Well, there went two days that I forgot to post anything. I wish I had a better excuse than "by the time I was done with the day I just wanted to go to bed" but that's basically it. I had two separate sets of guests come over for the past few days and no matter how pleasant the company is, after they are gone I just feel like going to bed.
Today I went with a friend to a horror convention. This was my second attempt at going to a convention of some sort and the last time I went to one I was not terribly impressed. To this day I am not certain if I was just not in the right frame of mind or if I went at a bad time or what, but I walked away from the experience feeling unsatisfied. This time I went to a different convention and I have to say this one was much more enjoyable. Oddly enough I'm not even really a horror movie buff. It may help, but I would say that you don't have to really love horror movies to attend one of these. In fact, I think it is far more important to just have a wry sense of humor. It was positively a celebration of all that is campy.
From the booths, to the posters, to even the movies they were showing it all showed what I love most about Halloween. Halloween is the one day of the year when we don't have to pretend to be nicer than we really are and can let the dark side of humanity, the side we try to repress the other 364 days, free reign to run wild. And what do we do when we do allow this dark side to come out? We mock it. As Thomas More noted in the Screwtape Letters, the devil cannot abide being mocked (yes, I know, most people think it was C.S. Lewis who said that but apparently More said it first). So, yes, I had a great time as I watched people peddling fake blood and DVDs filled with nothing but movie trailers. Then, for me a highlight of the trip, was finding a booth from T Shirt Bordello. That was fun.
What's the big deal about a shirt, you may ask? Well, that's a tough one to answer. A friend of mine once asked why I like weird or funny shirts and I tried to explain it was like giving people fair warning about who I am. Whether most people realize it or not, everything from clothing choices to the way people style their hair send out little cues to the world as to what sort of person they are. Small things like a woman's choice of earrings or the cut of a jacket can signal the world how a person wishes to be viewed by others. Me? I like announcing to the world that I have an odd sense of humor in big bold letters. It is advertising how I would prefer people to approach me. Relaxed, informal, and ready to share any odd observations they have made. T-shirts are cheap and they work almost as well as a tattoo in alerting the world who you are.
Ever since I started wearing oddball shirts with weird jokes on them I have found that, depending on the shirt, I have had lots of enjoyable conversations with total strangers. At amusement parks I've had ride operators, who were obviously bored by the very repetitive nature of their job and with sitting out in the hot sun, suddenly burst out laughing as they saw a joke that they appreciated fly by. People have stopped me in stores, museums, and other places to ask me where I found these shirts and where they could get one as well. People from all walks of life who get the jokes and find themselves laughing treat the shirt like an icebreaker and will start talking. For those experiences alone the cost of a t-shirt is worth what you paid for it many times over. The guy at the booth for T-Shirt Bordello was a great guy who didn't mind talking to a random stranger and even showed me a design for an upcoming shirt that will appeal to the Trekkie geek in all Sci-Fi nerds and discussed some others they have coming up. Too many choices, people. Too many choices.
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