кстати о РингКоне: пока писала прошлый пост, вспомнила, что у меня где-то лежит эссе на тему "Чем занимается Марк Фергюсон на каждом РингКоне" (в оригинале название звучит как "Marked for Life"). к сожалению, сейчкс у меня нет времени на перевод, поэтому для начала положу сюда на языке оригинала текст, а потом однажды точно переведу
итак, marked for life:
The closing ceremonies of Ring Con 2003 had barely concluded when my sister and I hurried to the coat and luggage check in a frantic attempt to beat the crowd. Even then, there was a line of sorts. Once we'd retrieved our luggage, we stepped out of the hotel to head for the nearby metro station in order to catch our overnight train at Koln HBF (Cologne, Germany) to Firenze SMN (Florence, Italy). Of course, it was raining.
"Do you want to make a run for it? Or do you want to take a taxi?" I asked my younger sister. Several taxicabs had strategically positioned themselves just outside the hotel to catch desperate people trying to escape the rain. She hesitated and was obviously sorely tempted to just spend the extra money. The metro station wasn't that far away. Her stubborn nature won out.
"Let's just go," she said almost irritably.
We rolled our luggage as far as we could, but that wasn't far at all. The gravel path we'd taken earlier was now wet and not navigatable for the luggage wheels. We picked up our luggage and hefted it as we hurried down the path, stopping only when we absolutely had to rest and regain our grip. The increasing downpour prevented us from resting for very long though.
"You think I'm stupid for this, don't you?" my sister said at one point.
"Yes," I answered curtly. My tone was sharper than I'd intended, but I was trying my best to fight back my tears while miserably carrying my luggage in the rain. All the while, I kept thinking, I knew that it'd end like this: that it would be raining and I would cry. In truth, I felt like the stupid one. I'd come from San Francisco, California, USA to Bonn, Germany on my first international flight to pursue a dream that I'd known to be hopeless from the beginning.
My grumpiness had alienated me from my sister. She hurried ahead of me with her luggage without realizing that I lagged behind. Once on the metro platform, she stood somewhat apart from me and waited for our metro train to come. I asked her if she was okay. She blamed her darkened mood on the luggage and the hood of her jacket that had tried to fly off several times during our short stint to the station. I knew it was my fault though, and it only made me want to weep all the more. I've always been a crybaby.
At last, when we'd boarded the metro and were being taken away from RingCon, I broke down. My sister was younger than me and never knew what to do in such situations, and so she just sat across from me and tried to pat me awkwardly. It didn't help that she had no idea what was wrong with me. How could she? I'd built RingCon up in my head for months now, and this was a crying bout that had been nine months in the making.
I'd first heard of RingCon, the German Lord of the Rings convention, the previous year and had been impressed that one of the convention's guests of honor had been the actor for the Elven-king Gil-galad. This delight in Gil-galad's actor was directly related to his short, two seconds of footage in Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring in which he enthusiastically speared an Orc in the prologue of the movie. I had rewatched that scene time and time again because he seemed to me to embody the strength and might of Elves of old, before modern fantasy novels made them into pansies. Since I lived in California and often visited my younger sister in Los Angeles, a short hop away from Hollywood, celebrities did not impress me. In fact, I was often more critical of celebrities than I was of normal people because I knew that fame corrupted. Thus, when my friend started a mailing list for Mark Ferguson shortly after reports of RingCon 2002 became available online, I joined it mostly out of friendship and because of my love for High King Gil-galad.
When Mark e-mailed the mailing list in December, I was as thrilled as everyone else on the list, but a part of me remained guarded. Despite (or perhaps because of) his obvious charm and wit, I didn't trust him. I doubted his identity even as I believed, and all the while, I reminded myself sternly that this was a man, not an Elven-king. His lack of response to our incredulity at his identity made me dislike him. After all, if he was so busy, why had he posted at all? I felt as if I were being tricked. Did he invite his fans to ask him questions only to win them over in a single e-mail? I've had a fear of abandonment since childhood, and I would've preferred it if he had never e-mailed us at all if he was going to subsequently ignore us.
The excitement of his online visit to his mailing list died down over time, and I promptly forgot about him when my father fell ill with a severe stroke on January 17, 2002. Washington Hospital had called me at work first although my mother's company was closer to the hospital, and thereafter, I couldn't help but to feel a strong sense of responsibility over the entire situation, all because I had been the first to receive the dire phone call. After contacting my mother, I'd e-mailed my siblings and pressed upon them the gravity of the situation. I arrived just as my father was moved from the emergency room to the intensive care unit (ICU), and it was a surprise that he'd survived even that 45 minutes that it'd taken me to get from work to the hospital. My mother was unable to cope with the situation and went looking for my father's car with the paranoid fear that someone would steal it and commit crimes with it. I was unable to receive calls on my cellphone while I stayed alone by my father's side in the ICU, but when I at last left his bedside to eat lunch four hours later, my siblings had all booked the earliest possible flights to return home from New York, Minnesota, and Los Angeles. I didn't tell my mother that all of the children in the family were returning because I didn't want her to panic.
This last Christmas, my eldest sister hadn't returned home, opting instead to visit her boyfriend and forgoing even the short stop home before flying to her boyfriend's as she had the previous years. Perhaps that was the reason my father, who never awoke from his coma, reacted so strongly to her when she visited him close to midnight.
"Hi, Dad. It's me," she'd said in an upbeat voice. We knew that people in comas could sometimes hear despite their inability to respond. "I came home to see you. I hope you're doing okay." She told him that our brother was returning home too. Then she looked anxiously at his life signs. She was a doctor in residency at Mayo Clinic, and so she did what she'd been trained to do. She put two of her fingers in my father's right palm and said, "Hey, Dad, if you can hear me, squeeze my fingers."