I Forget How Big California Is
From my first year at Eau Claire, I was drawn heartily to Q-Fest. It was like someone listened to my hopes and dreams of learning, working, and being a part of a film festival that embraces and celebrates queerness out loud. My hopes and dreams of films that don’t include a background character for a Buzzfeed article, but show the messy, ugly, heartbreaking, sensual, freaky, happy, lively, and all the other multitudes of ways queer people live and exist in an amalgamation of creative mediums and expressions.
As I began to learn more about Q-Fest and the program’s connection to the Frameline Film Festival, my eagerness to apply and attend grew. For me, this meant hours spent reading the Q-Fest website of past line-ups and blogs, researching the Frameline Film Fest and its history, and of course watching as many films as I could fit in my schedule when Q-Fest took place during my first and second year. To say I was excited, to the probable point of over-excitement, was clearly true. For me, even if I never got to intern or go on the immersion trip for Q-Fest and have a hand in selecting films and making connections over film festivals, the fact that it existed for queer students and people alike, taking queer joy and creativity from San Francisco all the way to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was enough for me.
As I worked my way through my second year of school and got confirmation that I was accepted to work on and be a part of Q-Fest, the only thing that didn’t make me think twice was the trip to California. Thinking through how I would critique and consider the films I was going to watch, prepping before the trip to Frameline to make sure everything I needed to see and research was on my mental check-list, and planning for my time after to prepare and go through the line-up for the amalgamation of our work of Q-Fest in October took up most of my time. Planning and researching places or pieces I wanted to see or make time for in San Francisco took up a breathable spot on the back burner of my mind.
In a somewhat naive fashion, I had assumed that what I had heard and learned in classes covered it and that my past trips to a small suburb in Orange County to visit my aunt had me more than prepared for what all of California has to offer. This was quickly and entirely reformed after trying to explain to my grandmother what I would be doing this summer that kept me from being in my hometown. I explained to her my thought process, of how different can San Francisco be, when she happily mused on her own trip to San Francisco many years ago. She described details of hilly, scenic walks and of climbing up through different apartment buildings under the guise of an interested renter, just to see what life there could look like in a studio apartment for herself. She gave me a kind reality check that the history and place of hundreds of thousands of people in a locale with a rich and vibrant community and cultural life can’t be explained away to another location with a similar climate, but as something to be felt, seen, and appreciated while there.
I take research very seriously. I sometimes think I was made to write academic papers, so delving into and putting together a piece-by-piece plan for every trip, assignment, or otherwise personal or professional event/activity is just the natural way I go about things. Sometimes it aids my time, perfectly thought out so everything I need or want to accomplish gets done with time to spare. Sometimes it doesn’t work, for the seemingly only natural order is chaotic in the best way, meaning that even with as much planning in the world, it doesn’t account for traffic on the way there or a dead computer halfway through a paper. I hope to take both sides of this symbolic coin with me to San Francisco. To plan away and spend as much time as I can in two weeks taking in film, culture, and the life of a community I adore and creativity I aspire to have, but to also let the experience of a new place with things that I couldn’t possibly plan for or study up on guide me on my trip.
