Altimore City

I’ve only seen a little anime, really popular things like Cowboy Bebop or Howl’s Moving Castle, so most of the costumes at Otakon went over my head. Still, when I ate lunch with a couple friends who were attending, I recognized the girl sitting at the table next to us as being dressed as Witch Hunter Robin.

I hate to write this but she was the worst of what you think of when you imagine a teenage anime fan: she had kind of dumpy body, an awkward nose, glasses that didn’t really suit her and the beginning of pimples sprinkled across her face. She was quiet, seemed like she saw things more than she was things, and what’s worse she had her mom tagging along. Her mom was snapping photos of everyone she could find in the bar who seemed remotely costumed. She even asked this pair of girls sitting in the corner to pose whose only qualification I could see was that one of them had dyed part of her hair bright purple.

The waiter brought an odd drink to the girl dressed as Robin, odd because she looked around 14 but the drink was in a martini glass, was bright green and had a pair of cherries hanging at its rim. Green the color of absinthe, not an appletini. They were carding everyone — even me, and I don’t look anywhere close to underage — so I didn’t understand how she could have swung it. But immediately she took a swig and grimaced. Something happened in that moment but I couldn’t say what, and her mother started to say something unkind but I didn’t want to eavesdrop, all of a sudden felt like I was starting to stare. So I stopped looking in her direction, focused on my Cobb salad sandwich, which was in itself a little strange but delicious. I think I’m at some stage in my life where I like avocado in any context.

Maybe twenty minutes later there was a nasty sounding crash — she had knocked over the glass and it had smashed all over the floor. Nasty glass fragments. But the girl — she had changed. Her eyes had grown larger, turned from brown to green, her complexion had cleared and the shape of her chin had altered itself. She was halfway Robin. I want to write that she had become beautiful, but she hadn’t.

People talk about the uncanny valley, where dolls become monstrous when they look very close to human, but aren’t quite. In our minds, the dolls become defective humans instead of imitations. This was like that but reversed — she was not a real human anymore nor something imaginary, and the tension between the two had turned her body into a nightmare.

I think she could feel everyone’s eyes on her because she leapt to her feet and stormed awkwardly out of the bar, nearly tripping over her own feet. Her mother looked around wildly trying to find a waiter, busboy, anybody who could clean up after this, but there was no one but herself who could do it.

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Tagged drinking, nerds, transformations

Otakon is always an interesting experience, to say the least. I’ve been attending them on and off for over ten years; back then it was a couple hundred people in the basement of the old Hunt Valley Marriot. These days, it’s got over 20,000 people spread out across the whole of the Baltimore Convention Center. So, yeah, the con has changed a lot over the years, and so have I.

As I stood in line on Thursday night, waiting to pick up my pass, my eyes wandered over the crowd. Costumes of all shapes and sizes, of course, worn by people of all shapes and sizes as well. The thing that sticks out most to me as every year passes, though, is how young they all are. That’s not to say they were all little kids or anything, but more that they all stood at the brink of growing up, at that awkward line between childhood and all the days past it. Like the group of girls standing behind me, all chatting rapidly about things I couldn’t understand, giggling with every other word. They all wore costumes from some show I didn’t know; short skirts, long, shiny boots, and fake wings pinned to their backs, strange sculptures of paper mache’ and feather. They were trying to look sexy; they were trying to look grown-up - trying to bring to life some vision that was only supposed to exist in ink and pencil in tiny frames trapped in time. I guess a me from those early Otakon days might have found them cute, but now me could only see how awkward they looked. They knew they didn’t belong in the clothes they wore - they hardly seemed comfortable in their own bodies. Postures askew from boots they were unfamiliar with, ready to show off their wings for a photo, but with a sense of embarrassment when they realized that people were really looking at them.

You could see that story over and over again in the crowd. The boy whose voice warbled every time he spoke, still trying to decide which age it wanted to be. The shy, quiet girl in the tiger bikini who comes out of her shell this one day each year, and who will be back to sitting in the corner unnoticed come Monday. So many reminders to me of what those days were like, and reminders of how different my days are now. Maybe I am too old for this, or maybe the world just wants me to feel like I’m too old for it.

I sighed, watching the line move slowly forward, with nothing else to look at but the people around me. I heard a gasp from behind me, followed by a muffled cry. I turned and saw that one of the girls had doubled over, clasping her knees to her chest and rocking slightly on the ground. Her friends stood over her, looking down with concern. A moment later came a sound like silk sheets snapping the breeze, and with a yelp of pain, a set of feathery white wings sprouted from the girl’s back, knocking off her costume fakes and sending them to the ground. The girl stood, a little dazed, but after a moment she unfurled them fully and gave them a gentle flap. They were soft, white, and beautiful in the summer evening sun. She was very lucky. Her friends looked on in awe, and gave her hugs of congratulations.

She smiled radiantly, though I don’t think she quite knew how the world would be different for her from now on. Her friends smiled too, but I could see they were less eager to pose for pictures now, and they stole quite glances of shame back at their own pale copies.

I finally got my ticket forty-five minutes later. I hate standing in line.

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Tagged nerds, otakon, transformations, waiting

When I first started going to Mem Sahib, it seemed a secret place. It’s right by Lexington Market but it was quiet inside — the first time I went, I think there was maybe only one other set of people in the place, and though you can see the market’s hurlyburly if you look up through the interior windows, you can’t hear a word of it. The walls were painted a reflective sort of blue that made me think of being a kid again, diving to the bottom of the deep end of the community pool, staying down there as long as my breath could hold out. And the food was good, not necessarily superhealthy but also not superdeadly, which can be hard to find. Grease sells in Lexington. It’s just a fact.

It was, in short, a refuge from work and from Baltimore.

There was a waitress who I named Amy in my head — she never introduced herself or anything and it seemed dumb to ask her name. Why I chose Amy exactly is a story for some other time. She was devastatingly pretty and also really nice, would sometimes have short little conversations with us about where we worked, that kind of thing. She was just one more reason to go.

One day I was eating there with a coworker and talking about the Back to the Future movies, how the past could be in a partially broken state, ostensibly preventing Marty McFly from existing but allowing him enough time to fix the inconsistencies in his backstory, and I asked my coworker: “Well, what’s your theory on time travel?”

It was at this particular point in time that Amy had come back to refill our glasses, and at my question her face took on a peculiar expression of wtf.

“We’re time travellers,” I joked because my coworker was shooting me a look that said: you’re screwing up a good thing here.

She hesitated for a second then said, “So am I,” and then it was our turn to wear the wtf expressions. “Where, um I guess when are you from?” I asked, not really sure if she was playing along or secretly crazy all along or something else.

“2139,” she said. “What about you guys?”

“I’m from — I’m a little later than that. He” — indicating my coworker — “lost his memory a couple jumps ago.”

“Oh, cool,” Amy said. “Do you have any artifacts?”

“Err, not with me.”

She pulled out a driver’s license that said she was 16 in the year 2145 and handed it to me. It was different, with weirder holograms and a longer zip code — I kept looking at it, trying to see where the fake part was, the part that would identify it as just one of things you’d pick up on a boardwalk somewhere, but I couldn’t find one.

“That’s pretty neat,” I said. “So… what are you doing in town?”

“Secret project,” she said. “For now just waiting tables. It’s kind of quaint.”

“Yeah — yeah, it is,” I agreed.

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Tagged food, nerds