Arisia 1: paneling

I had vague, muddled hopes for Arisia when I made my plans in December. I'd been feeling very isolated here in Saratoga, and was determined (by gum, and damn the torpedoes) not to pass up opportunities to socialize. By the time Friday rolled around, though, the holidays were just ending; I'd been back to Swarthmore for Hogmanay, to Montréal for the APA, and various and sundry places to see various and sundry family members. "Isolated" was no longer the word of the day; "tired" and "overwhelmed" and "hibernatory" were contending for top honors. Also "poor".

The four-hour train delay didn't make me any more confident in my decision; dragging myself into the hotel after 11 hours of travelling (or not travelling), I was more than happy to hang out with crystalpyramid and hide from the con. She was coughing up various lungs and other internal organs until I introduced her to the joys of Robitussin, which would have been more helpful if it hadn't been preceded by me dragging her through the dark windy streets of Boston for an hour or so looking for a CVS. But it was very good to see a familiar face in the lobby when I arrived.

She caught a bus to Swat at some point, and while I felt justified in going to sleep without new people around I couldn't really avoid it once I woke up. Nervously, I ventured out of my hidey-hole, and claimed my badge. Fortunately, cons have these things called "panels", which don't require human interaction. I immediately stumbled into one called "LiveJournal as a social medium," and over the course of it I started to feel more connected. "I have a LiveJournal!" I said to myself. "And I know some of these people they're talking about! I'm not an alien!" Their concerns were not so much my concerns—I'm not really into promoting my LJ, f'r'instance, though I'm pleased when people happen across it—but it made me a lot less nervous about being there for some reason. And at the LJ meet-n-greet afterwards ckd introduced himself to me, so I was able to connect a face to the blue plastic shark. (Well, the shark has a face, but you know what I mean.)

Other stations on the official track:

• I watched Star Wars: Revelations—a fanfilm with astonishingly good production values—in a crowded little room. The effects and costumes really knocked my socks off, but the plot and characters had traces of Mary-Sue-itis. A little less casting nepotism would have gone a long way. I thought again about my own versions of Episodes VII-IX while I watched.
  
  
• I caught the tail end of a panel on Google vs. libraries, which had a surprisingly strong anti-Google/anti-wiki/anti-web bias. Part of it seemed to be lack of familiarity with the way Google works, part of it a failure to distinguish between the different uses the web and libraries are good for. I wished I'd worn my Google T-shirt, as I had Things To Say, and could have spoken ex cathedra.
  
  
• I watched some filking, and wished I'd brought my guitar. (As with the T-shirt, there were a lot of times when I thought to myself, "Hey, I am an interesting fellow, with much to offer a con. By what arcane means can I communicate this to the people here?" I had some luck here, but a guitar or a Google shirt or a Flirt deck would have helped.)
  
  
• Do you remember the Bill Cosby sketch about the chicken heart, which scared him so much when he heard it on the radio as a kid that he set his couch on fire? Turns out that it was a real radio drama in the 30s, and on Sunday a cast reproduced it excellently in front of a live audience. There were foley artists and everything. It was alternately creepy and hilarious; my hat is off to them. The mad scientist got the best lines: "We're doomed! DOOOOOOOOMED!" and "It's doubling in size every hour! It's already the size of a city block! Do you know what that means? In thirty hours, it will be one city block to the thirtieth power!"
  

Sadly, my late arrival kept me from seeing many more panels; the con didn't start for me until 2PM on Saturday, so I missed the historical fantasy panel and the poly panels and the sci-fi porn movie and the Goth Beach Party and the Circlet Press party. (I didn't see C. Tan at all. *pout* How am I supposed to nurse a distant crush like this?) I enjoyed what I attended, though, and am resolved to arrive earlier next year.

Happily, there's more to a con than panels, which I will get to in the next post. Let's hear it for me, for I Was Not Dumb.

Arisia 2: masking

The aforementioned LJ panel was held in the vast and opulent Imperial Ballroom (which never failed to get Elvis Costello stuck in my head when I saw it). Huge crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, balconies lined the walls, colored spotlights created pillars of color that shifted through the spectrum. It was amusingly jarring to see a panel of people seriously discussing LiveJournal in that space; the Masquerade was a better fit.

orawnzva and I sat together; it was good to trade comments with him. Dracula hosted, and offered traditionally bad puns from the podium. There were not many entries; besides the parade of kidlet-made (and predictably adorable) costumes—including the Elf Knight Wizard King (talk about multiclassed!) and the Hero Man—there were only a dozen or so. But I was particularly taken with a few:

• One young woman was dressed as Kaylee, in her poofy dress from Shindig. It was an amazing piece of workmanship, and her awed and wondering expression when she came on stage so closely mirrored Kaylee's at the ball that I actually thought it was Jewel Staite for a moment. (Of course, I was approximately 3/4 mile from the stage, so that's not so very surprising.) It was she (I think) who later exclaimed over my Jayne hat; I was pleased to have made her smile.
  
  
• There was a very impressive space marine on stilt-boots, with long Wolverine claws. He won an award, and it was a hoot watching him try to accept it without killing the emcee or shredding the certificate.
  
  
• A girl in pink hair and matching pleather armor came out to answer her cell phone: Brittany, Warrior Princess! I mention her, first, because her costume was adorable, and second because she talked to me in the elevator afterward, which cheered me up. I wished her a happy birthday, since it was.
  
  
• Most wonderfully, Prince Katamari made an appearance! Four happy people were dancing and bouncing to the Katamari music, until Prince Katamari appeared with his sticky ball and chased them screaming off the stage. They ran back and forth a few times, Pac-Man-cut-scene-style, while half the audience roared with laughter and the other half sat baffled.
  

I was surprised it was over so quickly, given the dozens of hall costumes I saw, but I enjoyed myself. (I will gloss over the alarming entry in which the nine-year-old girl strutted about in an oversexualized midriff-baring costume as the emcee declared her a "party girl", because perhaps I am just an old fogey. Yeeps.)

Arisia 3: balling

(I wasn't going to write this entry now, but this Current Music came on and made me.)

There is really nowhere but a con to see people in fetish wear dancing with Kaylee in her ball gown, or Batgirl dancing with a Jedi knight. My smile warmed, watching them; it was here that I really remembered why I like fandom.

"Here" was, once again, the Imperial Ballroom, this time tricked out into a night club for the dance party. I wore my Hogmanay outfit: nice black pants, black-and-purple-striped shirt, brocade Chucks (which drew many comments). When I arrived, they were playing noisy Goth/industrial music I didn't recognize, so (as is typical for me at dances) I stood around feeling awkward and grumbling, "Darn Goth kids. Too bad sinsofthedove isn't here instead of me. Snarl snarl snarl."

Just as I was wondering whether to leave, the opening lick of Paradise by the Dashboard Light pierced the spangled gloom. I had no choice, of course; it's the rules. I had to leap onto the dance floor. Almost immediately I connected with a young woman in a green blouse, and I spent all eight-and-a-half minutes of the song dancing and lip-synching with her. When it ended, she hugged and thanked me, smiling, and reached into her purse. I thought she was going to offer contact information, but instead she handed me wind-up walking sushi, which I thought was the most wonderful thing in the world.

I am an...uninhibited dancer, and my heart was thumping dangerously after the Meat Loaf, but the DJ pulled out The Time Warp then, and of course I couldn't sit that out. I ended up singing the middle verse with a young woman in a splendid corset and devil horns (who later turned out to be rigel, but I didn't know that yet). I did get a break then; the DJ started playing blocks of different genres, which worked well for me, as I could jump up for the 80s music and rest/ogle in between. (There was much to ogle; Arisia is full of pretty people in corsets and less. The winner was the girl wearing a bra made of what looked like spiral heating elements. Meep.) I am not sure how people viewed me, flailing and leaping as I was; a third young woman laughed and pogoed with me, mimicking my excellent moves, during Video Killed the Radio Star, but another put her hand on my shoulder and asked, very intently, if I knew where to find drugs. ("Um...no. That's just me.")

I rarely step onto a dance floor, but when I do I sort of meet myself—an alternate-track j7y who doesn't change much through the years. He's the same fellow who stepped onto his first dance floor in 8th grade; I check in, see how he's doing, get his perspective on my life now. It's very centering, and the fact that I had such excellent interactions with people while I was doing it made me feel pretty good about current-me. I'd gone to Arisia with the vague notion of hooking up with someone, but for whatever reason I didn't feel a push to activate Flirting Mode that night (whether or not it would have been successful); I was content to be a benign presence watching people make out and leave together. Unusual for me. I would have enjoyed having someone to snuggle with on a couch, maybe, but I wasn't unhappy about not.

At some point, I asked the DJ if he had the Numa Numa song, and his response was something like: "Oh. My. God. ...I do. Nobody has ever requested it before." I waited a long time for him to play it, but he never did, and close to 5AM I looked at the cell phone and was shocked. Bedtime, and my blistered big toe agreed.

The songs I danced to were, more or less: Paradise by the Dashboard Light, The Time Warp, Pop Musik, Video Killed the Radio Star, Safety Dance, Red Right Hand, Land of 1000 Dances, Total Eclipse of the Heart, White Wedding, Thriller, Coin-Operated Boy, Unbelievable, and Da Da Da, I Don't Love You You Don't Love Me, Uh-Huh Uh-Huh Uh-Huh. Ah luv the 80s.

Arisia 4: bailing

On Sunday, I had to wake up early to check out, so I wasn't good for much. My confidence from the night before had bled away; after Chicken Heart and a final stroll through the thirty-five corset shops in the dealers' room, I sat sleepily on a couch on the Mezzanine, reading Gene Wolfe, frustrated with myself for failing, for an entire weekend, to actually meet anyone new—to learn a name, or exhange LJ info. I Was Dumb; I forgot that the way to meet people is not to sit and sulk in a black funk.

Except, apparently, when it is. I got a Get Out of Dumb Free card, which I didn't deserve: rigel and a gaggle of her friends sat down next to me, all out of the blue, and we chatted (more or less coherently) for an hour or two about Google and Gene Wolfe and cons and LJ and porn. I was given cookies. It was a perfect cap to the weekend; they seem like excellent folks, and made me feel welcome until irilyth and psocoptera came to carry me off to delicious Tibetan food.

So, it took a while—until the last moments of the con, really—but I think I made some inroads. Next year, if I get there on time, if I overcome my timidity earlier, if I remember my lessons about bringing attention-grabbing items, I expect things will go even better. These things are cumulative.

Love that dirty water. Oh, Boston, you're my home.