At long last!

I know that you all only come here for the parts when I talk exhaustively about costuming, sewing and crafting, and that you were sorely disappointed last year when I copped out so hugely. Breathe your sighs of relief, then, because I have determined that I will NOT spend three hours desperately wiring rubber snakes together in an effort to make it seem as though I put effort into my costume choice. NO, this year, my lovelies, I am going to make a costume.

It is not as inspired as years past, but my criteria were different. It needs to be packable, longwearing, lightweight for temperature reasons, and reasonably clever. No sticky makeup, no fussy accessories, nothing I will need to constantly check or fix. This immediately disqualified my best ever costume ideas - the story of the green ribbon, and the gutshot cowgirl - and made my favorite forerunner for this year - a steampunk mermaid - seem unfeasible. I settled on something iconic, easy to put together, and yet challenging enough to make me actually want to work on it. I decided to be the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

The elements are simpler than you are imagining. A vest, some pantaloons, a pocketwatch on a chain, some rabbit ears (fascinator style, natch), and a little pink nose. I am rather pleased with myself. I even have a pattern for a vest that I have been holding onto for years, waiting for the occasion to arise where I might need it.
Also, I might have gone ahead and bought a pocketwatch today. I need one anyway!

HRH is going to be Little Red Riding Hood, which I am also making. I bought a set of red velveteen curtains at a garage sale for $5.00 and threw them in the washing machine not long ago. I hope they survive the trip. They smelled about a thousand years old. IF so, they are going to make a really beautiful, heavy, hopefully warm cape. I want to make a pinafore trimmed with Bavarian ribbon, too, and then she can wear a white shirt and white tights and black shoes and carry a basket.

So now I have a plan, and two patterns and the fabric for one costume. Now to dust off the sewing machine and set to work. I'll post updates - hopefully with pictures, even! - as I make progress.

The reason why

There was a time not so very long ago when I was utterly, entirely convinced that I was fated to be alone for the rest of my life. It had been a long painful, messy end to a long, messy, difficult relationship, and I had had my heart ground to dust and splinters. I wasn't interested in gluing the puzzle pieces of my life back together just to let another man dismantle it again. Unfortunately, I was desperately lonesome and while I knew I was perfectly capable of leading a full and fulfilled life without being in a romantic relationship, I never wanted that. One particularly low moment after a mystifying rejection, I asked La Fab if she thought I would die without ever having sex again. She laughed and said, "Are you planning on offing yourself tomorrow? Do you have a terminal illness you are hesitant to tell us about so as to spare our feelings?" Then she went on to reassure me that she believed I was lovely, intelligent, and attractive, and that I just needed to settle down and wait - something would come along. SomeONE would come along.

I thought I knew the kind of guy I would find, if I were to find anyone at all, and I thought I knew how it would go. He would be smart and verbose and rather cuttingly mean; I would feel sick to my stomach with desire and lose sleep thinking of him. The less I thought he thought of me, the more I would try to make him think of me. He would be thin and intellectual, pretend not to care about the way he looked, but really work very hard to be look so nonchalant. He would know a lot about wine and have a ridiculous dream to visit that bar in Belgium with 2500 types of beer.

Here's what I never thought would happen: that I would decide to amuse myself by flirting with a boy in the audience at a last minute bar gig and end up feeling strangely as though I had met him before. I never anticipated that he would take me up on an offhand offer to visit Sitka and see us play again. I never dreamed he would respond to my awkward overtures to befriend him, that he would email and call, that he would answer my questions and ask ones of his own. The oddest thing happened: I slept better, I felt great. There was no heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed second-guessing. He was first dozens, then hundreds, of miles away, and so having a friendship complicated and clouded by lust was an impossibility. I came to genuinely like and admire him.

Here's what I never thought would happen: that I would decide to chase away my own emptiness by filling it with meaningless encounters and find myself a year later deeply in love with my best friend.



I know everyone who reads this has spent the last year humoring me as I tried to make sense of all of this, and I know it has been a month since the last time I posted anything. The thing is, I used writing all of this stuff down as a way to keep it from swallowing my head, and now I have someone to tell it all to and process it all with, so I don't have to write it down anymore. Also, contentment is neither interesting nor funny. For the time being, it might be sparse around here. You can take it up with Z.if you really, really need to.