grrgoyl

As promised, Halloween 2009.

Despite having a few weeks' notice this year (unusual for the crowd we hang with), I was drawing a blank on a costume. Tery tossed out a few suggestions, all of which I forget now (except I know one was Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. How was I supposed to pull that off short of having a radiation accident myself and learning how to rearrange atoms?) Then she mentioned Rorschach from Watchmen, which I was just about to dismiss when after a little thought it occurred to me how easy (most of) it would be.

Sure, they make a manufactured costume, but the mask looks pretty ridiculous and it's pretty pricey for something I wasn't even sure would fit me (my noggin is as oversized as my feet):



Trench coat from Goodwill (they had an entire rack of them): $12.
Fedora from eBay, cheap costume quality, with shipping (could have probably found cheaper if hat sizes weren't so hard to gauge online): $18.
Stocking for mask: $3.
Men's dress pants and shoes: Free (already in my closet).

That's it. Here's one pic of the result (more under the cut later):



The mask obviously posed the biggest challenge. I scoured the internet, where I found plenty of fan forums discussing making your own. Unfortunately most of them were obsessed with having moving ink blots "like in the movie!" (guess what, morons -- in the movie his eyes are actually completely exposed and the blots are CGI'ed on later) This could apparently be achieved with the use of thermal paint that shifts when you breathe on it, but it involved a complicated process of more than one layer that I might not be able to breathe in and I'm sure would come at a higher price than I was willing to pay considering I expected no one to even recognize me.

That included a site I found, Rorschachmask.com, where a guy sells his own that look nice, but not $49.99 worth of nice.

So I got a few pairs of tights and stockings to experiment with. At Target the only ones that came in white were little girls sizes, which were very difficult to see through. My grocery store had "ivory" nylons that were more promising. I played around a lot with making the tiniest possible pinholes for my eyes, until I just tried no holes for the heck of it and discovered I could see fine. In fact, the darker the room, the better I could see.

Then the blots. Everyone online suggested using a Sharpie, which would have taken a month to color in all the shapes and would have resulted in very clean edges. In a stroke of genius, I found in the back of our closet some "scuff remover" for shoes, essentially liquid shoe polish. When I blotted that onto the stocking, not only did it cover large areas quickly but came out nicely irregular and automatically created a "bleeding" effect on the edges of the pattern. Again on the fan forums someone had helpfully posted a sample pattern that I just printed out, stuck under the stocking as a template, and dabbed in. VOILA.

I was ridiculously pleased with the result after so little effort. Even if no one would recognize me.



( ::More pics and party stories here:: )

Tabby came over to hang out last night, something she hasn't done since last July 4th. This was due to a recent discussion I had with Tabby's co-worker and our mutual friend, who believed Tabby needed a stable influence in her life again, and somehow I was the only one who could fill that role. I agreed with her on that point, however Tery and I both took exception to her misguided feeling that I could also provide someone "non-judgmental" in this capacity as well. I will be the first (and Tery is the second) to admit that I am one of the most judgmental people on the planet (well, someone has to be).

So after two weeks of hesitant planning Tabby came over last night, ostensibly for a South Park marathon, but when she realized from the plot synopses on the DVD case that none of the episodes featured her beloved Towelly, the pot-smoking towel, she quickly lost interest after only two eps (I did catch a funny reference that might be missed by those not lucky enough to live in the Denver area....in "The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000," someone gives their address as "off Arapahoe Road on Emporia Street," directions that have been permanently hammered into the heads of Coloradans by countless Shane jewelry company radio commercials. Hee!) But before we could do anything, naturally we had to go to the liquor store, in the time-honored traditions of Tabby's visits, where I got to wear my sexy new creepers, seen here:



True, they make me almost two inches taller, and Tery delights in comparing me to Herman Munster, but what does she know about cutting edge fashion? Nothing, I tell you.

Tery got home and the drinking began in earnest (for them). I am not a drinker. They love to joke that all it takes is a few wine coolers to get me dancing on the table, which is a gross exaggeration...all it takes is a few wine coolers to get me sleepy and passed out. I am a cheap date, true. And Tabby is about the only person on the planet who can coerce me into drinking. I partook of their "Jolly Rancher shots" (watermelon Smirnoff and Red Bull) which were grotesque. I fared slightly better with her "root beer floats" (A&W and vanilla Smirnoff) but still only had two. Pleasantly buzzed and rendered motionless, I lay there and watched their antics for amusement.

I like Tery when she is drunk-but-not-too-drunk. For some reason she is filled with admiration and love for me and extols my virtues to anyone who will listen. She told Tabby I was the most stable person she knew, and the most real, and that I wouldn't let her get away with anything at all and she needed that from me. I told her I was going to remind her of this conversation the next time we were fighting because I wouldn't let her get away with anything. And who can get tired of hearing someone say that you are the person they wish they could be?

Tabby, however, goes through very specific and predictable stages when drunk, only one of which is endearing. She starts out mellow, sweet, flirty, deeply appreciative of her drinking companions' friendship, which isn't so bad. Then she progresses to nostalgic, weepy and heartbroken over her latest disastrous breakup (Stacey, dumped by Tabby after being discovered in flagrante delicto with a man, not only took back the Sarah McLachlan birthday tickets she had given Tabby, but later actually called and offered to sell them back to her. What a class act). This phase's arrival was hastened by Tery showing home video of a recent cabin getaway everyone went on but me. Even the extremely limited footage of Tabby and Stacey was enough to send her into the bathroom with the phone for a very ill-advised but dramatic conversation with the white trash, ho-bag psychopath. She started to tell us the details but went off on so many of her own tangents that she forgot the point of her original story. Drunk people are so entertaining!

Then, slowly and insidiously, she moves on to belligerent, uncontrollable and very, very loud. Obviously this is the stage I dislike the most. She hates being told what to do even when sober, and when drunk she is 20 times worse. She thinks we are excessively considerate (which I honestly think is not even possible nowadays) because we won't let her run around the place, shout with the windows open, or carry on her heated, frenzied, angst-filled phone conversations with her ex on our balcony at 11:30 p.m. To make matters worse, being raised on blaring MTV her whole life, tragically she is now half-deaf at age 21 and needs the TV at movie theater decibels to watch anything, regardless of the time of night. She does these things in her rented apartment without fear of consequences. She just doesn't get that in a covenant-controlled condo complex we could get fined for such behavior if someone complained.

But before we deteriorated to this phase, there was actually good fun to be had. ( ::unrestrained debauchery behind the cut:: )

Tabby finally passed out in my bed, much to Alsatia's displeasure. Alsatia loves our bed a lot. This should give you some idea how much:



So she was none too pleased to have a drunken Tabby taking up way more space in it than is fair for her small size. Nor was I, as I spent most of the night sleeping with her crooked elbow jammed into my neck as I clung to the 6 square inches of space she had left me. At least she didn't throw up, so I can see that bright side of things. I wish I had a picture of it, but come morning I emerged from the bedroom to see Alsatia curled up in the loft (where she never, ever sleeps at night if I am in bed), facing the living room to make sure I saw her sour, glowering disapproval first thing.

When Tabby left she said we should go back to doing this sort of thing more often. Boy, I can't wait!

-=Lainey=-

I have had Xena on the brain a lot lately, beginning with a couple of weekends ago when Tabby was over. She hadn't been online in months, after learning the hard way how meeting someone in person that you got on with famously online could be quite disastrous; the meeting ultimately resulted in her losing her computer, and most of her favorite clothes and CDs in a breakup spectacularly out of proportion to the amount of time she had known the girl (who on top of being emotionally unbalanced was apparently a very accomplished thief).

But that is neither here nor there.

After having a few drinks she decided it might be fun to get on my computer and cruise some AOL chatrooms. As I have stated earlier, I was once a huge fan of the chatrooms, or at least one in particular, the member-created "Fearsome Females" based loosely on a mutual admiration of "Xena: Warrior Princess" though we talked about far more than that. I have since tried to return to the rooms but I can't figure out if the problem lies in my lack of ability to focus adequately to start a meaningful conversation with anyone or if there really isn't anyone hanging out in chatrooms WORTH having a conversation with anymore. They are either hopelessly "clique-y" or strangely silent, which means the occupants are either furiously IMing each other privately or have moved on to other pursuits and forgotten they left their virtual alter-ego in the room. The most stimulating room I have been to lately was linked from an AOL article about gay marriage and boy was it a mistake to wander in THERE. Basically a bunch of homophobic idiots who talked all in caps to drown out any kind of rational dialogue on the topic ("Why is it people with closed minds always have their mouths open?" I love that bumper sticker.) After getting sufficiently riled to offer some comments of my own that were mostly completely ignored in the shouting match, I closed the window for the sake of my escalating blood pressure. Because there are some topics that you simply cannot change someone's mind about in the context of a chatroom.

But back to Tabby and her search for some hot online lesbian action. The first few rooms we found were hella lame, one of which was inhabited by no one over the age of 15. Tery and I jokingly tried to give her some tips on picking up younger girls (remember Tabby is 20 and Tery and I are both over 30 (but also remember Tabby seduced me)) but it really was quite hopeless and the only meeting ground they could conjure was the infamous VMA Madonna kiss. So we moved on to some member-created rooms. This was even worse for Tabby since they mostly contained the over-30 crowd. (The inference we can make is the 20-something lesbians are probably out in actual bars meeting each other.) Naturally Tabby was logged on under my name and she was horrified when one intelligent and interesting woman noticed the Xena reference in my profile and started discussing the show with her. Tabby is quite the conundrum in that she is totally into lesbians and women, she only reads lesbian erotica, she only wants to watch movies with lesbians in them, etc. There is nothing wrong with this apart from the fact that the material is somewhat limited and she is bound to run out of entertainment quickly, especially at the rapacious rate she consumes it. So I can't understand her opposition to Xena, probably the biggest lesbian icon to come out since Martina. I even brought over some of the best episodes for her to watch that I felt required the least familiarity with the show to enjoy, but she would have none of it. So it went something like this at the computer:

AzurePhase: So, Grr, you like Xena? What is your favorite episode?
Tabby at the computer: Nooooooooooooooo.......I don't WANT to talk about Xena!!!!!!!!!
Elaine behind her: :::::laughing my ass off:::::

I coached her through some answers but she lost interest very quickly and rudely fled the room in mid-conversation with poor Azure. I reminded her she was using my name and I had better not get an inbox full of pissed-off emails tomorrow from these people.

So here I am feeling all nostalgic for Xena again, making this dream not very hard to interpret at all:

I dreamed I had somewhere found a long-lost, never aired episode of Xena called "The Plinth." I even know exactly where the title came from. I had just finished "The Order of the Phoenix," where Ms. Rowling uses this word to describe the base of the stone arch with the curtain into which Sirius disappears. I remember thinking what an odd word it was at the time. Here it was again in my dream, except in the Xena episode "plinth" meant a supernaturally attractive being with every ideal physical trait. Somewhere in the middle of it I was suddenly IN the episode and of course I was Xena (herself an almost supernaturally attractive being). The Plinth appeared and he/she was naked and dazzingly beautiful. I say he/she because s/he was very tall, lean and wiry with the overall body shape of a man, with shoulder-length soft blond hair and piercing blue eyes; except s/he had small, perfectly formed breasts and asexual but still vaguely feminine genitalia, like a store mannequin. After appearing in a blaze of heavenly light (s/he may or may not have had angel wings) s/he lay down on a dais and beckoned me to join him/her (because I was Xena, after all.) I don't remember much of what followed, but I am sure it was positively lovely......


Speaking of Plinths, here are some drool-worthy pics of Hugh Jackman (the only other man besides Alan who makes me weak in the knees) from this month's Advocate because again I am just too damn lazy to find a community to post them to:






-=Lainey=-