The National Girl Scout Convention
Oct. 9th, 2005 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
levertovfanSo I'm back from the Girl Scout convention. There was a "cybercafe" on the exhibition floor, so I got to check lj and email regularly, but somehow I felt..weird.. describing the Girl Scouts on a computer screen while they were around because someone might look over my shoulder and take offense at me describing the things about the Girl Scouts convention that were odd and stressing them over the things about the Girl Scouts that are perfectly ordinary. I need to wake up tomorrow in less than eight hours and head to Union station and thence New York City, but I also feel the need to dispense this entry.
I spent was felt like the substanatial portion of the past few days on the exhibition hall floor, giving the schpeal about what-Youth-Venture-is-and-what-we-can-do-for-them to women in matching green attire, and girl scouts in a variety of colorful troop t-shirts or vests covered in patches. The convention, I should explain, was HUGE. 15,000 conventioneers attended, plus local troops and troop leaders with day passes. Becca and I would stand for the first three or four hours of each day, but then we'd sink down into our chairs and each time we had to get up and give the schpeal and smile at people, it got harder and harder to fight our own weight and get up. At the end of the day on Saturday, we were so tired that we behaved like sedate-ish drunks. The three hours between 6 o'clock when we were released for the day and 9:30 when we went to bed was the longest concentrated period of tiredness without seguing into sleep I can remember.
Atlanta was its own culture shock, as the South always is (sorry Brynn, although I think you understand), but I didn't feel it too much: meeting the Girl Scouts organization face-to-face was more of one, both with its similarities--a midwestern, even upper-midwestern, sort of friendliness and decency and willingness to be kind to people who show up in places they don't belong; women who don't mind gamely wearing lots and lots of pins on hats and neckchains and chests--, its differences--a marked love of badges and cookies; the sheer number of women attired in the same shade of green; the emphasis placed on motherhood and parenthood--, and curious political structure--a democracy run by women, for girls, that suffers constitutional changes every three years.
So I went to the Girl Scout Conventiopn and noticed that Girl Scouts like badges and cookies. 1 point for profundity.
Just describing that tiredness is making me tired, and reminding me that I need to go to sleep.
I spent was felt like the substanatial portion of the past few days on the exhibition hall floor, giving the schpeal about what-Youth-Venture-is-and-what-we-can-do-for-them to women in matching green attire, and girl scouts in a variety of colorful troop t-shirts or vests covered in patches. The convention, I should explain, was HUGE. 15,000 conventioneers attended, plus local troops and troop leaders with day passes. Becca and I would stand for the first three or four hours of each day, but then we'd sink down into our chairs and each time we had to get up and give the schpeal and smile at people, it got harder and harder to fight our own weight and get up. At the end of the day on Saturday, we were so tired that we behaved like sedate-ish drunks. The three hours between 6 o'clock when we were released for the day and 9:30 when we went to bed was the longest concentrated period of tiredness without seguing into sleep I can remember.
Atlanta was its own culture shock, as the South always is (sorry Brynn, although I think you understand), but I didn't feel it too much: meeting the Girl Scouts organization face-to-face was more of one, both with its similarities--a midwestern, even upper-midwestern, sort of friendliness and decency and willingness to be kind to people who show up in places they don't belong; women who don't mind gamely wearing lots and lots of pins on hats and neckchains and chests--, its differences--a marked love of badges and cookies; the sheer number of women attired in the same shade of green; the emphasis placed on motherhood and parenthood--, and curious political structure--a democracy run by women, for girls, that suffers constitutional changes every three years.
So I went to the Girl Scout Conventiopn and noticed that Girl Scouts like badges and cookies. 1 point for profundity.
Just describing that tiredness is making me tired, and reminding me that I need to go to sleep.
