other fans had been invited, as I'm assuming this was supposed to be like a fun meet up hang out sort of thing where there is also food, and multiple people knew where I was just in case I was like, murdered, so it was cool. It was fine. If you have the chance to meet your fave celebs, you've got to take it, you know? 

I miscalculated train times and ended up like ten minutes late, but like. I just. Am still very overwhelmed. I am sitting here trying to think of the words to type to express how overwhelmed I was and I cannot do that, which should give you a clear enough picture of how overwhelmed I was. 

I was the only fan to go, so it was just me, Jarod Joseph, and his mom at this cute little Italian restaurant in San Francisco. 

Again, San Francisco is too good to me.

Jarod greeted me with a hug when I arrived, invited me to sit, and then made me eat an absurd amount of food. It didn't matter how many times I told this man I wasn't hungry, he literally pulled a menu out of thin air and made me pick something to order. 

I'm not going to go into like, vast details of this experience, because I was very embarrassing like the entire time, but oh man you guys. What in the world. I hope that everyone has the opportunity to meet someone that they admire like that. Jarod was the coolest. He was so nice and kind and leaned into the awkward of it, and his mom was also the best talking about how good he treats her, and I may have zoned out like multiple times because I was literally sitting next to Jarod Joseph for like, an hour. 

When my mom later found out about this experience she asked how long I had to wait in line to meet him and I had to stress, no mom, you do not understand, I had dinner with him and his mom. They made me take the leftovers. They ordered extra bread because it was so good and they wanted me to try it. He asked me about the non-profit I work for. I made a joke about Drake and he laughed. This wasn't like a hey here's a photo okay bye sort of thing this was a sit-down and fully immerse yourself in this experience kind of thing.

I am still so thrown. 

I don't think that he really understood that he's like the celebrity crush that I have. Which, you know, good. That's good. That would've been, I don't know, totally mortifying for the rest of forever. So it was pretty normal and fun and, okay kind of awkward but what else was expected? We FaceTimed one of the girls that couldn't come and she was talking about another one of the actors in the show and it was then that I realized that Jarod must not have realized my love for like, him as a human and the characters that he's brought to life.  

I truly 100% did not give a literal fuck about any other character or actors from that goddamn show that whole night. 

All of the actors from everything I've seen are also wonderful people (who are also beautiful, all of them, how one cast can be so good looking is truly unfair) but like, Jarod was here and who cared about anything else? 

As the trailer had literally come out that day, we did talk about the show a little bit, but like, very minimally. Mostly we just talked. Me him and his mom. Over dinner. Casual. Normal. Totally cool. It's fine. 

We took pictures and I got my video for my One Second Everyday app and he asked if I'd be okay to get back to transit okay and then that was it. I was gone.

My phone died like, the moment I arrived to the station. This entire experience where I met one of my favorite people to ever exist had just happened and my phone was dead. So I rode the train in silence, trying to process my life, trying to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. 

It's bizarre to make someone like Jarod Joseph into a real person. I mean, he tweets enough that anyone can have a vague sense of who he is, just like most celebs, but what people put out into the internet isn't always a reflection of who they are. But I've met him now, I had dinner with him, and now he's a real person in my head who is funny and kind and well, a bit overwhelming. 

(still my celebrity crush but come on who can blame me!) 

It was just... joyful. It was so freaking awesome. 

While personally my experience in fandom has been great and uplifting and has led me to lifelong friends, fandom can also be kind of weird sometimes. Some people (not everyone! I stress, not everyone!) feel like once they meet the cast (at like, cons for example) that they're sort of... superior. And they have this attitude like they're better than other people who haven't? And I really just cannot understand that mindset. At all. 

I hope everyone has an experience like this. I hope everyone gets to meet their favorite people and feel as special as I felt, as elated, as overwhelmed. It was so good, so solidly good that I would wish that feeling upon literally everyone. Everyone deserves that. Everyone deserves to feel that excitement and happiness and joy. 

It was funny, because as I was freaking out beforehand, and literally said "I'm a good person and I deserve this!" 

But like, I am a good person. This year of service, of living in community, of dealing with all of my own shit, I have spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that I'm not a good person. That I don't deserve good things. That because of this or that I'm broken and dysfunctional and a mess and etc etc etc. But actually, I am a good person. I care a lot about people. I have more empathy than I really should. I put other people's needs above my own to the point that my own mental health sort of deteriorates so I can make sure that other person is okay. I do good, hard work that I really love. 

I've been trying, as much as I can, to put out as much joy and goodness into the universe. And if I've learned anything, it's that joy attracts joy. 

I know it's not that simple. I know that life is hard and unexpected things happen and somethings things can be bad. But like, the world's a bit of a shit show these days, and all we can do is support and care for one another and try and make it a better place on whatever scale we can. So I do that. At least I really, truly try. I kept my heart open and the universe, in response, led me to the ultimate joy.

Not that I expect him to ever read this random blog post, but to Jarod - thank you so much for allowing me to join you and your mom for your night in the city. It wasn't something that you needed to do and yet you did, and you embraced it, and I am never going to be able to put my gratitude for that weird experience into words. 

The next day at work I told my co-workers that I actually met the guy I'd been freaking out about hours earlier, and they couldn't stop laughing. 

Me: Things like this just don't happen to me!
Ray: Jenn, things like that don't happen to anyone. 

I know that I'm incredibly lucky to have the opportunities and experiences that have presented themselves to me, and I can only hope that you all have some of the same. 

What did I say, man? 2018 is all about living your truth. Might as well embrace it. 

On Friendship

I've been thinking about friendship a lot lately.

I was going to make a post about this a few weeks ago, on Valentine's Day actually, but then Parkland happened and I couldn't think straight. Then, for a while, I was thinking about making a post about Parkland. But whenever I thought about it I would get anxious, or sad, so I kept not doing that.

And then those kids, those survivors, those brilliant and strong teenagers rose up from the ashes and gave me hope again. Then I was thinking about posting about that and the hope and the joy and the tears that came from the whole March For Our Lives movement, but it was all still overwhelming.

So, mostly I haven't been posting anything.

But I was thinking about friendship again lately, which had me thinking about Valentine's Day, and how important friends really are. After a few weeks I've decided to broach the subject again.

This past weekend my friend Annie came to visit.

Annie and I met last June when I decided to go to North Carolina with a group of strangers from the internet. To be fair, they weren't really strangers. I'd been talking to a few of them online for at least a few months. (My generation has learned to safely navigate the internet and make sure people are Real People, so I wasn't too worried.) We met because all of us watched the same the same TV show and loved the characters more than anything. Thus, friendship happened online, a trip was planned, and then a unification of strangers from across the continental United States took place.

I'm still a bit unsure as to how I got to be part of this group. I wasn't super Devout in the fandom, really kind of uninvolved at this point, but whatever. I was about to graduate college and I wanted to give myself a graduation gift and a week on the beach with a bunch of people I vaguely knew sounded pretty good to me.

Long story short, it was magical. There's something really magical, and really pure, about friendships based in fandom. It's just all of these people who love the same things you do. It was magic! There's no other word to describe something like that.

Anyway, that's where I met Annie, though technically I had met her at some point in time on the internet before that. I hadn't seen Annie since that week in June and part of me was worried that it wouldn't be the same. Internet friends are literally talking all the time, so it's not like we hadn't kept in touch or anything, but there's a worry that lingers about the magic of friendship not carrying over again. It turns out it was a dumb fear, because Annie's still the Annie I know and love, and we had an excellent weekend in the bay.

She left yesterday morning, her train carrying her down the tunnel while I stood on the platform and got ready for work. It was very sad. When we'd been waiting for the bus earlier that morning, I felt myself getting teary, so I kind of ignored it. But then on the train, the two of us standing there, me getting ready to get off while she stayed on, it was awful.

It's always easier to leave than it is to get left.

Friendship is really important to me. Annie was the first person that flew out here to visit me and experience this place with me, and then she was gone. That's sad! I'd rather her be here forever and we can see all of the sights together and experience all of that joy at the same time. It's one thing to see all of these places and do all of these things on your own, it's another to do it with people who mean the world to you.

When I was younger, a whole bunch of shit happened in my life at the same time that kind of left me friendless. I bumbled from "best friend" to "best friend" trying to find myself in the process, but middle school friendships are hard and life was complicated at the time.

I'm older now, and friendship isn't really any easier. It's complicated and can get messy but, getting back to my original point, friendship is full of so much love. On Valentine's Day I'd been thinking about how much I love my friends. I'm not great at opening up and being vulnerable, but I know that even if I share those darker, scary parts with my friends it isn't going to turn them away. If I show them my broken pieces they won't smash them further. In fact, they might offer some glue.

I think I'm at this weird age where everyone has their Thing happening. They're getting engaged or they're graduating or going to grad school or they're moving or having a kid or got promoted or blah blah blah but I rarely, if ever, hear about the big and tremendous things that people do with their friends. Adult friendships are kind of not talked about, but they're so important.

To find someone who understands you for who you are, all grown up as an adult, and accepts all of the trauma and the gunk because they know that there's light inside and love inside, it's just really magical.

So, a love letter to my friends.

Dear friend,

You haven't any idea how much you truly mean to me.

For making a paper phone with me in 7th grade and becoming a Principal. For nearly falling out of your bed dozens of times because you didn't want to climb down from the top bunk. For that time we had maybe three too many sour bombs at Turtle.

For sitting with me in the nurse's cabin because my period cramps were so bad I nearly passed out. For driving me around literally everywhere even though you're younger because I didn't have my license. For spontaneous tattoos and A Christmas Prince.

For raising a group of 9 kids with me and still loving me despite the fact that I can be very stubborn and opinionated. For putting up with my driving and never telling me if you were afraid. For your shitty taste in music and that one time you held your phone up to your ear to drown out our songs.

For answering the phone when I called you after staff worship not knowing if I believe in God. For finding me at the cross and giving me bug spray and reminding me of my worth. For all of the schedules made, but mostly the Charlie schedule.

For reading every book that I gave you, even if you weren't interested it. For celebrating when I finally listened to Hamilton instead of giving me shit that you tried to get me to listen to it months before. For sitting in my room when I needed to clean because it made me feel more productive.

For the Girl's Room.

For the longest Snapchat streak I'm pretty sure either of us have.

For exploring with me. For so much laughter, even when the things are hard. For simply understanding.

For planning futures that are full of mismatched mugs and walls covered in art. For photos of cats and photos of dogs and photos of your faces. For a home in North Carolina, or maybe somewhere else, as long as it's together.

For fandom.

For all of the moments that may have met nothing to any of you, but reminded me that this world is full of love and joy.

I am so, so thankful.

I love you all so much.

Love,
Jenn