Rollercon! or Vegas baby!

I am ready. I think. My bags are all but packed, I have a pile of clothes ready and waiting for me to put on in the morning, my bearings and wheels have been cleaned and lubricated (both indoor and outdoor, mind you), my USARS paperwork is printed, I'm waging an epic battle against the family printer to spit out my hotel reservation information as we speak, (It made a noise! It's giving in!), my boat reservations have been made, the car is waiting for me to drive it, and I'm still freaked out.

Rollercon is not a cheap date. I'll be away from work for a week, the pass cost me almost $200, there is the room, food, and the vendors... and I'm worried I'm not going to make enough of it. I'm worried I'm going to be overwhelmed by the crush of people and not see enough of what I want to see and learn enough to make the trip worthwhile.

It will be awesome, I'm sure of it. It will be great, and I'm going to enjoy myself. It's vegas, baby, how could I not have fun?

A side effect of my awesome trip is that I will be gone and not post for a week. :p

Pretty People

I stepped into the coffee shop today around two o'clock, stashed my things, and made some coffee (it's sort of what I do while I'm there). Before I had a chance to settle in to a routine, I made a large four shot carmel latte with a little bit of whipped cream for a gentleman in his thirties. I smiled, in a pretty good mood, took his money and handed him his change. We didn't trade small talk while I made his drink, he didn't appear out of the ordinary at all.

"Can I tip you?" he asked, and mildly surprised I nodded. I know you can't tip baristas in airport Starbucks. Maybe he thought it was like that, weirder assumptions about the island have been made.

He gave me a twenty, his drink cost $6.25, and he got a raisin cream scone at $2.40, for a grand total of $8.65. So, on the tile counter lay a dime, a quarter, a one and two fives, because I ran out of tens (like always).

"I don't usually do this, but you are a very beautiful woman" instead of picking up the change and the fives, leaving the one (as I expected) he left a five, and took the rest. I was equally surprised by his actions and his words. I stammered a "Thank you" and he left.

The sad part about this is that my first reaction was suspicion. My mind raced, trying to figure out how this could benefit him, what he wanted from me, but as his blonde hair disappeared out of the courtyard, I realized I just needed to accept the compliment. More people need to hear things like that, I think. I don't care if it is true, that's not the point. I felt good, because no matter what I thought, he thought I was beautiful. Or maybe he didn't, but he said he did.

Here's the thing. My basic beliefs about the world are pretty few, but among them is the belief that most people are ugly. I'm not not being pessimistic, I feel like I'm being realistic. Not everyone can be amazingly beautiful. Biology is gross, get over it. All people are mostly ugly, but we all have some beauty in us. We all do, and life is better when we take the time to stop and look for that small part of ourselves and others and that makes them beautiful. i have a hard time sometimes seeing the beautiful in people.

Sims 3

The Sims 3, at least thus far, does not feature aliens. I didn't have a particular fondness for aliens in my previous games, but of course, when they were missing, I wanted them. The sims 3, does, however, let you customize skin color in a wide array of fascination options-many of them not within the normal human range.

So, I created an Alien couple. They had blue skin, instead of the green consistent with the previous sim aliens. I know that within the sims game there are places where you can type family descriptions, or bios for individual sims, but i've never used them. Oddly enough, with this family, I found myself creating a story in my head: something I never take time to do.

My blue-skinned alien couple were from some far away planet, sent to research life on earth. They would be the first of many alien envoys, as the alien culture needed viable worlds to expand to. Thus, my blue-skinned alien couple moved into a small house in sim land. They tried their best to fit in, despite their very blue skin. They took the names Marina and Kyle Small. They had some advance knowledge of life on earth, but common names, modes of dress and hairstyles were not among the priority information. Thus: Kyle had a mohawk until the day he died, and Marina a short boy cut. Not bad, but not the easiest to overlook, either.

Marina became a doctor, to better understand the insides of humans, and Kyle became a best-selling science fiction author. His books appeared to be science fiction to the humans, but to the aliens who were arriving every day, his books were guide books-the instruction manual to life as a human he never had.

Kyle and Marina became pregnant, and Marina gave birth to a baby girl, Lizbeth (by now they had a better handle on human names). Around this time, a newly arrived alien family (of the more traditional, green skinned variety) moved in next store, with three green skinned sons. Lizbeth and the middle boy, Connor, became best friends, and as they grew and matured, their relationship became romantic. By this, I mean that the day Lizbeth became a teenager, a second birthday cake mysteriously appeared at the party Connor was invited to, and he was compelled to blow out a second set of candles, and ta-da! He was also a teenager. They kissed, and were boyfriend/girlfriend.

The day they both became young adults, they got engaged, and had a private ceremony (I didn't want to throw another party). Connor aspired to be a best-selling author like his father-in-law. Lizbeth aspired to be a chess grand master. But see, Lizbeth and Connor were of another generation. Kyle and Marina had spent many years traveling to earth, and many more adapting to life with humans. Lizbeth and Connor had grown up, for the most part, as humans with human ways and rites of passage. They were excited to hold on to their heritage as proud aliens, but they were more comfortable on earth than their parents had been.

Lizbeth and Connor vacationed in France, something Kyle and Marina would never have done, and brought back a nectar making machine and samples of many fine grapes. Since Lizbeth is a genius, and had been working on her life goal from her early teenage years, she finished it a few days after their honeymoon, and set out to make nectar. Their little house is expanding, and the intelligent Lizbeth continues her father's precedent of buying human property throughout the town. Lizbeth and Connor have a daughter, Pashina, (a traditional name from their parent's home planet) (in case you were wndering (I was) when a blue woman and a green man have a baby, it has blue skin and green hair. FYI) and another child on the way. They are both hoping for another daughter.

I am having way to much fun with this.

Night Skating

So yesterday I worked. While I was standing behind the tiled counter, not making espresso beverages or facilitating the general public's love of croissants filled with deliciousness, my phone rang. I answered it, because I'm a questionable employee. Shhh.

Here is where the interesting part of living in such a small town comes in. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman. She is the mother of a girl I went to elementary school with. She used to live on the island, didn't, and then did, and I'm pretty sure she lives in long beach now. She worked with my mother for a while doing massages, and most importantly, she joined the Long Beach Roller Derby people sometime last year (Also, her arms are covered in tattoos of bugs, just fyi).

Anaya: Hello

K: Do you want to go skating?

Anaya: Sure.

~Now, what I was thinking was, "Yeah, but where? All the streets are either steep or heavily trafficked, and smoth flat surfaces are surprisingly hard to find in this town."~

K: Okay. I get off work at seven.

So, I finished my shift, went home, played sims and then threw on a dress (without a bra! I'm not sure why I felt I needed to share that with you) and dashed down the hill to meet my mom at the Villa (AWESOME) Portifino at 5:30. If course, she wanders in at 5:50, and I kicked myself for rushing. I could have played ten more minutes of sims!

Whatever, that isn't the point. We had a very nice dinner, then went home to wait for K to call. I texted her a few times, and was messing around with this blog thing, and at 8:30 she finally calls.

I am skeptical of this plan. This "skate around avalon at night" business but I'm willing to try it, because I've been a slacker recently and was sick and had bad headaches, and anyway, I haven't skated in "I'm not telling you how long." I met her by this weird fountain/planter in the middle of the road, suited up, and started skating.

(When I'm going to go skating, but not practice, I never know how many of the numerous and rather expensive pieces of protective gear I own I should wear. I worry about it much more than I do getting dressed for nice dinners. The only commonality appears to be, wear your knee pads but not your helmet. So, if i'm going to wear my knee pads, I might as well wear knee gaskets. Might as well. Wrist guards are a must, but what about elbow pads? It is a dilemma. Then there are the ankle braces. I should probably wear them, but they take forever to get on, and looks like I'm expecting to get hurt, at which point I should just wear my helmet. The one thing that is never a question for me is the mouth guard. Breaking out two teeth makes the mild embarrassment of a mouth full of green plastic negligible.)

We skated to the casino (on the pedestrian walkway), scaring the crap out of the pedestrians, who though that the little walkway was just for them, suckers! then back down the road (not much better on my ankles, actually) past the skate shop, up metropole, through the alley (nice concrete, for future reference), through the other alley, on front street (yes, I know, I know. The doesn't actually say no rollerskates, but it is implied) and out to the mole- where we skated around benches and the roundish ticket window building (this entertained us for a surprisingly long time). Then back into town, stopped at the plaza (there was a very smooth roundish area where the busses park) made half-assed plans to meet again (didn't happen, but at 6:45 this morning, man was I glad). Here comes the fun part.

So I called Mom, who had dropped me off, and asked for a ride up the hill. She said yes. I skated to where she dropped me off, and got tired of waiting. So I started up whittley. I didn't get very far before each push just didn't get me anywhere, and I walked the rest of the way on my toe stops to avoid sliding all the way down the hill. When I got the the east whittley juncture, I thought about waiting, but got bored again, and kept walking. Up east whittley. I was 3/4 of the way home before my mother ever left.

I must have lost my touch

I realized recently that I lost one of my most important skill sets: effectively swimming through hoards of apparently mindless tourists. Most people have little need for such a skill set. They are lucky.

My least favorite place to be in all the world is front street, in Avalon, around noon, in August (It's a little weird that I'm writing this as if it is for people who don't know what I'm talking about, when I know exactly who is going to read it, but whatever). Families of six and seven dig trenches into the beach, and there are just so many people going in every direction without any sense of destination.

As summer winds up, I do my best to avoid this situation. Leisurely walks downtown cease, I find myself taking side streets to avoid the congested areas, and most importantly, I just stay inside. A few years ago, when I eventually found myself faced with the crowded crescent avenue, I would dive in, expertly dart and dodge around strollers, wandering children, and stalled girls in tube tops and obscenely large sunglasses staring into store fronts with blank stares on their faces. I would bump shoulders just hard enough to not loose my place on the sidewalk, and most importantly, keep up a good pace and maintain my status as a moving target.

In contrast, it is July of a slow summer, and if I find myself rusty, moving slowly through the river of visitors. I have this acute fear that I'm going to wake up one morning (or return from Rollercon in Vegas) and realize it is August, it is busy, oh god there are so many people, and my mind is just going to melt. Everything will cease to matter, my priorities will fade away, and I will be an utter failure at transporting myself anywhere.

Hello Summer