前途: A Year in Morocco

This weekend, for the first time in 4 years, I am missing Seattle’s yearly anime convention. Sakura-con is more exciting than Christmas for me.

Yes, I just said that.

There are many reasons. When con action kicks into gear, I’ve spent a year working on costumes, ordering high-quality wigs from China, altering clothing, and making props from scratch with obsessive attention to detailed accuracy. At its most basic level, cosplay (costume+roleplay) is a year-long, 3D, living, completely customized art project, and Sakura-con is the gallery where it gets displayed and is met with very immediate positive feedback (read: attention) when you’ve done a good job. Plus it’s always fun to take a public bus in costume!

No less important is that Sakura-con is usually the largest uninterrupted amount of time each year I get to spend with one of my two best friends, Erin. We rarely spent more than a day together because she lived, worked, and studied very hard in a far-away land. For con, she would come to Seattle and sleep at my apartment, and we got to geek out and hang out for 3 or 4 days straight. It’s also the one time of year I get to spend lots of time with important uni friends who now have jobs, as well as see old friends from high school.

Finally, there’s the glorious, comforting fact that at con, you are never the weirdest person there; you are just one weirdo among many. My friend on Twitter put it best, “Finally, amongst my own.”

The anime community is a community tied together by a common interest, which is generally considered childish, time-wasting, and/or inappropriate by many of the attendees’ family members, colleagues, and friends. For many of us, we breathe a sigh of relief in being united with a group of people which judges you based on whether you like moe, mecha, or magical girl, and not by how much time you spend watching anime or that you cosplay and spend a lot of money on it.

AND. I am SO upset about the fact that I am missing the Exist Trace concert this year, grrrr. (Exist Trace is one of very few all-female Visual Kei bands [lol not that a casual observer could tell the gender of the members anyway] and I have liked the band since literally forever. Literally.) (＃ﾟДﾟ)

Con is stressful. From the planning, skipping classes but turning in homework ahead of time, the cooking and the packing lunches and cameras and water and Motrin and makeup and super glue, thinking about the what-ifs in costume planning, deciding on outfits, shoes and makeup (and glow sticks) for the concerts and raves, charging cell phones, dealing with transportation and parking and sleeping arrangements and friends who disappear without their cell phones, exhaustion from too little sleep, etc. Despite all this, at con, I am able to fully relax.

I was going to attend the very first Middle East Film and Comic Convention in Abu Dhabi, UAE. It would have taken place next weekend, but due to regional events, it has been moved back to the fall, when I have no plans [yet] to be on this side of the world.

For now, I will satisfy my con-sickness by browsing the threads of Sakura-con pics on the internet, watching copious amounts of anime, and wishing I was at home. T__T