Jonas will tow the trailer, sans wooden top (which more than doubles the weight), and the rest of them will carry extra food and less junk. A couple of people leave us tents but most just add more gear to their bikes. They're supposed to ride 100km, but Cue is at 122km, so some people are keen to do that. They start with a photo call in front of the scenic Meekatharra generation station (6 chimneys, 6 big diesel generators) at 8:30am for the local newspaper. So they're off to a fine, early start (those that managed to get to the photo call, at least). John and Tali on the trike.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Evan, Sarah and I get to spend an extra day chilling out and entertaining ourselves while Alan gets seen to. Somewhere I've slipped a day, so it's also now Wednesday the 23rd. The diary made sense while I wrote it, but I don't recall it like that nay more so pleh. Maybe we spent a night and a day there? That's quite plausible. Anyway, onwards to the afternoon we spent in the sun.
Evan, Sarah and I spent an afternoon lying under my fly talking. Evan expressed unhappy, angry that the group has turned to custard. Sarah is optimistic and thought everything was fine, she certainly never realised Evan was at all unhappy. I'm surprised that Evan has chosen right now to talk about it. I'd have expected him to keep it quiet until after the ride, but then again, it's a big load to carry, keeping that one quiet.
Sarah does not see the gender divide, she feels that Chris is on the inside of the in group. Evan sees it, but also casts it as friendship grouping and agrees that it's girl-group social war, the same "game" they played at high school. Sarah sees it purely as friendship and doesn't like the suggestion that there's a systematic exclusion of anyones views. Everyone gets listened to, after all. I see it more as everyone gets a chance to talk, but if we measure being heard by the change that results, most of the group might as well talk to the walls. There's not even a pretence of compromise.
Sarah also sees the food centric thing, but regards it as a positive bonding tool. I see it as another way to exclude the people who need to be closed out. IMO any bonding technique that acts primarily by marking status is negative in an egalitarian group. How does it help the group that John's food preferences are widely known, acknowledged, and ignored? Especially while Naima's whims can change the menu even after cooking has started?
My cause du jour is the idea that the group is too big. No-one can actually deal with even 12 people as individuals, so everyone ends up focussing on a few people they know well and like, and the rest of the group become an anonymous mass. That is the polite explanation, in that it doesn't imply that anyone is doing this deliberately, they're just unaware of what is happening. However, it falls over when you consider the efforts that John, Bindi and I (among others) have put into explaining that we're unhappy and why.
Evan focuses on the people who arrived with their own agendas, and did not want to do the ride as planned. He spent a lot of time and energy trying to get ideas and suggestions out of people before the ride, and tried very hard to incorporate them into the ride plan. But in Darwin people (Sunny, Naima, Sue especially) turned round and went "thanks for the help, lets do it my way now". They agreed beforehand with the agenda as written, they had to opportunity to change it, but once ride started they wanted to change everything. How could he do it better next time? He can't see any way, unless you only accept people who live in Sydney, and that would exclude wonderful people like Bindi.
So the first issue was to change the itinerary and goals of the ride. That, plus the was a heap of prearranged processes and rule have been ignored right from the start make Evan deeply unhappy. He feels responsible for the ride, but he has no control over it any more. People like me look at it and say "Evan organised it, and it was shit", when Evan is sitting there going "but it wasn't supposed to be that way". It's interesting seeing Evan criticise Naima when she tries so hard to keep him under control.
Evan comments that he "sits in" on meetings but never votes (sorry, "dissents") since his input has proved irrelevant so often. That makes it five out of five guys "just happen" to be irrelevant in meetings. Repeat after me "there is no gender bias here". "Sitting in" is the only way he can accept the decisions that come out of meetings because he feels that he still has to work to implement them. He respects me and John for standing up and walking away, but that's more confrontational than he can be.
I appreciate his feelings, and also the huge amount of work he has done and keeps doing to get the ride going and keep us together. Even though any sane person would have given up long before. Oh, and Sarah listened in on all this and periodically made comments to show how much she hadn't seen in the group process.
One side effect of this is that as time goes by my attitude towards women-only events hardens again, and I lose patience with the whole victim-centric running away from the world philosophy behind women- only events. This makes it a bit hard to deal with Kelly's exhibition in Sydney, which is by dykes for women. I don't talk about that with Kelly as far as I can avoid it.