I’m the king of ding-a-lings.

December 23, 2013 4 Comments read Everything is Terrible, Uncategorized

When I was a kid, you could have asked me what I wanted for Christmas at any time during the year and I would have been able to provide you with an exacting list with annotations and illustrations, along with more information than you ever cared to know about why this new My Little Pony was superior in every way to the bin of My Little Ponies already in my closet: “This one changes color in the sun and smells like strawberries, duh!” I was ALWAYS ready to tell anyone at any time what would have made me happiest in the moment, even if the desire was impractical or fleeting. (Seriously, a unicycle? I was barely able to master two wheels and I wanted to cut that number in half?). As an adult, I dread the question.

It’s not that I don’t want things; if anything else, moving house recently taught me that I maybe like things a little too much. But I’ll generally buy the things I really want/need for myself unless they’re wildly expensive/impractical, which means I certainly couldn’t ask others for them. This doesn’t make buying a gift for me a Herculean task, however–I have a wide variety of interests, I’m thrilled by the unexpected and ridiculous, and, like I said before, I like stuff. I just don’t want to give an exacting list of things that I might like to anyone: for me, the biggest component of a gift is being seen by the giver, knowing that they put some thought and effort into choosing something just for me. Anyone can buy off of a list.

Lately, if I see something that I might like or need at some point down the line, I’ve been adding it to my amazon wishlist. Sometimes I’ll revisit the list and order something, most often I revisit the list, say “What was I thinking?” and delete ten things. It’s full of “miracle” hair products, stuff that I might need for future costumes, and various doodads that I’ll read about and want to consider trying later.

This year, I finished with Jason’s Christmas shopping early–almost before Thanksgiving. Jason, in turn, noted that he needed to get cracking, and a few days later, a bunch of packages arrived from Amazon. “I hope he hasn’t been buying stuff from my wishlist” I thought. A few days later, a package from Alpha Chemicals arrived that left no doubt in my mind: Jason was buying all of my Christmas presents from the aforementioned “I’m not sure I actually want, need, or could ever use this” list.

I had two choices: Say something and ruin Christmas, or say nothing and ruin Christmas. As I work from home and don’t get a lot of human interaction during the day, not talking about it proved to be too difficult, so I went ahead and ruined Christmas the bigmouth way. After a solid argument about why I was being intentionally difficult in not giving a list, and misleading in that I maintained a list full of things I didn’t actually want, we came to a mutual understanding about why surprises are important to me and what makes Christmas fun.

Last night, Jason went to wrap some gifts and came upstairs with an ornament of King Moonracer and told me he was going to make a diorama of “the island of unwanted christmas gifts” but thought it might be too mean. I probably deserve it, so I decided to run with it.

We’re on the island of misfit gifts

Here, we don’t want to stay

We want to travel with Santa Claus

In his magic sleigh

A packful of toys means a sackful of joys

If the Christmas spirit Mellzah didn’t destroy

When Christmas Day is here

The most wonderful day of the year!

A bottle of emu oil is here to say

“Wake up, I’ll help make your stretch marks go away!”

When Christmas Day is here

The most wonderful day of the year!

Spiral vegetable cutter

Might as well be in the gutter

It won’t set the heart aflutter

It just says “Hey, make me some dinner!”

A new toy for Jason, toothpaste for you

The kind that even does some whitening, too.

When Christmas Day is here

The most wonderful day of the year.

“How would you like to be two pounds of aluminum powder?”

“Or a TCA chemical peel that may or may not remove tattoos?”

“Or faux rust finish?”

“We’re all misfits!”

If we’re on the island of unwanted gifts

We’ll miss all the fun when Mellzah throws a fit

When Christmas day is here

The most wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful day of the year!

“Behold the horrors of the slanty shanty! See the twisted creatures that dwell within!”

December 19, 2013 2 Comments read Everything is Terrible, Games

This year at PAX, to deal with their PR problem, they’re adding a “Diversity Lounge”–a safe space where congoers who feel marginalized can go and congregate with the likeminded to talk about issues of diversity within gaming; a con within a con.

Diversity doesn’t just exist in a bubble, though. The solution for people feeling unsafe at the convention can’t be the removal of the people who feel threatened, that’s just further segregating and alienating the marginalized. Marginalized congoers don’t only want to talk about the lack of diversity in the industry, they want to experience the whole con. That’s the whole reason they decided to attend a gaming show like PAX in the first place. They want to walk the floor, play the games, and attend panels like everyone else. All they’re asking is to attend panels without one of the con heads saying he regrets pulling merchandise that poked fun at rape victims. They’re asking that the con management think twice before allowing panels that encourage the behavior of the lowest common denominator. You can’t create one small safe space and call the job done. You need to target the root of the problem to make the con safe and enjoyable for everyone. Granted, you’ll never be able to prevent all negative instances from occurring, like that one time I ran into a former classmate on the show floor who back in the day was quite vocal about his notion that he felt I owed him a blowjob for being female and in his vicinity, but you can at least TRY to implement working safe space policies that apply to the entire convention.

Unless the Diversity Lounge serves drinks. Then I’m all in.

With notes of bergamont, pepper, and self-doubt.

December 10, 2013 6 Comments read Everything is Terrible

If the last year and a half of my life were a perfume, it would be “Obsession.” Jason and I got engaged in March 2012 when he asked me to slap on a ring, and I said yes. Every moment after that was forfeit to the wedding demon.

I didn’t intend to become so obsessed. I wanted to be a cool bride, one of those women who just flutter a slim, perfectly-manicured hand in the general direction of wedding vendors and show up on the day of, and everything is magical perfection. Nearly everything in the universe conspired to prevent this from happening. In fact, I’m starting to believe that sort of wedding ease is a myth, right up there with the chupacabra and perfect credit scores. For me, getting married was like every wedding cliche that ever existed, thrown at me in one giant shitstorm I was neither equipped to handle nor afford.

It began on the day we got engaged. Well-intentioned friends and family began to ask immediately when the big day is, where it is, and where we’ll be honeymooning. These same friends helpfully let me know that their cousin got married in the summer and everyone spent the entire wedding sweating and wishing they were dead, or that the tropical destination we favored is “lovely, I suppose, if you enjoy the thought of having your passport stolen by a rabid monkey.” There is always an anecdote, and that anecdote is always negative. Rather than think negatively of these helpful people, I came to believe that every decision I’ve ever made was wrong.

One day, a bridal magazine just started showing up in our mailbox out of the blue. It made it clear that I was, in fact, doing everything wrong, not spending enough money, and that I will look like a bloated, gaseous hellbeast in a wedding dress unless I immediately lost half my bodyweight and booked an appointment with the country’s best plastic surgeon besides, and furthermore, if I failed to do these things, I would be ruining the best day of my life. I bought into all of this, because I didn’t have any perspective. The truth is, these magazines are written by the same people who write the ladies’ interest magazines with 50 NEW AMAZING SEX TIPS every month, involving blindfolding your partner and snapping his balls with a rubberband while guzzling bbq sauce. They are written from the perspective that you somehow managed to fool a man into marrying you with your secret applications of no-makeup makeup an hour before he wakes up and by exclusively pooping at work, and now you need to dazzle him with a perfect wedding to convince him to seal the deal or you’ll never have another chance at happiness because we all know what a wretched troll you truly are.

I knew the whole thing was going pear-shaped when I had a mini meltdown over the color scheme. Everything I’d already purchased or made was wrong or cheap-looking or bad, and it all had to go. Immediately. Hysterics ensued. Jason may or may not have kept himself awake at night, fretting that he’d agreed to commit himself to a person who would be better off being committed to an asylum.

Then we bought a house.

You’d think that buying a house would be a good distraction from the wedding planning, something to ground me and help me focus on the bigger picture, but instead it made me freak out more: about money, about moving, about whether the house would look magazine-perfect for all of the family members that have never visited before and may never visit again, to justify what I’ve been doing with myself for the last decade I’ve been living here, to prove that I’m a capable adult with decent taste who can handle both running a household and planning an event at the same time. It certainly didn’t help that the day after we closed and received our keys, Jason turned to me and said, “I think we’ve made a mistake. We could have gotten a better house for the money we spent, it looks so old and outdated and I’ve been checking into how soon we can sell.”

If I looked back of the last year and a half and tried to pinpoint the moment that I became certifiable, I’d say that was likely it. The next week became a whirlwind of patching, painting, and worrying that we’d just dropped a fortune on a stinking bog of a house that would eventually tear everything apart, including our relationship and possibly the fabric of space-time. I couldn’t sleep. I cried and painted and cried. I bit my nails to ragged, bloody stumps. I ate compulsively. And when I wasn’t working on house stuff, gnawing on my hands, or stuffing my face, I was thinking about the wedding.

We didn’t do anything or go anywhere for months. Whenever we were invited out, I’d think about how comparatively piss-poor my wedding planning was going to the glossy magazine photos and multitude of wedding blogs, and I’d decline in order to stay home and tear at myself some more.

Ultimately, as all things with hard deadlines do, the day came and went, and it was relatively wedding-shaped, and not all that remarkable, given the time, effort, and money we’d put into it. But in retrospect, I don’t know what I was expecting from the day, other than being married at the end of it. Cheers? Recognition? I don’t know how I could have ever thought that anyone would be as invested in the details of one party as I was–that’s just unreasonable on its face. There’s no way it stood a chance of being the best day of my life: it would be utterly depressing to think that everything from that point is downhill. Life is far too interesting and vibrant for it to be over for me at thirty-one.

So a year and a half lost to obsession, and what did I get out of it? Cold pizza, about a half sip of champagne, one bite of frosting, I fell on my ass during the father daughter dance, there was complaining about how dark it was, my guest list, and my seating chart, a baby screeching through my wedding vows, and about two photos where I don’t look like the fattest, whitest whale that ever beached itself at a wedding venue. Fuck it. I’m married. I’m a homeowner. What we’ve completed on the house looks great. I never have to plan another fucking wedding. And I’ve got myself back: that alone is worth everything.