Parallax

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Things Indi Learned (And Or Did) Today At The Courthouse:

I got a letter about a month ago for jury duty. I'd ignored the past summons... or two, would that be summonses? I can't remember if it was one or two, but I figured I'd better go this time. So I woke up way too early (this is my body's new thing, all of a sudden: either I cannot wake up or it's all HEY I GOT US UP THREE HOURS EARLY THIS IS GOOD RIGHT?) and put on clothes that didn't look or smell like Riley had been sleeping on them (though she had) and my goofy red boots and packed a backpack with stuff and hied myself hence.

Then did the traditional circling through downtown Tampa because god fucking forbid Google remember which street goes which way or is actually connected instead of dead-ending into a vacant lot, and how are there still vacant lots out there?

I amused the people manning the door by popping up and happily announcing: "You summoned me. Here I am!" I signed the thing I forgot to sign and handed my form to a lady who tore off a bit of it and handed it back, and then I waited for a very long time. At some point during all of this, one of the judges came in and made some jokes and explained a few things and thanked us a lot and said we're so very very important. We're a trapped audience, you don't have to mock us, dude.

Eventually I was called up with... oh, I'm no good at numbers, you know that, 30 or 40 other people? Ish? We were the fourth group that got called up, and we were then told that we had about half an hour to bum around or get snacks or whatever. So we wandered off and did that. The courthouse has a surprisingly decent cafeteria, upstairs. Pressed Cuban-bread toast with cheese? Yesplz. Nom nom. Once we reconvened, we were taken out into the hallway by a... a bailiff? A sheriff's deputy, doing courthouse sheepdogging, and he lined us up in the hallway in three rows. He told us to remember the people in front of and behind us, then led us on a merry chase across the street (in a raised building connector thingie) and up elevators and down corridors. NOW LINE UP AGAIN PLEASE.

I feel the need to note that this guy reminded me of one of those fighting roosters. Not particularly big, but very... puffed-up, and sort of over enthusiastic about what he was doing. It is SRS FUCKING BUSINESS to herd a docile group of sleepy law-abiding citizens, I tell you what.

Deputy Rooster finally led us into the courtroom proper, after lining us all up again, and then we sat down on long wooden benches, like church pews. Then we stood up because ALL RISE BLAHDAYADDA DO I HEAR TWO TWO HUNNED DO I HEAR THREE THREE HUNDRED FIFTY DO I HEAR THREE FIFTY AND COMING AROUND ON THE OUTSIDE IS SECRETARIAT ETC and the judge came in and we may be seated, so help us god. So we were seated.

Then we got talked to by the judge, and had stuff explained, and then stuff started to happen. What happened was something I had not expected, being that I am mostly if not entirely uninterested in legal dramas and therefore have little concept of The Law outside that movie Chicago.



That is not how it went, unfortunately. It was dead quiet (the guy next to me jumped when I cracked my knuckles) and there were no sequins. What we got was four lawyers in suits, a few more bailiffs, a judge with robes but NO WIG ALAS, state and country flags, a court recorder, and the defendant in question. It was explained to us that he was being hauled up on charges of I think stalking with a weapon. So everyone said hi and thanked us.

What happened next was: we got questioned. It's.. there's a name for this, I can't recall, something Latin that vaguely translates to "there's no wrong answer, be honest here guys." We got asked about employment, about any prior jurying, whether we knew any cops, whether we could adhere and uphold the laws of This Great Nation (which were repeated in detail) and then it got to the part I'm proud of.

They asked if, given the particulars of the case - stalking, weapon - anyone would not be able to be impartial. Someone in the first or second row (I was in the third) said something about getting mugged.

So I raised my hand, and without stuttering or um ah like like uh um ahhhh -- I just told 'em, clear as this: I had experienced domestic abuse and there is no way I could be impartial in a situation like this. Which is true. I sorta wanted to stay just to give the guy trouble, and that is the opposite of all the impartiality they'd impressed on us.

I felt really fucking good about that, because YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE BAD THINGS NOT EVER EVER EVER -- but I did. I didn't go up to the judge and say it privately. I said it out loud, without stuttering or mumbling, so that it was Recorded In Court and everything, and I kept eye contact with the lawyer when I did it.

Because fuck that silence and shame bullshit. That's what lets this all keep going.

After I said that, two more women raised their hands and were all "Uh, yeah, what she said? That happened to me too." I felt really fucking good about that too, like maybe me saying this as casually as if I was talking about the weather meant it was okay for them to talk about what happened to them, too. Maybe it was. Maybe I helped. I have no way of knowing. Oh, and the lawyer thanked me for speaking up about it too. Which is a refreshing change from.... most everybody.

After that there isn't much to tell. We left the room and sat around outside it: everyone turned their phones back on and went taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap, me included, but surprisingly some people clustered together in groups to talk. Then we went back in, and a list of names were picked to be the jury, and the rest of us were thanked and excused. Deputy Rooster corralled us outside and told us to re-reconvene about an hour later, in case any further cases needed our sound judging.

I got lunch (my chicken sandwich fell apart and I ate it with a fork, causing the lady sitting at the table with me to laugh) and then sat in the Juror Auditorium (which is just a big room) and IT GOT VERY COLD, HOLY CRAP, and I wrapped me in a scarf pashmina shawl thing my mom had got me a few years back, and I read some, and internetted as best I could, and shared jokes and tic-tacs with people nearby, and "see, it's not that I mind being here, I'd just rather be useful if I'm going to be here," and the I tried using the Force on people, to see if folks really do get twitchy when they're being stared at. Yes, they do. Two hours of sitting later, we were told we were free to go, thanked again, and reminded that we were exempt for the next year. People cheered and clapped.

Then I found a goddamn parking ticket on the car because something is amiss with the license plate. I don't know what. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Oh yeah: there was a cop on a Segway. I valiantly did not fall down laughing at that.

Holy shit, it is unseasonably cold out. I am going to keep saying this until it stops being so. Climate change: totally not fake. The manatees are having survival problems again, the aquifer's low from all the farmers dumping water to keep their crops from freezing, but in Orlando you're still allowed to run immense decorative fountains. OUR PRIORITIES, WE HAVE THEM IN ORDER.

They do everything big in Orlando. You can find the biggest McDonald's in the world, which is on the same street (or in the same neighborhood anyway) as the biggest Checkers. That's Rally's for those of you further north. The convention center is bigger than some towns I've visited and there are at least six roads going through it. I4 expands from two lanes each way to four, in places, and there are plenty of other highways and frontage roads that still can't handle all the traffic.

"I have bad luck with bananas," said Jen, and although she had a perfectly logical reason to say this, it's funnier if I don't explain. So I won't.

She and Bleu and I trucked up to Orlando on a sunny Saturday morning as Bleu had business to attend to down at Disney. She'd volunteered to do something at some kind of marathon, or half-marathon, which she plans to run next year. The organizers, allergic to licking postage stamps, had told all volunteers that they needed to go to a specific place in Disney to pick up their informational packets. Bleu minded that about as much as I'd mind being told to go to the ice palace on any given day, so off we went.

We walked into the ESPN Big Sports Whatever Thing with crowds of cheer squads and dancers and people half our age wearing twice as much makeup as any one human face that isn't on a stage reasonably should. There were people wearing giant three-fingered white gloves at the gates, waving all the folks in, and somewhere Jen and I lost Bleu. We were walking, we were chatting, and when Jen turned to Bleu to say something she was not there. What followed went a bit like this.

Text from me to Bleu: Where the hell are you?
Jen: "I see her, she's over there!"
Me: "I'm buzzing, she's -- she's calling me. Allo?"
Bleu: "Where are you?"
Me: "Where are YOU?"
Jen: "She's over here!"
Me: "I have Jen."
Bleu: "WHERE ARE YOU?"
Me: "I -- oh! OH! Turn around."
Bleu: "What? Oh."
Jen: *giggle*
Bleu: "I thought I was talking to you until I looked over and I was talking to some guy instead!"
Me: "Hi."

What I wasn't expecting was a princess convention. Apparently the theme for the half-marathon was princes something something or other, and there was lots of... princessing. There were women in fairy-godmother outfits scampering about with glitter-filled wands and plastic face shields; they'd put the shield over a victim's face, then liberally coat them with silver glitter from the wand while reciting something from, I think, Cinderella. We avoided the glitterfairyemployees. Bleu wouldn't have allowed me back in the car if I'd been seasoned like a ham. This all took place in a ginormous building which was VERY VERY HOT, where lots of stands were set up to sell all manner of running-related apparatus. They offered shoes and socks and headbands and sweatbands ("I'll get you one of those next year," I said to Bleu, pointing at something covered in peace-signs; "I don't want one," she told me) and Wii Fits for some reason, and it was this big hot maelstrom of people. So as soon as Bleu was done, I led the retreat because OMG TOO MANY PEOPLE.

Sadly, only the runners got to get little tiaras and purple princess backpacks. I was disappointed on Bleu's behalf; she was probably relieved that I could not insist she wear a tiara all day.

After that we had a day to kill in Orlando, so the logical thing was to get food and decide what to do next. We got food and we decided, and what we decided was what I had been hoping for the whole time.

That's right. We went to the Ripley Museum. And it was brilliant. We saw funhouse-mirrors and puzzles and visual mind-teasers and pushed buttons for sound effects. There was as twenty-six-foot-long snakeskin, a sign from a Welsh village with a ridculously long name, a shirt originally owned by Robert Wadlow, photographs of three-legged sideshow freaks, shrunken human heads, decorative whatsits carved from skulls, Tibetan executioners' swords that looked like gargantuan kukhris, a real medieval iron maiden, elaborately decorated wooden penis sheaths from New Guinea, a rickshaw made entirely of jade, a 1920s car made entirely from matchsticks, a dinosaur skull, a Komodo dragon skeleton ("They drool more than my dog!" I said excitedly,) a room where the perspective was all wonky that made me and Jen feel queasy, a taxidermied conjoined-twin pig, a piece of the Berlin wall, wax busts of people with big noses or three eyes or horns or trepannings they kept candles in, all manner of fortune-telling devices that cost fifty cents, a penny-smasher (I got the one with the shrunken head, of course), the world's biggest Goodyear tire, a large and surprisingly comfortable chair, Canadian newspapers talking about the Titanic disaster, a Boston Mummy which cost forty dollars and was 'made of local materials,' preserved rats and cats and bats, a horse statue made from five thousand pounds of horseshoes, a Mona Lisa made of bits of toast, a full-size statue of Vlad Tepes, sculpture inside the eyes of needles, and most bafflingly a wall full of bedpans.

AND ALSO? THE FEEJEE MERMAID.

At the end, the last thing you go through is a spinning tunnel full of mirrors and lights with a stationary walkway down the center. Jen vanished somewhere, and Bleu and I looped back through that thing about four times trying to find her. Turns out she'd scampered off to the ladies'. I did not just survive the Ripley tunnel, I survived it four times in a row. And I took long-exposure pictures of it, which came out all swirly.

I've got about a frillion photos to sort through -- I'll post my favorites here when I've got them all online. But it was brilliant. I'm happy we went. Jen picked up a shark in a jar full of formaldehyde at the gift shop; I resisted doing the same but now I'm sort of wishing I'd got one, because what can't you do with a fetal shark in a jar?

The best thing, though, was right in the beginning. They've got a little office-study looking room set up, and a hologram in the middle of old Ripley. He sits at his desk, and as the hologram moves around and interacts with the environment, books flip open and lights go on and the chair turns this way and that. It's all delightfully low-budget and done with tripwires and things, and I adore stuff like that.

"And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall any day."

No, that is not a typo. I'm stealing the word from copperbadge. Which is amusing because copper does feature into this Adventur.

Sunday, bleukarma and I decided to go have an Adventur Day, which is like a normal day in that we go do stuff without planning it. Unlike normal days though, when we come up with silly ideas of things to do, we'll do them despite the silliness.

Sunday's Adventur started with an art show. At least, we thought it was an art show. Bleu saw an advertisement for it somewhere, proposed that we go, and the motion was carried two to nothing.

First of all, it was misnamed, because it wasn't exactly an art show. There was a bit of art outdoors, done by Travelling Professionals -- you know what I mean when I say this? They had tents, they came prepared. Likely they, whoever they were, do lots of outdoor shows and various other gigs at which to peddle their wares. There was also a small stand offering fried food of unknown variety; we could smell the oil. (Though it was hard to, with the bay evaporating across the street; did I mention this record heat wave? Can I have just one summer where I do not mention record heat waves? CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, FOLKS.)

Indoors, things were a bit different. It was not an Art Show, but a Craft Show. It was a Show of Crafts done by Women Of A Certain Age, who in their youth had, all of them, been Stepford Wives. Society Wives, you know? Every single person there had at least twenty-five years and about five income brackets on us.

That's right, folks: Bleu and Indi had just crashed a party at the Women's Club. And nobody offered us canapes.

( Did you see the butt? )

Our next ADVENTUR, I think, will happen at Ikea, where at least we know what to expect.