Where I Belong

I consider myself lucky that one of my earliest jobs was in a field that I absolutely love, that it was a great environment to work in, and that I had awesome bosses. It set the bar pretty high, and the last few jobs I've had have been pretty lackluster, even without the comparison. My dissatisfaction with my current job has me reminiscing about this early work experience, and I really find that I miss it.

Back in the day, I worked as an usher for a large performing arts center. It had only been open a year, and was a renovation of the city's first high school. I worked there for two years or so, commuting back on the weekends when I got into college. I got to the point where I wasn't just an usher, I was also able to house-manage the smaller of the two stages. I helped out on mornings when tickets for highly-anticipated events went on sale. I helped patrons find their seats, and get new seats when they had tickets on the fourth floor (the balcony, which was above the mezzanine - - it was really damn high up) and acrophobia kicked in. I just loved it. Not only was it a performing arts area, but it was also a customer service area.

My bosses were awesome. I'll never forget the one who gave me a great brief on the professors at the college I would soon attend, and later gave me advice I should have listened to. He was fond of calling me "AB" and high-fiving me. I think it amused him that I was so damn short, but it was still fun. He left, and his assistant took over, and she often seemed to have such a great energy, and attitude. These were people that I wanted to work for, and made me want to do well. Those are good feelings for a kid just entering the work force to have, I think.

Out of lingering nostalgia and a few other reasons, I decided to become a fan of the center on Facebook, and yesterday a video was posted of a horde of children streaming into the building to attend a show. I am not a person who is fond of children, but watching the clip made me want to be there so badly.

There's something wonderful about a performing arts center. It's not like retail, or (I imagine) other types of customer service. So often, it seems, shopping is like a chore for people. It's not something they get excited about very frequently (though there are moments, and when they happen, it's kind of awesome in its own way). But with performing arts, the energy can be incredible. For a lot of people, it's a special occasion, and they're happy to be there, and looking forward to the next few hours. I'd give my left arm to be back in that kind of environment.

Somebody's left arm, anyway. No need to go wasting a perfectly good one.

Too Long to Tweet (again again)

From an article titled 9 chic shoe rules:

7. Pair Sky-High Shoes with Tame Hemlines When going for major air, keep your hemlines at an inch above the knee. But when wearing a short skirt or dress, wear a lower heel or flat — it will balance you out and keep you from showing altogether too much leg.

I'm sure I'm missing some fundamental aspect of fashion, but I'm not sure how a shoe can make you show more or less leg while wearing an already short skirt. I'll accept the fact that high-heeled shoes make the leg appear longer (and more shapely), but I really doubt they can make you show "too much" leg when your skirt is already shorty short.

Besides. If you're wearing a short skirt, I'm going to hazard a guess that the intent is to show off the leg anyway, so why not wear high heels to make them look oustanding?

Expressions

Someone I love passed away last night.

She'd been battling cancer for nearly four years, and it felt like a weird little fight to someone who wasn't always in the know. She was a tough, determined, awesome woman, and when she was diagnosed, she had the attitude that she would beat it no matter what. Or at least fight it. And she did. With the usual round of treatments, we were told that she beat it and was doing well. Then, months later, we were told that she'd collapsed, and they found a tumor in her head. But we were told that she pretty much beat that, too.

We weren't really well informed about what was going on, how she was doing. For the most part, we assumed that no news was good news, and she looked like she was doing well enough the few times that we were able to see her. We went to her retirement party just last spring, and while she looked older than her mere 64 and didn't quite have the same vitality we used to see in her, her hair was growing back, and she was still the same person we love so much.

When my boyfriend went home over the New Year, he spoke with some of her former colleagues. I don't know if they specifically spoke of her, but again - we assumed that no news was good news.

Yesterday, after I got home from work, my boyfriend asked me if I was familiar with what Hospice Care was. When I told him my knowledge was pretty vague, he informed me that she had been placed in hospice care the night before, and she was essentially being made comfortable. He found out through a group dedicated to her memory on Facebook, which at the time had only about 30 members. Twenty-four hours later, there are 375 members. There is a long line of wall posts from people writing about their memories of her. We were informed, via the group, that she'd passed away at about 10pm that night.

It feels strange to me now, and it did at the time, too, but when I found out that she was in hospice, and had gotten my first good cry out, I turned to Twitter next. I had to say something, and 140 characters seemed about enough for a simple cry of grief and pain. I was hurting (I'm still hurting) and there was the compulsion to express it to the void of the internet. Not because I felt that any of my followers needed to know, not because I wanted expressions of sympathy, but because my Twitter account, as much as this blog, as much as any other of the online spaces I frequent, has become a voice for me. It is as much a voice for me as the one with which I speak to a stranger on the street.

I wish I could go to her funeral, but I don't think things will work out. Knowing that hurts as much as knowing that there is now a world without her. She was a teacher, and a beloved mentor to so many people. She touched my life more profoundly and positively than even some of my own family members were never able to do. My grandfather, who was present in my life up until a few short years ago, died last September, and it didn't affect me nearly as much as her loss.

Work tomorrow will be difficult for me. I was glad to have today off through a natural course of events. But sometimes I still just want to cry and cry. But this post is just one more expression of grief and loss for me, and I'm glad to have made it.

Also, two beers and a glass of Bailey's...

On the twelfth day of Xmas, my true love gave to me:

Twelve kickers punching,

Eleven dragons sleeping,

Ten boozers boozing,

Nine earmuffs warming,

Eight dimes a-diming,

Seven powder donuts,

Six mules a-braying,

FIVE GRIZZLY BEARS!

Four apple pies,

Three French verbs,

Two turtle ninjas,

And an angry yellowjacket bee!

Too Long to Tweet (again)

Disclaimer: I've not gotten into the Twilight craze; have not read the books nor seen the films. A good chunk of the people within my circle of friends do not have good things to say of it, so this post is based on my estimation that their opinions would be comparable to mine if curiosity ever got the better of me.

That said, here's a hypothetical for the internets:

If Jason Friedberg and and Aaron Seltzer (the creators of Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, etc.) were able to salvage one more movie out of their career and made a Twilight-based Vampire Movie... would it be better or worse than the source material?

Deep down, I feel myself leaning towards worse. Crazed tween girls probably have better taste than concussed frat boys. Probably.

Crypticon!

This is going to be a long ass-post about my weekend at Crypticon. Here's the precis:

It was awesome. There were cool people. The Sheraton is neat. We spent money.

Here's the full-length version.

We left Winona by 3pm on Friday and made it to the Sheraton in Bloomington by, oh, about 6pm. There was wicked awful traffic once we got into the Twin Cities area, but we stayed cool and didn't experience too much craziness.

We checked into the hotel and Nick was astonished to discover that the Sheraton (not Sheridan, as he'd previously believed) is a rather posh establishment. The whole place was very shiny and prim, and it was damn amusing to see all the punks, metalheads, and downright scary scary people walking the shiny halls. Our room was on the 15th floor.

We were amused that there does not appear to be a 13th floor. As a matter of fact, when we were getting ready for bed at the end of that day, Nick dropped his shoes on the floor and exclaimed, "Take that, 13th floor!"

Now that I look at the picture, it looks like there's no button for the 3rd floor either, which is kind of weird. I do think there was a 3rd floor, and also a maintenance floor just above that one (3M) so things evened out. Really.

We went up to our room and marveled at the nighttime view. I tried to take a picture but totally failed at it, so you get nossing for now. But it was pretty cool. In getting settled in our room, we discovered that the very posh and shiny and expensive Sheraton Hotel did not include a mini-fridge in our room, which we'd pretty much expected, having stayed at other, less posh hotels and gotten fridges. This was problematic, as we'd brought not only sammiches for lunch on Saturday, but also a 12 pack of Killian's. So we did what anyone would do: we filled the garbage can with ice from the ice machine and tried to drink as much of it as possible as fast as possible.

The lack of a fridge was a point of contention with Nick for the whole weekend, though.

The beer situation settled, we headed down to the lobby to get our VIP wristbands to enjoy the con. As we walked, I casually asked Nick, "So, you got the tickets we printed out?"

Silence...

That's right, he left the damn tickets sitting on the printer at home, three hours away.

PANIC!

I'll skip over all the crazy panicking we did, and tell you now that the Sheraton provided computers with free internets in the lobby, and free printing services too, so we were able to access the email that had our tickets pdf and reprint them, and all was well.

We walked around the dealer room, chatted with a few of the guests and vendors, and basically oriented ourselves with the place while trying to not spend any money quite yet. We made an especial effort to chat with Ricou Browning, who played the Creature in The Creature from the Black Lagoon films (he did the underwater work in the creature suit, someone else did the above-water work). And for one of the big highlights of the evening, we chatted a bit with Don Calfa of Return of the Living Dead! He's a very awesome guy. Ernie Hudson was there, but Nick hadn't worked up the courage to talk to him quite yet. I'd have teased him about it a little, but I was a little starstruck myself.

We went up to the music room (a new event this year) and checked out a few metal bands. Our favorite was Mommy S3z No, simply because they played a song called Zombie Bukkake.

At 9:30 we went to watch an independent film called The Landlord, about a guy with quite literal tenants from hell. It is a hilarious movie (complete with its own drinking game, which we've not attempted yet) and we bought a copy later. We then watched part of another movie called Terror Overload, which had lots of boobs and gore, which is always fun. But we got a little restless and decided to check out the hospitality rooms (another new feature this year). There was one room playing Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and serving chili. The decor was pretty great.

And then we went to bed. Saturday had a whole lot of stuff planned for us, and we needed our rest!

We woke up Saturday morning to the sound of one of our neighbors having a loud phone conversation in his room. It was a little unnerving that such a posh shiny expensive place should have such thin walls ("And no fridge, dammit!" Nick muttered). The towels were also really coarse and cheap feeling, and Nick and I agreed that as posh and shiny and expensive the place looked, it was really just a money veneer.

We got dressed and I got fancied up (seriously - I wore makeup every day this weekend. Crazy!!) and I wanted to make another attempt at getting photos of our view. Success! It doesn't look as impressive in the morning, but oh well!

The Ernie Hudson Q&A was at noon, so we decided to hit the $10 breakfast buffet and see if the made up for the lack of an in-room fridge. And I'm not going to lie to you, Marge, the food was awesome and we completely stuffed ourselves. They even had fresh raspberries, which of course I went crazy over. Between the fresh fruit, the eggs, breakfast potatoes, the thick-as-whoa slices of bacon, and the muffins and pastries, and other foods that we didn't get a chance to cram into our faces, it was a damn fine $10 breakfast buffet. Because there were fresh raspberries, I forgave the Sheraton for its thin walls and coarse towels and stuff. Raspberries make up for everything!

Tummies stuffed, Nick and I headed to the dealer room to kill the last bit of time before the Ernie Hudson Q&A. Needless to say, we were thrilled to get a chance to hear him talk about his life and experiences and such, and I was personally glad that nobody ever asked him if he was a god, because I sort of expected it to happen but wasn't sure if I thought it would be funny or lame. Immediately afterward was the Q&A with Bill Moseley; it was pretty interesting in spite of the fact that neither Nick or I were especially well-versed on his films or parts.

Back on the Con floor, Nick started his shopping spree, getting autographs, pics, movies, and tshirts. We have yet to take full stock of all the hot swag we picked up this weekend, but it was good and plenty, let me tell you! We finally worked up the courage to visit Ernie Hudson's booth and professed our undying love for Ghostbusters. We got his autograph and a pic, and afterwards he hugged the both of us. That was a real highlight of the day.

We hit the Q&A with Ricou Browning, who talked a lot about his stunt work, and the animal training he did on Flipper. After that, none of the events happening really appealed to me, so I took some time to have a sammich (it was still good, in spite of just being in our little cooler and not a fridge) and a few beers, and reconnected with my much-missed internets. At six I joined Nick at the Return of the Living Dead Q&A with Don Calfa and Linnea Quigley, both of whom are cool as cool is cool.

We stuck around for the Sideshow Vaudville Burlesque show, expecting to see some boobies and dancing but instead got a pretty damn fun sideshow vaudville burlesque show - why we didn't expect exactly that I don't know. Probably we just saw "burlesque" and assumed there would be boobies galore.

Nick and I grabbed some food quickly at a nearby TGI Fridays (we'd never been to one before). I got myself a kitschy Cosmo poured over pink cotton candy and an appetizer. We went back up to our room, had a few more beers, and hit the music room for some more metal. This was where we were damn glad to have had the presence of mind to pick up earplugs before coming to the con, because even with them in the music was loud loud loud! Clearly, Nick and I are boring squares. The best part of the concert was watching a small group of teens, probably around 14 years old, headbanging right by the stage, and trying to form their own mosh pit. Nick and I were in hysterics watching them, and we both commented later how it was weird to feel ourselves lauging our asses off, but not be able to actually hear it.

After the concerts, we caught the last of the few short films playing that night, including an airing of an episode from the Twin Cities Ghostbusters. You may remember me taking a pic with them last year, and of course they were back in full force!

Then it was time for bed for us. Nick and I passed right out.

We woke up the next morning, cleaned ourselves up, packed all of our swag and gear and such and loaded everything into the car, quite thankful that checkout at the hotel wasn't until noon. So, of course we hit the breakfast buffet again and stuffed ourselves just as completely as the day before (mmm raspberries). We'd been seated next to where all the con staff was having their breakfast, and as we ate, Steve Dash of Friday the 13th 2 joined the con staff (he sat right next to me!). The con staff got up shortly after, and so we got to chat with him while we all finished eating. It was an awesome experience, and very cool to chat with him one-on-one in such a relaxed manner.

The Q&A with Margot Kidder was at 1pm, so we swept through the dealer room one more time, got the last of the things that we decided we really couldn't live without, and then headed up to watch her speak. It was incredible listening to her; she made a few allusions to her breakdown years and years ago, but she is really just a very charming and outspoken woman. Towards the end of the Q&A, she told "all the young women out there" not to be afraid of aging, because it was like a free pass to get to say and do and think whatever you want, and that it was terribly empowering and wonderful. It was an awesome thing to hear, and I think I got a little teary-eyed listening to her say that.

After that, we had still more time to kill until the Steve Dash Q&A (which we couldn't miss now that we'd had breakfast with him) and it was absolutely hilarious! He ripped on people coming in late, he ripped on other guys that had played Jason, he talked about his experiences as a stunt man, and was thoroughly entertaining.

And that's the end of the con. Nick and I got some sushi, and headed home, and crashed hard. I'm still not feeling totally recovered from it, and was a little worried this morning that I'd picked up one form of ConSARS or another (that post-con sickness that seems to plague con-goers), but I'm actually feeling pretty good right now. 100% pleased with myself that I'd had the presence of mind to take today off work.

I've posted all the pics at my Flickr page, so feel free to check them out there.

Too Long to Tweet

Why is it that one of my all-time favorite pieces of jewelry is not the garnet necklace that used to belong to my great-grandmother, or the gorgeous Italian necklace and earrings my boyfriend's parents (his mom, really) gave me, but a cheap necklace I got from Goodwill for a Halloween costume five years ago?

Upon reflection, the reason this necklace has preference at this time is because I'm packing for Crypticon, and expecting to be at at least one rowdy concert, and I'd feel less shitty if by chance this one got lost or broken.

Also, holy hell run-on sentences!