WisCon: general
My WisCon was pretty good overall, but also stressful and tiring.
The very difficult situation at work that I mentioned obliquely a couple weeks ago (and that I still can't talk about publicly) is still ongoing; it's not the kind of thing that will get better per se. (I'm sorry to be cryptic about it, but there are good reasons for that, and it has nothing to do with the company, and please don't try to speculate about it or give me advice about it.) I'm coping a little bit better now, but I still have very little social energy or emotional energy. So I spent a fair bit of WisCon either hiding in my room or talking one-on-one with close friends (which included telling them in varying degrees of detail how I'm doing, so although it was really good to see people, the cumulative effect was also a little emotionally exhausting). And spent another fair bit of it preparing for the three gender panels I was on, two of which had the potential to fail spectacularly. I think in the end all three of them went fairly well (thanks primarily to some excellent co-panelists), but I was somewhat stressed about them beforehand.
I didn't get to see everyone I would've liked to have seen, but that's always true at cons. Unusually for me, I didn't attend even a little bit of the Tiptree auction. I was sad that, for the first time since SH launched in 2000, there was no Strange Horizons tea party at WisCon, and no current fiction editors in attendance. I had to leave various things and skip a couple of interesting-sounding conversations because I couldn't cope with noise levels and number of people.
It was really really good to see friends. I received a lovely handmade quilt from one of them who I'm not sure whether to name publicly. I got some much-needed hugs, and I may have engaged in a certain amount of crying. I also got to see a couple dozen less-close friends and friendly acquaintances briefly in passing, and that was really nice too. And I played two fun new-to-me games: Slash, and the RPG that Ben is writing. And I attended a few panels and an excellent reading and a couple of small lunches and dinners, even though I wasn't being as social or involved as usual. WisCon still feels like home to me in a variety of ways, even when I'm skipping a fair bit of it.
On Sunday evening, I did attend the dessert salon (with shirt-ironing help from a friend) and the guest-of-honor speeches, and spent a little time hanging out outside of the Floomp; I have a whole other couple of posts about gender stuff and WisCon half-written, but won't be posting them for a while yet.
Anyway. Short version: WisCon good, but tiring. Thank you to all who helped make it good, and sorry to have missed those of you I missed!