Update!
So yeahh LOL I haven’t been on tumblr for about 4-5 days. My que has been runnin tho. So here is a brief update on what I’ve been doing!
The past week has been all devoted to Ops at Tet Festival (largest one outside of Vietnam) and boy was it INTENSE! We had to set up Garden Grove park the week leading up to the festival. It’s pretty amazing to see a park turn into a festival ground. Erryone I saw was scrambling to get everything up. Parent’s and kids were building errything from scratch haha. The front gate, lang vietnam, and decorations were all built and put up within a matter of days. Basically the week before and 4 days during and after sleep was very little. Our days consisted of waking up at 7am, and going to bed at 2-3am for 4-6 days straight!
Game day finally hit on Friday. Opening day was SOOOO hectic! As technical division, we had to rerun lines to all of the sinks, make sure that all vendors were following regulations, cut nets, fix fences, fix power and light issues, and soo much more! It didn’t help that it was HELLA windy that night. Signs and banners were falling down. Metal pipes were even broken due to the winds. Oh man. There was a lot more stuff that happened but I can’t remember.
Second and third day was still pretty darn busy, but all of the initial craziness was over. The festival was beginning to run on auto pilot. Vendors are sooo nice! (most of em) They offered us free food and drinks. It was pretty fun walking around and just talking to them. Some of em even remembered my name LOL. It’s a pretty good feeling to help someone and watch them be all happy and stuff idk. :] There’s just so much to say. Unclogged sinks, helped people with heat exhaustion, found a missing child, yelled at people, directed traffic, ran permiter checks, made runs delivring supplies to people, almost had to kick this one dude out, drove go carts on the opposite side of the street at night, fireworks, reseting spider boxes, front gate work, fwakk i hate talking to pedestrians. Some of em think they’re sooo bad ass when they’re not. saw djs, live performances, combat rolls off of carts, lion dancing, the push/sweep, surprise visit from friends and family :DDDDD and much much more.
It was finally over on Monday haha. There was break down (I was at school tho), then at night there was an ops kickback. LOL pretty funny to see erryone wind down and some of us buzzin.
The rest of my week was spent pretty much catching up on sleep haha.
Ops was definitely an experience that i’ll never forget. Can’t wait to do it again next year! D: The first couple meetings was a bit awkward cause I didn’t know a lot of people, but by the end of the festival, I knew I could count on each and erryone of them on the team to be there when needed. Whenever there was a problem, I could’ve sworn there was at least 5-6 of us on scene within 5 minutes. I don’t think that just anyone could be on ops. Its HELLA hard work. Like me and Tommy said, “It sucks ASS working rn, but it’s the funnest thing ever and the little moments make it so worth it!” By the end of the first day, you learn to work through the pain and to keep going no matter what.
Anyways, there were 3 phrases/things that I would say described our Operations team.
- “Honey badgers don’t give a shit!”
- Operations operate
- Zip ties
Anyways this wasn’t brief at all LOL and it was very POORLY put together but yeah. Like number 1 said ^
On a side note i still needa clean my knives and tools b4 they get all rusted -___-
I saw these cute guys that were dancing at the festival.
I, of course, was checking them out ha. And I was just watching them dance cause it was cute and cool. This somewhat cute guy noticed I was staring and smiling at him and he kept looking over to me and dancing some more heehee.
Those guys looked like the guys I see from the tumblr meet up pictures on here. With the hat and all that dances.
LGBT Support Against Exclusion @ Last Weekend's Tet Festival
As a follow-up to my previous post about LGBT Exclusion from the Annual Tet Festival in Orange County, CA.
Recap of events at Tet Parade this weekend:
- The LGBT coalition took the matter to Superior Court in Santa Ana. Judge Geoffrey Glass did not rule in our favor, over a matter of a few technicalities. Legally, the Tet Parade Committee never officially rejected the LGBT coalition. Judge Glass ruled that he would not involve himself by saying that our counter arguments were not sufficient to rule in our favor. He said that there is not sufficient legal evidence that they actually excluded us. The committee officially excluded the contingency the following day.
- Many of the politicians, contingencies, and funders of the parade were not aware that we were being excluded, and took action to support us and to show that they cannot support a parade that discriminates against LGBTs. Elmore Toyota, who provides over half of the funds for the parade, pulled out as a sponsor and will no longer fund the parade, so long as we are excluded, starting next year. Union Bank will no longer sponsor the parade. Garden Grove Unified School District was going to provide school buses for the parade, but after hearing about our story, board member Bao Nguyen held a meeting in which the board decided to pull the buses from the parade. Santa Ana City Council members Roman Reyna and David Benavides cancelled their participation in the parade “due to their discrimination of the LGBT community.” Politicians Lou Correa and Loretta Sanchez also pulled out of the parade. The United Vietnamese Student Association (who coordinates the Tet festival) decided to cancel their participation in the parade as well, but were forced to participate after all, due “contract agreements”, as argued by the parade committee. They only had about 10 of their 60+ members march.
- The coalition also received overwhelming media coverage and support from NPR, PBS, ABC, NBC, and Voice of America.
Other highlights from the parade:
- Over 300 people came to support the LGBT coalition on the sidelines. We had people from San Diego, and San Jose make the trip just to join us!
- Several parade attendees came up to us to show support. One man in particular, 81 years old, said that “the LGBT are our children and we should all be one community.”
- Several groups in the parade showed support for LGBTs. The Rancho Alamitos High School marching band stopped in front of our group, faced us, and played and danced for us. Many of the band members were wearing rainbow leis.
- We cheered for Elmore Toyota (who will stop funding the parade because of our exclusion) and Minh handed one of the Elmore drivers a rainbow flag, who then waved it happily for us. One of the parade officials (not a policeman or security guard) ripped the flag away from the driver.
- When the UVSA marched by us, the parade announcers were reading a quote that they requested to be read as they approached the stage (it was about community and how discrimination is not acceptable), but stopped midway after realizing what the quote entailed. To support the UVSA for standing by us, we released balloons into the air and chanted their name.
- State Assemblyman Jose Solorio got out of his convertible to greet us, take pictures, and shake our hands. He grabbed a rainbow flag and was with our group for a good five minutes!
- Ted Chen from NBC 4 was there and did a story on the parade.
