KaousuuWriMo

[Suu]

This thread will be the home of my NaNoWriMo 2008 project: It's All Geek to Me: Ten Years of Being White and Nerdy

Let's face it, a lot of us supergeeks who wear costumes and attend conventions take a lot of slack. But what is it REALLY like to be on the other side? This is a first hand account starting in 1998 and Suu's junior year in high school, and how her life fell into a downward spiral of nerdiness so extreme she has yet to escape.

[Suu]

IT'S ALL GEEK TO ME: TEN YEARS OF BEING WHITE AND NERDY
A novel by Kaousuu


PROLOGUE


So what is it exactly, that reaction that I get when I tell people that I wear costumes to conventions? Not a good one, well, not typically. I've had weird responses, eyebrow raises, snarky remarks, all of the above and the occasion, OH MY FUCKING GOD IS THAT COOL, but yeah, other than that, it's not all what it's cracked up to be.

Why did I do this to myself? How did it start? Congratulations! You've been chosen by fate to read this novel that I'm a writing called "It's All Geek to Me: Ten Years of Being White and Nerdy", which is on the web right now on a forum somewhere you stumbled upon regarding National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

Where to begin...where to begin...

Let's Quentin Tarantino this just a bit, and start my freshman year in college, then we'll flash to my youth, and build up into what could be the most ridiculously written tale of woe ever to appear before your very eyes. Okay, no woe, just laughs and "what the fucks". Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...


CHAPTER ONE: THEM DIRTY, DIRTY GRASS ROOTS


"What do you mean, there's conventions for this...stuff?" I pointed at the doodle in my sketchbook as this girl in my graphic design 101 class looked on.

"Oh yeah, I'm going to Otakon this year." She replied.

"What is this...Otakon you speak of?" I was intrigued.

She went on ad nauseam about the magic of Japanese Animation Conventions, people in costume, people selling art. People, lots of people from all over converging in the Baltimore Convention Center for 3 days out of the year in a mass of total chaotic doom.

"I...must see this."

Now, I was aware of conventions for things like, work and Star Trek, and this thing that they did for Star Wars Episode I called "Star Wars Celebration" in Indianapolis which I couldn't attend because my parents wouldn't let me. Stupid parents. But this...JAPANESE ANIMATION. How fucking cool is this?

I mean, here I am, I'm eighteen, I'm cool, I can draw, I watch Sailor Moon and know more about it than what they show on Cartoon Network, which is how this convention talk started with this stranger in graphic design one-oh-one that very summer of 2000.

She approached me after overhearing me speak about the Starlights and how epically awesome they were and how they would never be shown in the United States because they were hermaphroditic Sailor Senshi and that is, as we all know, just totally uncool for a cartoon. She corrected me on things too, that bitch, and she turned out to be more than I bargained for down the road, but before we get to that, we're going to do the fly back to 1982 and my fateful birth in West Islip, New York to two parents who went on their first date to see The Empire Strikes Back. See? It was fucking destiny.

Star Wars had been a pivotal point in my life since I was very young, as far back as I can remember I was watching the movies on TV with my father, playing with my cousin's amazing toys that would be worth a fortune on eBay these days, and always wanting to be Princess Leia in the metal bikini. I mean, what other childhood dream is there? Who didn't want to stand next to their favorite heroes at some point in their time and just escape to that world, it was so much cooler than ours, afterall, so why not?

My mom was also a hell of a living room tailor, and what I mean by that is that we had all of our Halloween costumes hand-made by her hand sewing her ass off every month of October. I think this is part of the reason why I am the way I am as well.

Oh right, back on track, my nerdy roots.

My family relocated from Long Island to St. Petersburg, Florida when I was five years old. I consider it a pivotal point in my life, not so much on the nerd front, but just in general because it put things into perspective for where my future would end up. Sometimes I believe in fate, sometimes I don't, this is one of them.

Florida is one of those places that you either hate because of all of the negative media it gets, or you love because it has Mickey Mouse. Fact is, in the 15 years I lived there, I never even set foot in Disneyworld. Screw that.

Moving on, there's a story in here somewhere...

In grade school I wasn't all that popular. I was the girl from the other state, the girl who wasn't rich in private school, the girl who was...a nerd. Yes, that one, the one that likes Star Wars, because eww...that was so 80s and we're in the 90s now, and if you don't like New Kids on the Block you suck.

Guess what, I didn't like NKOTB, why? Because I was too busy listening to my father's collection of epic progressive rock from the 1970s to care about a bunch of cute boys singing pop music. I had no time for boys anyway, why? I had Star Wars.

Who needed hot green baseball caps and checked hammer pants when you could pretend you were zipping through the galaxy listening to Starship Trooper? That make far more sense for an 8 year old having fun in the afternoon after school. Sure, the kids called me a 'retard' but it was word of the year and I got over it relatively quickly.

My first CD was Nirvana's Nevermind; with it's cover of a naked baby in a swimming pool forever burned into the heads of millions who rocked the flannel. I was in third grade at the time and brought it in for show and tell. I mean, CDs were new and cool! What could possibly go wrong?

...I got it taken away by the teacher for that very VERY obviously pornographic cover and my dad had to go and get it for me after school, ripping the teacher a new one about the importance of allowing children to have their choice of music.

I'm a rocker, I've always been a rocker. I've done the hip-hop and pop music phase, that actually followed when I entered junior high school and I attempted to do what was necessary to 'fit-in' and not continue to make an incomprehensible nerdy ass of myself.

But first, thanks to the zoning of buses in Pinellas County do to desegregation, I could no longer attend the elementary school that was literally around the corner from my house an the primary reason why my parents moved to the area, oh no, they wanted to bus my white ass to the bowels of St. Petersburg to meet the quota at a predominantly black school in the Southside. Now, if there ever was a way to burn my mother's ass without a flame, this is it. It has nothing to do with race, it has nothing to do with the quality of education I would be receiving, it had to do with the fact that I had a fucking school AROUND THE CORNER FROM MY HOUSE and they wanted to bus me, on a stinky yellow thing, probably close to 50 blocks South to an area that was relatively unsafe for children anyway.

Schools in this area were surrounded by barbed wire and looked like jails. Not to keep the kids in, but to keep the ghetto out. To this day, after living in a couple other large cities, I have yet to see an area quite like it.

This had already happened once to me, when we first landed on the Thumb of the Wang, we lived in Pinellas Park, a suburb-city of St. Petersburg and known for it's trailer parks and rednecks and white trash and alligators and all sorts of nice scenery that makes Florida what we know and love. Instead of going to the local Pinellas Park Elementary School, I was shipped down to Perkins, which was remarkably over 100 blocks South past the then-skeleton of the Suncoast Dome (Now Tropicana Field) and a barren wasteland of downtown St. Petersburg to this scenic area of barb wired schools and burned out cars. Not knowing exactly what was going on, my New Yorker parents just assumed it was because of overcrowding as they were of course from an area that was at the time much more populated than the Tampa Bay Area, and went with it, even though the bus ride was pretty much an hour.

I'll be honest, I don't remember my time at Perkins much, except that my kindergarten teacher had the same last name as I did and my first grade teacher was an absolute bitch. We moved to St. Petersburg Proper about half way through my first grade year, which made me happy, and I started attending Woodlawn, the school around the corner.

By now my mother had learned the lesson and with two kids in the school now, she wasn't about to let a nine year old and a six year old do that ride all the way to the Southside and fought tooth and nail through my third grade year to fight this desegregation rezoning.

It didn't work.

But this time my parents had a plan B! Hey! Our Catholic church up the road has a school! Let's see if we can get the kids in there!

And we were accepted and spared from the bowels of St. Petersburg scenic Southside once more and embarked on the quality of Catholic education for two years.

No really, it's okay, I'm laughing too.

St. Paul's was okay for the first year. I knew some of the kids from Vacation Bible School (even though most of us Catholics/Former Catholics know the Bible had little to do with anything.) so I wasn't a total stranger, and I got to wear plaid, which was very popular in the early 90s anyway. Plaid, side ponytails, penny loafers, I mean, this was an absolute dream come true for any fourth grader that was just going to a public school down the street last year and was absolutely dying to take religion and prayer in class on a daily basis.

Long story short, the kids turned out to be twats and hated me because I was poor (oh lord, my brother and I were on grants and scholarships! Boo hoo to you!) and my fifth grade teacher decided to tell me that I couldn't pray for my dead cat and that the Holocaust never happened.

Goodbye, Catholic education! I hardly knew thee!

By this time, we had moved to another suburban area of St. Petersburg called Shore Acres, known for it's ability to mimic New Orleans during a hurricane anytime high tide rolled around and I was technically zoned for another Catholic school, which was St. Paul's nasty, red plaid, rich rivals, St. Raphael's.

Enter my architectural geekiness. As far as St. Paul's went, it had that classic red brick look with rose window and a large open Romanesque chamber with lovely stained glass windows and a Crucifix that for some reason constantly made me shit bricks. To this day I'm still not fond of the full Crucifix behind a Catholic alter, but I don't quake with fear when I see it.

St. Raphael's, on the other hand, was right on the water of an inlet to Tampa Bay between the islands of Snell Isle and Shore Acres. It was smaller, with the classic Spanish Florida architecture and a chamber that was relatively cozy in comparison to St. Paul's as its congregation was typically smaller. Instead of the domed high ceilings, it had a lower apex made entirely of bent, finished wood that went all the way to the stained glass windows on the side that represented the holy holidays of Christ's life like all Catholic churches. Oh, and the Crucifix wasn't as creepy. As far as Catholic churches that I have been in go, this one is by far my favorite, because it doesn't intimidate you. It doesn't make you feel that "God is Omnipotent So Shut the Fuck Up" modesty when you sit in the pew and look up.

So, my parents had considered sending us there and moved to transfer parishes, but when the Diocese refused to transfer our grants and my mom had enough of my fifth grade teacher's lack of historical knowledge, they opted to return my brother and myself into the mix of public school with my sister now for shits and giggles.

So not only was I going from private school to public school, I was going from elementary to junior high. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

If there ever was a student body that hated me, it was my sixth grade year at Riviera Middle School. I can't even describe what I had to deal with. Yeah, I had friends, but I had mortal enemies now for the first time ever in my life, and a lot of them stuck with me all the way until high school graduation seven years later. That's pretty horrible. Coming from private school, my parents urged that I be placed into all advanced classes, which I did okay in, but the lack of friends and a social life made my grades stagger, so come seventh grade I was put into some regular speed classes, in which, like any nerd, I got bored and started getting into fights. A lot. This is normal, right?

I had started Tae Kwon Do a couple of years prior near the end of my fifth grade year at St. Paul's, so I had that as an outlet after school to get out some frustration, but unfortunately as a twelve year old who was relatively bored in school sans band and dealing with things like crushes I could never get the invisible balls to push through to fruition as a relationship and continual stress thanks to these kids who pretty much didn't like me and a Spanish teacher who could pretty much go fuck herself, I found that violence and defiance seemed like a viable alternative. Hey, I went to a Southside school for kindergarten after all, and I WAS born in New York, that made me a bad ass. Oh, and that Tae Kwon Do thing too.

Plain to say that the seventh grade administrator and I became pretty buddy-buddy, he seemed to understand where I was coming from considering his reputation for being a staunch asshole and those times I would be sent to his office became more of a respite if not a therapy session in my routine, and I often got candy.

Then came my shining moment if not fifteen minutes of evil bitch infamy when this guy, named Carlos (though don't let the name fool you, he was as ginger as they come) decided he was going to be a helpful guy and take my bag as I was already late to my class after the bell. So he grabbed and ran...and I pursued screaming at the top of my lungs to get the attention of some form of authority until he slowed and I trucked into him from a perpendicular hallway and completely took him down. By the time I was wrenched off of him, I had broken his jaw in three places and spewed more profanities than was natural for any mouth that wasn't stationed on the USS Saratoga.

What resulted was an in-school trial determining that my acts were in self-defense, I was suspended for three days, and Carlos had his mouth wired shut for six weeks. Unfortunately my parents and Tae Kwon Do instructor didn't seem to find my antics cute and I caught the beating of a lifetime, legally, wearing full contact pads in the Shore Acres Recreation Center. I was also failed to be promoted from my green belt for a while.

To this day, my perseverance with the sport still amazes me, I could have easily quit after that, but I didn't, and I was award the Most Improved Student of the Year award at the annual banquet.

Eighth grade progressed a bit smoother. Once you play the Machiavelli-card of preferring fear over love, seas tend to part as you approach. I also discovered volleyball in my physical education class, and was sucked onto the team by the coach within weeks. Finally I had something to at school that wasn't beating up anyone who gave me a hard time, I could take out my aggression on a leather ball during the day, and then continue my Tae Kwon Do studies in the evening. Life was good.

High school wasn't terrible. Northeast High School (aka NEHI) wasn't the greatest school in the county, and with "School of Choice" being passed, my parents were pretty adamant on me choosing another route than the local zoned school, and NEHI, although academically sound and a magnet school for athletics, was at the receiving end for the kids who lived on the Southside near those schools with the barbed wires and brought their etiquette and court-like manners to Northeast which had resulted in fights, stabbings, shootings, and the annual ceremonial rape. 

But I accidentally on purpose forgot to get my application in to attend another nearby not-as-hardcore high school and to NEHI I went. To this day I'm still glad I didn't make a different choice. I was reunited with a good friend of mine from Woodlawn of all places seven years after the fact, and we still keep in touch til this day. I was able to finally find my niche as a geek with other geeks who lived locally and also vied for not going to one of the other high schools in fear of their lives and it worked out beautifully.

I continued my volleyball playing and made All-State three times (which in a state the size of Florida, is no easy task mind you. I worked my fucking ass off) which would later score me a full NCAA scholarship to any state university. My freshman year I also decided that competitive swimming on top of volleyball on top of Tae Kwon Do was a good idea, and in wasn't in short, but I was never so jacked in my life.

I allowed my geekiness to come back full-force and get involved in drama club, and later form the school's first Japanese Animation club.

Oh right, Japanese Animation! How did THAT happen!

Somewhere in the transition between junior high and high school, my dad and I decided to dive head first into Marvel Comics right at the time of Age of Apocalypse and Onslaught. I'm not even going to explain what that means, but if you know, then you KNOW how epic this time in the X-Men chronology really was in the comic world. It was at this time I also started drawing a lot.

I had been pretty artistic since I was young; always doodling and painting and getting involved in crafts. I actually have to give my mom a lot of credit for that, going back to her living room tailoring of Halloween costumes, handmade Christmas ornaments made from sand dollars we would get at the beach and send back as novelties to the family back up North, and yes, even that dreadful Vacation Bible School and it's projects. It's always something I've enjoyed and excelled in, and still do this day.

Between my brother and I over the span of like five years created an impressive collection of Marvel comic cards, mostly X-Men, but there was a good amount of Spiderman and Avenger ones in there as well. These gave me good starting points for doodles that would pretty much consume me for a while.

Rogue, Psylocke, Cable, Gambit, I drew them all, and pretty damn well if you ask me. I still wish I had all of these, they were all in basic pencil, shaded and the whole nine yards on white construction paper. I would draw them for my brother's friends, my father's desk at work, the wall of my bedroom and even the refrigerator of course.

And then there was Alligator Express, which I think is still to this day published weekly in the Sunday St. Petersburg Times. Alligator Express was a section of the newspaper devoted entirely to kids and their artwork and was pretty selective. I entered in a couple of times, but never got published. I did however get a few refrigerator magnets which my mom used to hang my artwork with for a while, so I stopped trying to enter. I think she still has them to this day.

And then came fucking anime. Bollocks.


(11/1/08 11:25pm 3,500 words.)

[Eve]

eww...that was so 80s and we're in the 90s now, and if you don't like New Kids on the Block you suck.

(11/1/2008 12:24AM 842 words.)

You got the right stuff.. baby.

[Suu]

Previous post edited for formatting changes and additional word vomit. I'll probably make actual separate posts for now on, but I changed the chapter format. That's all. No words were deleted or rearranged.

[Suu]

CHAPTER 2: 1998-2000 - JAPANESE ANIMATION AND WHAT I DID TO IT WHEN I FOUND IT


I often get asked the vile question, "So how did you get into anime?" when I frequently stagger drunk behind my artist alley table or in some sort of half-assed cosplay, and I always respond the same way.

"The Barenaked Ladies did it."

This gets a lot of looks. Most people know that The Barenaked Ladies are of course a rock group known for some rather interesting hits such as One Week. And it was One Week that did it.

"Gotta get in tune with sailor moon
Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes
That make me think the wrong thing"

At this time, Sailor Moon was a regular feature daily on Cartoon Network's Toonami block at four o clock PM Monday through Friday. Yes, I still remember that, because I would drop my homework to watch it. It was the summer of 1998, the year between my sophomore and junior year, and the year I enlisted in the United States Air Force Reserves. I was sixteen years old, and I was watching whiny bitches wearing skimpy sailor outfits fighting monsters in Tokyo that were sent by villains who were named after semi-precious stones (No really, Beryl, Jadeite, Zoisite, Malachite...)This was the LIFE. I mean, I remember looking at my catalog for my class ring and then at other jewelry catalogs I would get in and giggle over seeing malachite being offered. Lovely stone it is, really, green and swirly.

Anyways, my afternoon became consumed by Sailor Moon, and later by the dreaded drawn-out Dragonball Z, in which my amusement toward character names only became more apparent as I discovered, after checking out a Japanese-English dictionary, that the main characters were all named after some sort of food source such as rice, cereal, tea, pickles, breasts, and bloomers. Naturally, this show could do no wrong in my eyes.

It became all to easy to blow off my AP United States History homework to partake in an hour of this corny shit, I mean really, it seemed that my infatuation was ridiculous.

As the school year progressed and my drawing skills progressed to bouncing, perky, underaged tits and eyes the size of coffee cup saucers, I ran into a group of fellow nerds who were also into this crazy and outlandish Japanese Animation thing and we all geeked and we had great times at lunch drawing and talking about shows I haven't seen yet but pretended I did to fit in. How else do you make friends? I mean, aside from breaking jaws of course.

I'm not going to lie, drawing anime isn't easy, and I still have a lot of my early stuff archived in a tub in the basement here, buried deep under college textbooks, photo books, and a bicycle missing its front tire. Sometimes I wonder why I even bothered to keep them, because frankly, they're a lot of crap. The anatomy is piss-poor as I attempted to make that transition from almost natural Western comic style to the exaggerated Japanese style. The eyes were not good at all, and I was light on the colored pencil, as I wasn't that comfortable in the medium, being primarily a graphite and ink sketcher. I have to say that it took me at least a solid five years before I was comfortable in the style I predominantly do today.

One thing that I'll never forget from this year in particular, was that I apparently started watching Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z at a rather magic interval in their release to North America. These shows were not new in 1998, in fact they had been out and cycled on American television for about four years already, but it wasn't until Cartoon Network actually acquired the rights to them that more than one season was released to the Western world that wasn't a fansub. We'll get to fansubs in a moment, but for now, we're going to discuss the awesome that was Sailor Moon "The Lost Episodes" and the Dragonball Z "Frieza Saga".

"The Lost Episodes" of Sailor Moon actually turned out to be the second half of the "R" season, in which that pedophile Darien...er...Mamoru...er...we'll just say Tuxedo Mask and Serena...er...Usagi, otherwise known as Sailor Moon, began their rather formal relationship. "R" stands for Romance, obviously. The semi-precious stone collection got upgraded to the precious stones including Emerald, Sapphire, Diamond, and Emperor Palpatine holding a crystal ball, oh sorry, Wiseman.

I just completely fell in love with this season and to this day, even after seeing so many other shows, it's still my all-time favorite anime season overall. The plot was good in that corny Sailor Moon way, the English dub was decent except for the change in Darien's voice actor, and now there was a Sailor Pluto who controlled time. Oh, and let's not forget Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask's daughter from the future and all sorts of silly plot twists and turns and nonsense. I mean, it was epic, and became even more epic after I was able to get on the internet at a rocketing speed of 56k and discover that the Japanese version was even better because it didn't have the North American editing out of things such as nipples, rape and crucifixions. How dare America not show these things on television!  Blasphemy I say! Japan is obviously so much better and I need to be just like them!

Oh, and, I have to say, if not be slightly ashamed to, that yes, this was the time that I went from being a casual after school fan, to a fangirl. Yes, Angela, there is a god, and his name is Prince Diamond. Oh yes, my heart still goes a flutter to this day when you see his majesty appear on screen with his magic fruit punch on a throne of dark crystal in a pan up from those gangster shoes he wore. He was beautiful in a way that only a two dimensional character could possibly be. I was in love, and considering my overall popularity with guys anyway, he was probably the only piece of action I was going to get for a while, if not for a half hour five days a week and episodes I recorded to watch on the weekend for "drawing reference", naturally.

You're probably wondering what magic fruit punch is. Long story short, my friend Heather started it in the first season in which Zoisite gives Nephrite a hard time and asks him (in the English version) if he's enjoying his lemonade, when it was obviously a hard liquor drink in a rocks glass. Well, Prince Diamond is holding a snifter of wine or brandy, and it became known as the 'Magic Fruit Punch' in lieu with Nephrite's 'Magic Lemonade'. It was hysterically funny at the time when you're a virginal sixteen year old girl. I swear.

Moving along, this wonderful "R" season of Sailor Moon gave birth to not only a fangirl, but to a rabid fan fiction author as well. I spat out an eighty something page fanfic that basically turned into me living vicariously through Sailor Pluto and having sexual liaisons with the boys of the Blackmoon Clan. Yes. You read that correctly. It's still posted at Fanfiction.net, and I can not bring myself to even read it anymore because it's so horribly done. Not that I was a bad writer in eleventh grade, mind you, but I was still in just eleventh grade, and it shows. I was over descriptive, and not even in the parts where it should have mattered! I worked more on tarting up the appearances of the characters that everyone knows already rather than getting overtly explicit in scenes that I didn't know much about then aside from whatever giggling madness my pure yet perverted brain could machine out.

I wish I had such positive things to blurt out over Dragonball Z as I did Sailor Moon, but I have to say, that the incredibly repetitive, ridiculous, boring, poorly dubbed, epic fail, "I'm going to blow up the planet in ten seconds but it's going to take me thirteen episodes to get through" Frieza saga was the nail in the coffin for my fleeting fandom of that animation. Sorry.

Eleventh grade I have to admit was probably the most remarkable and memorable years in high school. I suppose most of you will disagree and insist that senior year is supposed to be the one that does all the above and more, but my junior year marked something that I'd like to think of a progression in my life, perhaps removing a bar in my black iron prison, so to speak, and evolving more into the focused artist type rather than the frustrated angry white chick who likes comic books and sodium nitrate bombs in chemistry class type.

Oh, and remember Carlos? The kid who's jaw I broke back in seventh grade? Yeah him. He started shit with my friends in chemistry class, and thought it was fun idea to rip the head off of a stuffed bear that was given as a birthday gift to one of them. Big mistake, and I was happy to meet him in the hallway follow news of what had happened and I'd never see a white boy run so fast.

And then the punch line!

The summer between junior and senior year, Carlos became the recipient of the prestigious Darwin Award when he proceeded to get ridiculously drunk and fall off the Gandy Bridge into Tampa Bay. Yes, let me elaborate just briefly. Carlos drank himself silly at the age of sixteen, walked onto a very long bridge spanning Tampa Bay between Tampa and St. Petersburg, in fact on a span that was undergoing renovations and wasn't open to traffic, let alone drunk teenagers, slipped, and fell into the depths of  the channel of Tampa Bay. They pulled his body out of the mangrove trees three days later and the autopsy showed that he had a blood alcohol level of  0.1%. The state percentage in Florida for legal intoxication is 0.08% BAC.

As you could imagine, this was received by the student body and the rest of St. Petersburg as a "great tragedy", and I think I really shocked my mother when she told me they found him dead and tangled in some bushes and I responded with a resonating apathy.


I cut my hair, got back into rock music, got back into drawing classes, and started to find a purpose, even though at the time my vision was dead set on being a hurricane hunter for the Air Force than an animator or comic artist. Or maybe an F-16 pilot, of course. In fact I had it all planned out. I was already in ROTC, so I enlisted in the Air Force Reserves, and would get my basic training completed over the course of breaks between school. I applied to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and I was going to continue on a full-time military career after college graduation. On paper, this was a great idea. In real life, not so much.

Colleges have a way of turning people down, and out of the seven schools I applied for, I was turned down by only two: The Air Force Academy and Cornell University. I felt a bit crushed, since they were obviously at the top of my list, but my test scores weren't that great. My overall grades were more than satisfactory, but my SAT score was shy of where it needed to be. There aren't a lot of schools in the nation that teach meteorology as a primary course of study, but luckily, Florida State University, which was my favorite state college of choice, did have it, and it was a school I WAS accepted into, along with the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, Northland College in Wisconsin, and remarkably and laughably, Harvard University, which I applied to as a joke on a bet since they sent me information, though they really didn't have any courses of study was interested in, not that I could afford it anyway. If I was going to go Ivy League, I wanted Cornell, they at least had meteorology, but they didn't want me. Florida State it was! In addition to meteorology, Florida State had an Air Force ROTC program which would allow me to score more credits through being in the reserves and possibly graduate early. Life was good. This would work, especially since I had already been awarded the Florida Merit Scholarship which took care of seventy-five percent of my tuition.

But wait, there's more!

My exemplary performance as a volleyball player caught the eye of the NCAA, or National Collegiate Athletics Association for those that don't know it, and they wanted to give me a free ride to any Division I school I wanted as long as I played ball.

The Air Force gave me money too.

College was FREE! Everything looked great on paper again!

My senior year I could have coasted through but I continued studying intensely with a course load of two AP classes, a math class from hell called Analysis of Functions (which us students affectionately called "anal funk",) honors physics, Latin, Classical Greek, and art. By the end of my first semester I was suicidal.

To be fair, I had already taken three years of German, so my foreign language requirement was met, but I still wanted the classics. Latin was fun, Greek was hell, or may have not been if I wasn't taking Latin at the same time according to my teacher, who taught both. So I dropped it. Anal Funk was horrific, and I struggled through the course as my teacher only favored those students she had for Algebra II, so I failed, and I dropped it. Fortunately I had an extra credit pulled up from junior high that I got for taking honors science, so my graduation credit requirement was met. Instead of math and Greek, I found myself being a teacher's aide to the guidance counselor that took care of the teenage mothers and more art, namely my third year of intensive drawing classes, and then my coast came in the second semester, at least until the AP exams which I scored high enough to receive my credits on and enjoyed basking in the glow of being a super geek with a free ride to college and a handful of college credits ready to shorten my time in Tallahassee.

And then there was Gundam Wing.


(11/3/08 12:33AM. 5,691 words.)

Edited on 11/10 to add Darwin Award snippet.

[Valerie - Gone]

I feel like I'm not supposed to post here, but I'm doing it anyway.

Reading about your obsession with Sailor Moon made me giggly. I am still giggly. Huge grin on my face. God, I love it. I remember when Sailor Moon was on at 4pm, too. And 6:30 am. I would have been in... 3rd or 4th grade, I think, when it was on in the afternoon. 6th and 7th when it was on in the morning. I was so pissed that it was on in at 6:30 because I always missed the last ten minutes, since I had to leave to catch the bus at 6:50. Ugh... I miss those days. Still love the show, even though it's corny as hell and the voices grate on my ears. If someone ever got me all the series in Japanese with English subtitles, that would be like... the EPIC PRESENT OF WIN, even after the 10 years since I first watched the show.

Also, I haven't had time to read your fanfic, but this has gotten me more interested. If I can get all the stuff done tomorrow that I need to, then I'm going to reward myself Tuesday by reading it.

And I also need to listen to "One Week" again. I can hear "That make me think the wrong thing" in my head, but I've never caught the Sailor Moon part.

One more thing... I always liked Sapphire more than Diamond. Diamond like, almost raped Serena, if I'm not mistaken. He was a total villain. But Sapphire had redeeming qualities. He was going to try to tell Diamond about the Wiseman, until the Wiseman killed him, anyway. And... what was her name... shit, I think it starts with a P... She's one of the four sisters. She was in love with him and that made it even sadder when he died. Although, to be honest, that whole family's story is a little tragic to begin with.

God, look at me geek about Sailor Moon. Guess I'm still more of a fan than I thought...

EDIT: Wiki'ed this because it bothered the hell out of me. The name of the girl who loved Sapphire was Petz.

[Suu]

Like I said, best fucking season ever.

Diamond WAS a villain, which is why I liked him more than Sapphire, but he was also really twisted by Wiseman's brainwashing and the power of the Black Crystal. Remember the earrings? Sapphire is the only one in the family that DOES NOT WEAR THEM.

When Rubeus was on the UFO and it went to self-destruct, he stepped on one of his earrings, which rendered him unable to teleport (or as my sister and I affectionately called it "zonk") out of the present and back to the future. I caught off of that shit. 

Also FYI the Ayakashi sisters: Catzi, Prisma, Avery, and Birdie...OR Kōan, Petz, Calaveras, and Berthier in Japanese.

There's a really great wiki article on them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Moon_Clan

[Valerie - Gone]

Yeah, Diamond was pretty twisted by Wiseman. I remember there was a scene where he and Sapphire are looking at Earth from Planet Nemesis and Diamond promised Sapphire that he would get to see a real flower one day. All they wanted was to live on earth. But Wiseman corrupted them. Is sad. I thought it was interesting that Sapphire didn't wear the earrings when he was the one who had invented them.

Prisma! That was it. Petz didn't really sound familiar to me. And I was remembering that there was a sister whose name started with a B, too, but I could not for the life of me remember the name.

That was the article I got the name out of. I had to fight the urge not to take a wiki journey last night through the Sailor Moon universe. You are a bad influence, Suu.   

[Suu]

2000 was a busy year for pretty much every geek in the land. With the threat of Y2K, computer geeks were working overtime, with the threat of high school graduation, I was working overtime, and Cartoon Network acquired the show that would consume me for several years, even though the length of the show in general and on a daily duration, it's not that long, movie included.

To be fair, I was able to catch a bit of Gundam Wing prior to it's North American debut by way of the fansub. A fansub is basically a bootlegged anime that was snuck into the US by ways of friends-of-friends in Japan, translated, and subtitled in English for us non-Japanese speaking folks to horde and enjoy. This was done on a VHS tape, usually, and passed around circles of friends for your viewing and probably copying pleasure.

This method is now obviously defunct thanks to the internet, peer to peer sharing, and doing whatever it takes to be sneaky to get around the ever looming presence of corporations ready to sue your ass off.

I have to admit that a good portion of the anime I still own is on fansub VHS tapes unlike my husband that has spindles of CDs and hard drives full of the stuff. I dare not share the titles though, because I don't feel like dealing with the law.

I remember having to order the fansubs through the few websites that offered them (which I guess defeated the purpose, but this is before there was a fair amount of it readily available online to simply download). I have this thing about having a physical copy of things. This includes movies, books, music, designer handbags, et cetera. And so the VHS tapes would come in via mail, and I would giggle incessantly and retire to my bedroom where I had my thirteen inch television VHS combo eagerly awaiting my evening of Otakudom.

Oh right, that word, Otaku. Personally, I was never a big fan of it, because in Japan it's not a good word! Americans have this way of taking things that are Japanese and cool sounding and turning it into a potentially cool sounding word here in the states, but it doesn't work that way. To call someone an Otaku in Japan is to call someone a basement dwelling sock fucking nerd here in North America, in the most negative, degrading tone imaginable. A friend of mine in eleventh grade told me that, and since then, I've always snarled at the word. Yeah, we're nerds, but let us not insult ourselves any farther that we absolutely have to.

So, back to Gundam Wing. I had acquired a few tapes to view from my friend Heather and her friend Monique which were remarkably dubbed in French and then subtitled in English, so I'm not entirely sure how accurate it could have been. Those of us who have experienced Backstroke of the West know what I mean. So I watched that in my living room one afternoon after school and my father plopped near me and said if it wasn't for the scary French words and poor tracking on the tapes, that the giant robots almost made the show worth it.

Two months later it was scheduled to air on television and I had no memory of what it was until I was like, "Oh hey, those characters look familiar."

Gundam Wing was probably one of the best dubs to come around pretty much ever. The actors were well cast and the script was accurate. It didn't take long for this obsession to take over since at the time all we were getting with Sailor Moon was reruns as licensers fought over the release of the next seasons. Plus, now I had boys. Boys that were about my age with big robots to overcompensate themselves with and potentially gay relationships with one another. It was fantastic.

A word on yaoi: I hate it. No, I really do. I think it's a waste of time to create fan pairings between male characters for the sake of the thrill of writing softcore (or yes, even hardcore) porn. If the series is written that way, fine, but don't go and take the Gundam Wing characters and form algebraic equations with their numerical counterpart. It's just plain dumb. No one wants to see a title of a fanfic called 3x½ (1x2)² + (5x13)π/Σ = Relena. No. Just...no.

With that little rant over, Gundam Wing actually was rather remarkable to me in the fact that the artistic style appealed to me more than the more feminine (shojo) look of Sailor Moon and Akira Toriyama's angular Dragonball designs. It was still soft, but it wasn't proportionally distorted, and anything and everything that can involved massive amounts of explosions and carnage in my opinion was worth it's salt.

Gundam Wing became the subject of much of my Japanese Animation fan art up until this day, and I was able to present Scott McNeil, who was the voice of Duo Maxwell, with a lovely drawing I did of the character at Anime Boston 2005. From what I understand, Mr. McNeil has the God of Death himself hanging in his living room. Pinnacles such as that make the children of my fandom and artistic talent often worthwhile.

Obviously more anime followed as I spiraled out of control and began my descent into college hell, but overall Sailor Moon and Gundam Wing helped shape the person I am today. I can't wait to tell my grandchildren that someday.

(11:06pm 11/4/08 6630 words.)

[Suu]

CHAPTER 3: THE SOCIETY FOR CREATIVE ANACHRONISM, AKA, THE RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL ATE MY SOUL FOR BREAKFAST

I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism unofficially when I was sixteen years old at the urging of my next door neighbors. I say 'unofficially' as you cannot be a true card carrying member until you're of the age of majority, or eighteen years old. This was fine, because it seemed like such a cool thing to get into at that age ANYWAY.

The Bay Area Renaissance Festival had been a family tradition to attend for the past few years and it was getting to the point where we wanted to actually get involved rather than go and spend copious amounts of hard earned money on baubles, soup in bread bowls, and publicly insulting my father. So I enlisted as a volunteer and nailed an acting job. Pay attention to my characters and they'll eventually develop into what has become a second life for me.

When I started working at the renaissance festival, I was fifteen, and my breakthrough role was an ambassador from the Danish court's daughter. I'm not entirely sure why Danish or how that role was developed, but it went with the theme that year and I pretty much got to walk around with my 'father' in a lovely dark burgundy velvet gown in the late Florida winter.

Now Florida winter is a peculiar thing. A lot of Americans will preach to the choir that Florida never gets cold and is forever beautiful and awesome, just don't go down there in July.

Well excuse me while I laugh.

Florida may not have seasons as the Northern reaches of the country knows, but what it does have is cold fronts, warm fronts, rain, rain, and more fucking rain. "Winter" consists of beautiful weather for those that are willing to catch pneumonia, especially in February and March. Temperatures can be a balmy eighty Fahrenheit in the morning and drop to a wet forty in four hours flat. I've seen it, and it's dreadful. Granted, the chill may not last for more than a couple of days, but when you go to school without a jacket and come home with blue lips, SOMETHING IS WRONG.

Fortunately during the time of year the renaissance festival takes place in Tampa (then Largo) it wasn't as wet, but the temperatures could still dangerously fluctuate, and artificial velvets are unforgiving. As I have learned now in my years of costuming, fair garb isn't necessarily historically accurate, and the budget for cast costumes isn't going to allow for natural fibers unfortunately. So me being stuck in a frock of dark colored polyester isn't the most comfortable choice in the Florida sun, hot or cold. I went from freezing to boiling often on the same days, but I endured it, just as true ladies of the court would have in the old country, which was unfortunately colder and wetter in March. You get my drift. It was hard work! Rewarding, but hard!

My 'father' the Danish Ambassador, we'll call him Michael, who remarkably lived next to us in St. Petersburg which would make him that neighbor I previously mentioned, would often tell me of the wonders of this thing called the SCA or Society for Creative Anachronism, and how they actually recreated really real medieval society from the fall of the Roman Empire to the mid 1600s. I became intrigued, and we would often pass the time while walking around between our acting gigs and looking pretty which him sharing stories with me and basically giving me a nerdalicious sales pitch.

It worked.

Shortly there after I was roped into my first event which turned out to be a coronation for the king and queen, which happens twice a year for each society kingdom, and then a Middle Eastern event which  I think was called Caravansarai, and I was instantly hooked.

A brief rundown on society politics: The world is broken into regions which are kingdoms, Florida is the Kingdom of Trimaris, and Rhode Island falls under the East Kingdom.  Obviously, a king and queen rule a kingdom, but to get there, the king (or even queen) have to fight in a biannual crown tournament. Winner takes the kingdom for six months.

Kingdoms are broken into smaller chapters which are baronies and shires, each governed by their landed gentry, and some after that may even be broken into yet smaller cantons. Much like real life feudality, there is a peerage of barons, baronesses, counts, countesses, and even dukes and duchesses that get their titles though service to the society.

Everyone starts as nobility, you don't have to of course, but that's what most people like. After so much service to the courts, you are awarded the title of Lord or Lady, this is given in the Award of Arms, and then as time goes on and you become more awesome, you can be accepted into the peerage as a court baron or baroness.

The county and duchy ranks are given after service as king and queen. If you've been royal at least once, you gain county ranks, if you have served as king and queen multiple times, then you can take on a duchy. It does get a bit more complicated as far as awards of service and distinction go, as well as politics and boundaries, but there's still a lot I don't know and wouldn't want to be incorrect or misleading.

My neighbors were a court baron and baroness that had been around for quite sometime and even ran a household, which is pretty much what it sounds like, a household of society members that again, can get very complicated with awards, apprenticeships and protégés, et cetera. Since I wasn't in the age of majority, I couldn't actually be taken as an official protégé to my lady of the household, but I did start to learn a thing or two about sewing by hand.

My first large scale society event was Gulf Wars. Gulf Wars is a week long event traditionally between the Kingdom of Ansteorra and Kingdom of Trimaris. It takes place at Kings Arrow Ranch in Lumberton, Mississippi, and is hosted by the Kingdom of Gleann Abhann, which was at the time I went, still part of the Kingdom of Meridies, but since the SCA is ever growing, new kingdoms have been created. Even since I've moved my former Shire of Narval Dorado joined with the Shire of the Storm and created the Barony of Marcaster so...yeah. It can be hard to keep up with.

Basically, back to Gulf Wars. Holy shit what an experience! The only reason I was able to go was that it fell on spring break from school in 1998, and considering it's a week long event, a week living medieval (to a point) might I add, it was quite a culture shock. Unfortunately, half the week we experienced a Southern March at it's finest so half of the time it rained, and the rest of the week was spent in a cold Mississippi swamp much to mine, and pretty much everyone else's, dismay. However, I didn't let the weather "dampen" my experience, and took it for what it was.

I'm not an SCA fighter, it's something I've tried and failed at miserably when I got my bell rung during a demo once. The society doesn't use live steel for armored combat for safety purposes, and instead uses essentially duct tape wrapped rattan sticks while doing their best to emulate period fighting styles. It is in fact more of a sport than a reenactment art, but that doesn't make it any more or less difficult or competitive. Armor can be made out of anything from barrel plastic to the real steel deal, which is flashy, but not entirely necessary. More or less you need something acceptable enough to absorb a blow.

There's organized and marshaled tournaments and melee tournaments, which is pretty much what most wars are, so watching a bunch of grown men and women run at each other in the middle of a muddy Mississippi swamp was a sight to behold, if not slightly comical. So I sat there on a wooden bench with most of the other children and enjoyed the entertainment. In the process I destroyed a good amount of garb, all loaned from the lady of the household to me for the event, and realized the value of making sure that cheap garb is readily available for when I began my own arsenal of clothing a few years later.

I guess there isn't really much to say about the time I spent with the Narval Dorado crowd as I never got a chance to fully participate to my full potential, but after the 1998 Gulf Wars I returned to the Renaissance Festival for the season, upgraded now to an Italian ambassador's niece in which the lord of my household was now my uncle, and my persona began to take shape.

Anna Dauzzano was a pretty brash young woman for the time, they wanted me to play her as a snotty, jealous, educated woman of the Italian Renaissance who's cultural experiences clashed with the English court. So in addition to the scripts I had to follow, I was urged to improvise as much as possible while walking about the festival grounds either with my uncle, Niccolaio Dauzzano, or on my own and yes, now with English suitors, as I had reached that tender age of seventeen and technically should have been married. I got to turn down men left and right, speak in a funny accent, and pretend to poison people using my hinged rings. It was awesome, but how historically accurate could it be for me to translate into the Society?

I vowed to make it work, it took years of research though, and I was finally able to submit a full name and device in 2005 via my current barony in the East Kingdom.

But prior to that great breakthrough, my participation overall with the Society waned as high school graduation loomed and college was ready to start. I got to go to Gulf Wars one more time with ye olde household to watch the boys play this time in a dusty dry Mississippi March and actually had to use rattan to fend off a drunken man who insisted on thinking he was going to use me as his own personal tavern wench for the evening. It was actually that event that turned me off of the SCA for a while.

I was able to attend a few more events until I departed for college, and continued for one more season at the Bay Area Renaissance Festival as Anna Dauzzano, now a live chess match fighter who was now a pirate, and still was fending off men with a stick. I loved it, but the fun couldn't last.

(11/6/08 12:03am 9227 words because part of chapter 4 is written but I don't want to post it yet.)

[Suu]

CHAPTER 4: 2000-2002 COLLEGE, CONVENTIONS, COCAINE AND COSTUMES, OH MY!

It's often assumed that college is going to be the best experience of your life. You'll get that freedom, you'll get those friends, you'll get to where you need to go in life, and all within a span of hopefully four years living in a jail-like dorm room.

...My experience wasn't quite like that.

I arrived in Tallahassee in the dead heat of August, because this is Florida, and we don't have fall. My roommate copped out last minute, so I had a single as a freshman, and my dorm was all women, since it was the official "women in science" dorm. So no half naked men were running around, just a bunch of potentially nerdy girls studying potentially nerdy subjects and wearing potentially nerdy glasses and adorable matching pajama sets late night in the dorms common areas sipping Fresca and running through the days theories and equations.

Right. That.

So I decided to join a sorority.
Alpha Gamma Delta was the name, and uh, partying was the game. This is typical for all Greek life anyway, no matter what anyone tells you. Besides, I had a head start on most of the girls anyway being that I already knew the Greek alphabet courtesy of the semester of Classical Greek I took back in high school, and I could rattle it off faster than any match could burn my finger. I was the pledge to end all pledges.

I was athletic, I could take any strenuously ridiculous exercise they threw at me with a grain of salt between Tae Kwon Do, volleyball, and my weekends with the Air Force Reserve. My grades were high, and I got to get away with a lot of shit since I traveled with the volleyball team around the country on a regular basis. They hated me, and I loved it. They couldn't kick me out, as my grades were extremely high thanks to the no-life women in science dormitory I was in and the NCAA breathing down my neck, and I did everything they asked and more.

The cross over ceremony was a night after a home game and I was ordered to the Alpha Gam house immediately, so without dressing down and not knowing what was going on, I ran over there to find everyone entirely too nice and me dressed to kill in the volleyball sense.  What a long strange trip that was. There was booze, I was underage, but there was booze, there was food, there were guys that wanted to screw me thought I gracefully turned them down, and there was finals the following day.

College is hard. Okay, maybe not for normal people, but when you decide to join a sorority on top of playing Division I NCAA volleyball for a serious business Atlantic Coastal Conference school, on top of being a weekend warrior, on top of majoring in a very difficult science, it's only natural that there would be burn out.

Because of the sorority and my athletic scholarship, I needed to keep my grades up. Florida State had stricter rules above what the NCAA required to play ball, so I was still managing to push a 3.2 grade point average while not being at home for a chunk of the year, struggling in calculus and finding myself grow increasingly homesick even though I was only six hours from home. However I had no car, so my drives home had to be coordinated between my parents and my grandfather in Alabama an hour away. Pop's house gave me a nice weekend respite when I needed it, but it still wasn't "home". He's an old man that gets up at the crack of dawn to hammer shit around the house, so I started getting up at the same time just to get my jogging in, which turned out to be pretty hard in the stark darkness of Alabama Route 53 running through the one horse town of Cottonwood at five AM.

My first exciting college spring break was spent on Eglin Air Force Base on the Panhandle not far from school, and I felt like it was terrible taunt by the Air Force to put me on Ft. Walton Beach that was pretty much a touristy paradise and require me to actually do work for the first time in service to them. Growing up in Florida, beaches seem lackluster since they're generally a routine part of daily life if you live on the coast. So even though I was used to the Gulf of Mexico in my backyard, not being able to hit the white sands even for more than a few minutes was horrific torture. Oh well, I had it coming I guess.

Summer was okay, typical of all summer vacations when you're not at school, which means dealing with the parents and siblings on a regular basis and trying to get yourself back into the swing of what could be considered "normal" life by some standard, only you're hitting that point in your mentality that you realize you really don't want to live with these freaks anymore, and you can't wait to get back to school and that freedom you have there. 

I got back in time for September 11th, 2001.

That day classes  and practices were cancelled early courtesy of a couple of planes slamming into the World Trade Center, and what I remember the most is me laying on my bed in my dorm room silent, waiting for a phone call, ANY phone call, as I couldn't get a hold of my parents who were trying to get a hold of everyone in New York, and watching my roommate (Yeah, I had a roommate this year) dancing around and singing "It's the End of the World as We Know It" by REM. I wanted to rip her throat out. Not in a snap of momentary patriotism, but because I was obvious as to who in my family was going to live or die because of this. Because I knew I had two uncles that worked in the World Trade Center and other relatives that worked for the New York Police Department and Fire Department of New York.

That moment, aside from failing grades and that empty loneliness I kept feeling despite my new found hatred of being at home, I chose to leave Florida State University and go closer to home at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Tampa. A move I still kick myself for today.

Instead of playing NCAA volleyball and maybe getting myself a shot at the national team and go onto the Olympics in Athens in a few years, and persevere through the most horrific math classes known to man and god, I wimped out and went to art school. Forsaking two huge scholarships at a massive state university and chicken shitting out to go to a private institution where for the first time I would have to take out dreaded student loans to cover my tuition balance. The Air Force wouldn't help me this time, with me turning down their funding a year prior because I had everything covered. I felt screwed and hopeless, but hey! At least I had my own bed, free food and free board, right?

So I changed my major from meteorology, in which the math was killing me, to glorified graphic design, I mean, digital art and technology with a concentration in animation, where my electives were pretty much a cake walk was an odd transition, but I couldn't bitch as I really enjoyed being able to just be an artsy fartsy dork than have to worry about volleyball, sorority crap, grades, oh, and the Air Force.

My home base was transferred from Eglin to Patrick, which was actually across the state and where I initially started anyway. Patrick Air Force Base is a pretty cool place because there's a lot of NASA shit that goes down there. All of it way too classified for me to know about, but at least we had fantastic views of the space shuttle and I was able to get in free at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral a few miles away with my white card if by some chance I had the time over the course of the three days I would be in Melbourne. And again, I didn't always have to stay in the barracks as my godparents live right there, so I was able to crash with them was I was permitted to do so. Which wasn't too often, but picking up a nice home cooked meal certainly was better than whatever the barrack mess hall felt like throwing at us weekend warriors.

It didn't last for too long though, and my unit was transferred to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, a meager 15 miles from my house which made life fantastic and gave my mother shopping privileges at the commissary for cheap sometimes edible food stuffs.

Then they decided to break the news to me, you know, considering that they sold the house a year prior and I was wondering what the plan of attack was. They were moving to Rhode Island.

Wait, what? Rhode Island? Rhode Island! Good God, WHY?! What's in Rhode Island aside from trees, clams, and it being a lot closer to the old ancestral grounds of Long Island? Actually, literally a boat ride, but still! Rhode Island? I was in shock, this would probably mean I would have to move again, and enroll in a new school again, and piss the Air Force off again, fantastic.

(9:18pm 11/10/2008 10,052 words. Sooo behind...must keep going...gaaaaaah.)

[Suu]

Come to find out that my parents had been planning this for a while. Apparently they decided that they hated Florida and wanted to go back up north after fourteen years of Floridian living. Hell, my sister was born in St. Petersburg, not Islip like my brother and I, and after being there for the better part of our lives at the moment, it was hard for us to comprehend going back to a place where jackets were required for half of the year if not longer when layered under other clothing for three months of this season called winter. But the leaves changed, that was a cool thing.

After much discussion, it was decided that I would stay in Florida and continue my education and service in the Air Force, since I was due to graduate in just 2 years, and my six year reserves term was up in 2003 anyway, just a year and a half away, so there was really no reason why I would have to go through the red tape of another school and another relocation and deal with the headaches. It would be worked out, and it would be awesome because, as we've learned in the previous few chapters, every thing looks good on paper, and I'm an incredibly optimistic person.

And so we return to the beginning of Chapter One, and this becomes full circle:

"What do you mean, there's conventions for this...stuff?" I pointed at the doodle in my sketchbook as this girl in my graphic design 101 class looked on.

"Oh yeah, I'm going to Otakon this year." She replied.

"What is this...Otakon you speak of?" I was intrigued.

She went on ad nauseam about the magic of Japanese Animation Conventions, people in costume, people selling art. People, lots of people from all over converging in the Baltimore Convention Center for 3 days out of the year in a mass of total chaotic doom.

"I...must see this."

Now, I was aware of conventions for things like, work and Star Trek, and this thing that they did for Star Wars Episode I called "Star Wars Celebration" in Indianapolis which I couldn't attend because my parents wouldn't let me. Stupid parents. But this...JAPANESE ANIMATION. How fucking cool is this?

We attended Jacon that year, a convention in Orlando, for one day, which turned out to be pretty cool and addicting in our really, really shitty Weiss Kreuz costumes made from clothing we picked up at second hand stores and the mall that seemed to match what we were supposed to be wearing. Except for the pool mask I wore instead of goggles...No really, that was pretty fucking dumb of me, and pretty terrible to think that my costuming career had such humble and rather ghetto roots.

I remember this Jacon rather clearly, mostly because it was my first true convention experience even though it was only for a day, but in the span of that day, I made what felt like two hundred new friends, watched new anime (which is a faux pas, really, it's now known that people don't go to anime conventions to actually watch anime), watching anime music videos, sat through the costume contest, bought stuff in the dealer's room, and most notably, got locked out the car as we attempted to leave.  So by the time I got home to St. Petersburg from Orlando, it was close to 2 am and I initially assumed I would be home around 6pm. Oops. Live and learn.

I had a new best friend, and life couldn't get better for the moment. Rain and I shared a good amount of likes and dislikes, and if irony couldn't speak any louder, she was from Rhode Island, a town called Smithfield, and her boyfriend who had just recently moved down to be with her, Steve, was from Coventry, so they turned out to be relatively useful to my parents in their relocation.

The next convention experience was Anime Festival Orlando (there's a pattern to conventions in Florida, 99.9% of them are in Orlando, fuckers.) otherwise known as AFO or even Gay-FO. This time we were smart and got a room since we were attending for Saturday and Sunday, and Steve and my sister came along with us. I got to compete in my first costume contest doing Angel Sanctuary costumes, of all things. I was Alexiel in an amalgamation of crinkled, hand sewn (by my mother) material, felt, and my Renaissance festival bodice, my sister was Rosiel, Rain was the Mad Hatter, and our friend Brad, one of the two hundred I met at Jacon, was our Lucifer. It was ghetto, but it was hysterical. I still have it on tape somewhere, and I wish I could get it online. Unfortunately we went over time on stage and were disqualified.

We decided then that Rain and Steve would move to St. Petersburg and take over the lease at my parents' apartment instead of me moving to Tampa in an apartment that I could pretty much walk to and from school from, which makes little sense in my opinion now that I look back on it, and I think it had something to do with my part time job I had at Shell's Seafood Restaurant which wasn't that far away, and I was too lazy to attempt to get a new job in Tampa. Dumb mistake one.

Then more conventions! September was a busy month for me that year, a busy month spent in Atlanta as it were, since I attended Dragon Con, the most insanely large insane convention of insanity and insane stuff Labor Day weekend, and then Anime Weekend Atlanta a few weeks following that. Dragon Con was a total blur for me, and I still don't remember it that much.

Why? Because there was a shit load of underage drinking, smoking, and speed taking to get as much as possible out of this four day convention of awesome. That's what.

For the record, prior to this, I had only drunk occasionally. I didn't consider myself a total stoner, though my parents smoked, and I was surrounded by it a lot. It wasn't my first time, but I consider Dragon Con being that turning point in my life, despite my athleticism and service in the Air Force (Want to detox now? Ask me how!) in which drugs started to play a pivotal role.  Unfortunately I wish I hadn't fallen into the speed trap. Alcohol and marijuana, yeah okay, not as severe as they are seriously lead to be when in moderation and dare I say supervised. I was nineteen, obviously if I got caught drinking that wouldn't be a GOOD thing, so I really watched myself, and smoking, well, whatever, it's not like I seriously figured I would get into it that heavily. Speed on the other hand would come back to bite me in the ass.

Oh, one thing I do remember about Dragon Con was in all seriousness the amount of fat women in corsets. There I said it. Moving along...

Anime Weekend Atlanta seemed incredibly subdued compared to Dragon Con, and for my sanity it was probably a good thing. However, this was the first convention I was able to participate in the artist alley with nothing but a sketch book, for people to flip through and another one for me to draw stuff for them. I did okay considering, I remember selling a few key pieces in the art show, but now it's just such a normal part of my convention ritual that I document everything, so it's difficult for me to reflect on such days gone by.

That was another weekend I didn't do much sleeping, only because I was so involved in my costume wearing, art selling, and the like. Though no speed was really involved, I do remember not eating a lot since a member of my family managed to steal the money I had saved up to go. Luckily I had a friend from the internet comp me into the convention or I would have been totally screwed in the long run. My art sales were enough to get me Burger King and Pocky, which is a Japanese snack, at least twice during the three days we were in Atlanta.

After the September conventions I was able to attend a few Halloween events, remarkably also in Orlando and on the same weekend, so that was another weekend away from home for the sake of Japanese Animation and costumes, but I also got my first costume shoot with Maboroshi of Risingsun.net. This is of course before he started capitalizing off of it and charging cosplayers for his pictures. How Christian of him.

Everything did seem to be falling into plan otherwise, so that year I had quite possibly the worst Christmas ever knowing that my parents were leaving in two days for a state thirteen hundred miles away from where we currently were. We had no Christmas tree, we had no party, the only boxes that were around were the household goods that would be packed into the truck shortly as my gifts were just cash to take care of rent and some incidental funds I would need. Looking back at it now I really just want to cry, because it was a really horrible experience, and it's pretty disheartening to think that I had to go through the opposite of what most kids my age would do. Instead of me going away to school or the military, it was my parents leaving me to school and the military.

I cried a lot the day they left, at least in the morning when they departed, probably because they cried and it caused a chain reaction. They left with me an empty apartment except my bedroom, all of the house plants, some of the kitchen stuff, and the cat. Yes, I got to keep the cat, Triple, who was pretty much my child since I got him for my eleventh birthday. So I had some companionship for the few hours until Steve would arrive and we would go furniture shopping to fill said empty apartment.

Fortunately I had almost a month of school off that year for Christmas break, which made it easier to get my shit together, so I remember relatively clearly that the first day my parents were gone we acquired a large sectional couch.

Oh, I should mention that before the official move-in was scheduled, Rain and Steve had broken up. Yes, you can see where this is going really fast, and it did, in fact, go downhill really amazingly fast in a horrific, frighteningly, relatively expected way.

However, we all agreed that we needed to make this work and do what we could to keep things running smoothly. We were all friends, this could work, this could be great, and life would go on.

Of course within a month after my parents moved, a kid in Tampa decided it would be a good idea to go terrorist on the Bank of America tower downtown. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Bank of America, but if slamming planes into buildings was going to become a fad, I'd rather not live in a city where it was going to happen, personally. So, naturally, as soon as it hit national news, my mother was fast to call me at work that night telling me I had to pack my bags and move to Rhode Island immediately.

It's normal for a mother to over react I guess, but what I neglected to say earlier on in this shit fest of an autobiography is that my mother had already had a run-in with a suspected 9/11 terrorist in the very restaurant I was working in as he attended the flight school in Port Charlotte, and was en route to Tampa International Airport to get to Boston for the, well, you know, I don't need to get entirely descriptive in what happened later on as well all know what flew out of Boston and hit what soon after. Long story short, the FBI got involved and that just added to the family stress that brought me home from Florida State earlier in the year.

However I endured, Tampa was safe from terrorists as far as we knew because the kid was just a teenager who was very emo and taking flight lessons, which is probably not the best combination, but I'm sure his parents won't make that mistake again.

Winter quarter this year was pretty tricky for me, since I decided to go ahead and jump into an internship with Cross-Gen Comics based out of Clearwater. They are now defunct, unfortunately, as their titles and art were actually quite awesome. My job there, of course unpaid, turned out to be a coffee gopher, a scapegoat for a colorist who hated me for doing a better job than her, and just another name to add to a resume in the end. In other words, nothing terribly fancy, which was unfortunate, because I think I could have really learned a lot there.

The convention season started up again with FITCon, named for the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, which was a small, albeit tiny convention where I did badly done Yami no Matsuei (Descendents of Darkness) cosplay if I remember correctly, and then went into the throws of full swing with MegaCon in, amazingly, Orlando in February.

MegaCon is more of a show than it is convention, with a massive dealer's floor full of comic books, bootleg movies, bootleg anime, and rednecks. It's a good amount of fun overall, just very tiring. This is also where I found the 501st Legion for the first time, because there were a lot of stormtroopers there, and I decided I wanted to join them. Too bad it would take me years to get there.

MegaCon for me that year had more Angel Sanctuary cosplay, this time turning my prom dress into a costume for Astarte, one of the Satans, and then Jem, yes, Jem costuming on Sunday with Stormer from the Misfits. Oh, and then resulted in an epic case of strep throat, which was my first actual convention epidemic experience.


(11:36pm 11/10/2008 12,706 words. Yes, I vomited 3486 words today. I'm done for now. Also, I really do apologize that this seemed to turn into a rant about my life. I was hoping for it to take a more comical entertaining approach that I could have possibly converted to the 3rd person, but that didn't happen. Sorry to those who get stuck reading this garbage. However, it's inspiring me to do a one-woman stage act.)

[Valerie - Gone]

I like reading this, Suu. I don't mind that it's a rant about your life. It's autobiographical, so that's the point, isn't it?

I love finding out that you cosplayed Angel Sanctuary. That's one of my favorite mangas. I would be interested in seeing that tape someday.

[Suu]

I like reading this, Suu. I don't mind that it's a rant about your life. It's autobiographical, so that's the point, isn't it?

I love finding out that you cosplayed Angel Sanctuary. That's one of my favorite mangas. I would be interested in seeing that tape someday.

Just imagine this:

Me: I AM ALEXIEL!
Sister: And I AM ROSIEL!
Together: WONDER TWIN POWERS! ACTIVATE!

[Suu]

Another thing I was able to participate in that year was Maboroshi's regular monthly photoshoots, which was a lot of fun and resulted in me having an arsenal of semi-pro modeling shots on the internet that always turn up when I least expect them. Over the span of five months I had my pictures taken in Downtown Orlando (there's that fucking city again), Seminole (outside of St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park), St. Augustine, Downtown St. Petersburg, North Miami Beach and Boca Raton.

I can't say that I learned to deal with anything more than drama on these excursions, and as you will learn coming up in the next segment of my little story, things were about to take a tumble for the worst.



CHAPTER 5:  NORTHWARD BOUND: THE DRAMA LLAMA SHITS ON MY LIFE

Remember how I said that my roommates had broken up before they moved in with me? Yep.

At first things were okay. We got furniture, we got our separate rooms, everyone loved the cat, and we stocked the kitchen with everything healthy college students need like ramen, hot pockets, the fixings to make grilled cheese and an extra large pizza from the local place that would feed us for about a week or so. What could go wrong?

Then you take into account I don't own a car anymore, and Rain was using Steve's car, who had the motorcycle which wasn't useful when it rained (And when it Rains it pours! Bad pun, I know) and of course, we all had varied schedules. But that's okay, we'll work it out, right?

Rain had a hard time getting employed. Shit happens. At first she had a retail job near home, but then got fired or quit or something, I can't exactly remember, and then was hired by Busch Gardens, which was, unfortunately, not that close. In fact it was about twenty or so miles away from home, even past school, which would make things a tad difficult for rides, and yeah, I was no peach myself.

I only worked maybe 3 days a week at Shell's, and once my Cross-Gen internship was up, I picked up two more, one with IATSE, or the union formally known as International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada, and then a web design internship with the company that does all of Major League Baseball's websites and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers based in Downtown Tampa. I was going to be fucking busy.

On top of that, I decided, that since Episode II was going to be released this year, to get heavily back in to Star Wars like I did in 1999 when Episode I came out and then relaxed for two years, this time wasn't the case, this time I was manic about it. There was an online chat based role playing game that I had been in and out of for a little while called Expansion of the Force, and I decided to let myself get pretty immersed into it this go around. But immersed I meant that whenever I had free time I would find myself on my computer trying to get a game or six in before I forced myself to bed at some sort of ungodly hour of the morning, typically when Steve would be waking up to go to work on the other side of Tampa Bay in an area called Sun City Center, or simply, 6am.

In short, my typical day during my final quarter of school looked something like this:

-Get up at 7am, go to school until noon.
-From Noonish or 1pm work at web design internship until 4pm or no longer needed or...
-From there go to IATSE site for a concert until god knows when or
- Go to work at Shells until 10pm
- Come home and role play until some unholy hour
- Sleep for two hours
- Get up and do it all over again.

OR

-   Spending one weekend a month over at the Air Force Base or
-   Working at a nightclub in Ybor City for extra cash on either Friday or Saturday night

And then people wondered why I turned to drugs.


(12:01AM 11/13/2008 13,406 words. BAWWWWWWWWWW this fucking sucks. Less beer, more writing.)