Fond of rumpots, crackpots, and how are you, Mr. Wilson?

I've been away from the blogging game for so long, I'd forgotten that "so much to say, so little brain to say it" sensation that pops up after 10 pm. on the Friday of a chock-full-o'-nuts week of wonders. It's worse knowing that since I have been away for so long, I feel like I have to back-story everything so much that it hardly seems worth the trouble. As a storyteller, I make up for my lack of ninja fights and opium soirées with a matching lack of narrative brevity. This is why I can't open with something simple like, "I'm sitting in Brunswick, Maine with hypnagogie right now," without feeling it necessary to explain that I still live in Providence while she's in Maine finishing her post doc and I see her every other weekend and and and. Just because I sometimes live in perpetual nested flashbacks doesn't mean I need to splatter them all over my journal and expect the world to keep up.

So let me cut to the chase: Birthday week! Yes, mine! 48, if you must know, but I don't feel a day over...well, over 62 at the moment, for reasons that will become apparent in a bit. Birthday proper was Monday, which is almost as much of a drag as a birthday less than two weeks after Christmas, but I treated myself better than Mondays usually warrant, which was enough for the time. The real celebrations came later:

Wednesday: blissmorgan shares a birthday with me, and for years we've been swearing that this will be the year we get together and celebrate somehow, followed by hemming and hawing against the background drone of mildly annoyed crickets. But this year I think we were both feeling an exceptionally focused need to get the hell out of our respective houses and into good company, so we not only made actual plans, but we actually followed through. We settled on bowling at a place halfway between Bliss!House and Adam!House, which we quickly discovered serves up a light show and either disco or '90s alternative depending on who's controlling the knobs, so it made it harder to concentrate but much easier not to care that we were bowling solidly two-digit totals. (Neither of us had done this in years, which explains not only the "are you sure this isn't golf?" scores we were nailing, but also the fact that we are hurting in places we weren't aware we had places two days later. I'm not convinced I didn't throw out my first hip, hence the "day over 62" crack back there. From there we sought food at the kind of local restaurant that serves Reubens and liver & onions and burgers named after regular customers from the '50s, where we ate well and adored our waitress and had the most amazing conversation that led directly to me opening this DW account. Bliss wrote up the event far better than I ever could on her own journal (complete with snappy bowling ball glamour shots), so do pop over there, but suffice it to say that it was precisely what I needed in so many more ways than one. Thanks again, Bliss, and let's not wait so long next time.

Friday: I left for Maine straight from work, a 2 1/2-hour drive that's 2 1/4 hours longer than my bowling-ravaged joints were prepared for, but it was so very worth it as hypnagogie and I convened at the Brunswick Tavern for my official birthday meal. Their head chef has a contract out with someone from the demon realm, because good Lord. Pork belly with applesauce, steamed mussels, an amazing lamb shank for me and a steak for her that was so tender you could plant tulip bulbs in it without benefit of a trowel. We topped it all off with a bourbon-butternut cheesecake the consistency of gentle sleep that she described as "if pumpkin pie were made of God." I could go on at great length about the food and the connectedness that an exceptional meal shared can create, but I want to skip ahead to where she gave me the present she'd been dying to give me for weeks: she got me a smoking jacket, people. A SMOKING JACKET. Black velour with silver-and-black piping, perfectly lined and pocketed, and it even goes perfectly with the purple Thai fisherman's pants that are my new pajama bottoms. Ladies and gentlemen, I no longer sit—I lounge. Sybaritically, with a rake's practiced moue and a leisurely eye-fuck gaze that coos, "Hello, dahling, don't be shy. Welcome to Raymundo." It's perfect in every way. Thank you again, hon. A++++, would marry the hell out of again. (And yes, I'm bringing it to Arisia, and yes, I'm wearing it to the con suite at one in the morning.)

....

Remind me, how do you end blog posts again? It's like this, isn't it? Just kind of trailing off when you don't feel like typing any more?

Why is it that my pants not only routinely split straight up the crotch, but consistently do so only at major crowded social events? At Readercon, I went to say hi to issendai (who I hadn't seen in four years or so) and ookpik, and going in for a hug I went down on one knee and felt fabric giving way in the Delicate Giblet region. Swell. Luckily I was wearing the green striped boxers, so at least I had sartorial panache going for me.

Another trend: I only ever go to Readercon to have Murder Ballads band meetings/rehearsals with cluegirl, and this was no exception. After the business portion of the evening, she and aquila_dominus were kind enough to take me and my now-crotchless carpenter pants to dinner, which was my first trip to Rainforest Cafe. The decor is what you'd get if Busch Gardens yarked on an Outback Steakhouse, but it was a fun time, and the guacamole burger was damn good.

Speaking of crotchless pants, for last week's date night rain_herself and I went to see Magic Mike XXL. She'd seen it already, but she had been blown away by the degree to which it subverts tropes and expectations and she wanted to share it with me. I think there's a full entry in the wings on this one, but she's absolutely right: cultural expectations about masculinity, male and female sexuality, homophobia, body image, race, competition, and even basic notions of screenwriting and dancing itself get inverted and reframed. That, and holy flaming goat balls can Channing Tatum move....

Let's see, what else has been going on? Songwriting out the proverbial wazoo, hanging out pre-Readercon-adjacency with new-friend ourika, a return to KoL for reasons unknown, a frightening first experience with duck eggs (whose yolks should not be that color and consistency, and probably shouldn't smell like sea bass, I'm guessing), and an overdependence on air conditioning, mostly. Andrea's been in NYC this week, which means me having to relearn how to sleep alone (a skill I tend to misplace), but she'll be back on Saturday, which I'm hugely looking forward to. Meanwhile I'm realizing I haven't really gone out all week aside from work—hey, Bostonians, anything going on Friday night that I should know about?

I mentioned the costume. The perfect storm. Three elements.

The first came in the hours just before my 40th birthday. figmentj had managed to keep mum about just what my gift was, and I didn't even have a guess to hazard. It was this:

( The watch, outside and in )

I couldn't get a non-blurry photo of the watch cover no matter how hard I tried, which is a tragedy. The images gracing the cover were lovingly drawn almost entirely by her, and all deeply personal to me: guitar, pentacle, strip of celluloid, crossword (a detail of my Sunday Times grid, in fact), 9/8 time signature, rain to represent figmentj herself, and, of course, a rabbit. All wrapped up in a Tiffany's box, with a gorgeous letter that echoed the one I received as an infant from my mother's employer. And incidentally, the photo of the interior has not been reversed—the watch runs counterclockwise. (The part you can't read: "White Rabbit Watch Company / Wonderland 1865.") It couldn't be more perfect. Yes, I melted into sea foam, right then and there.

The second element arrived a few days after, although it had been a long time coming. Before I had even left New York, I'd spotted a white leather rabbit mask being offered online for some extortionate fee, and linked to it in this journal. belgatherial commented that she could do something like it for much cheaper, and promised to do so. It had been in the works ever since, but my coming birthday and Arisia led her to put a rush order on it, and the box from New Zealand arrived on my doorstep with days to spare:

( The mask )

It's kind of miraculous how well it fits, as she had to guess at the construction based on shaky measurements I sent over e-mail. It's a simple construction, which is exactly what it needs—it's the platonic ideal of Rabbit reduced to its most basic form. Like the watch, a labor of love, and like the watch, perfect. And yes, I melted again.

So there was no doubt in my mind that I'd be dressing as Rabbit at Arisia—not a particular existing character (although there would obviously be borrowing from Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit), but ideally something, well, me. The official plan at packing time was to wear the mask, the watch, my black vest (I even made a point of ripping out the stitching on the pseudo-pockets to make room for the watch, with the chain prominently displayed), black trousers, striped socks and black dress shoes. And that plan held until about three hours before I was planning on putting it on, when I suddenly decided that it needed something. It needed a waistcoat.

I grabbed figmentj and hauled her through the Dealer's Room and up and down Dealer's Row, to absolutely no avail. No one was selling anything even close to what I wanted, except for a leather shop that had gorgeous things that I'd need to hock internal organs to buy. Disappointed, I abandoned the quest without fully surrendering the thought that something was missing. As something between a lark and an afterthought, I decided to go for plan B, which was to upgrade the plain black vest to something snazzier. And it was during this second trip to Dealer's Row on the 16th floor that I spotted a room I hadn't noticed before: part of a clothing shop that had bought adjoining rooms but only opened one to the corridor, leaving only the door between open to get in. And there they had coats that were just about perfect—and one that was so far beyond perfect that I nearly needed to sit down:

( The coat )

It was more than I wanted to spend, but gods, it was precisely what I had been looking for, in ways that I didn't know about until I saw it. I fought buying it. I fought hard. But I tried it on, and discovered how solidly the thing was built. I found out how much it would normally have cost, and how much they had marked it down. My resolve was crumbling. Then the owner told me that Shrine, the manufacturers of the coat, had custom-made that design excessively for her—the pattern existed, but not in brocade, until she basically bullied him into it. And this was indeed the last one in stock, ever. I handed her my debit card.

So.

I had bought the coat literally moments before shadesong's reading, and it was immediately after that figmentj and I ran off to get dressed up for the Saturday night festivities. For me, this meant not only putting on the various components but pasting the mask's ears in place against my forehead, a feat accomplished with liquid latex generously donated by primal_pastry and a good deal of patience. I got a look in the mirror as best I could without my glasses (I would be going mostly blind for the evening), and I looked good, better even than I'd expected. (I posted the full photo in my earlier post on the matter.)

But there was something more to it than that. And this is where it gets difficult to explain.

See, I'm not much used to costuming. I'm certainly not used to outfits as elaborate or as personal as this one was. I didn't know how transformative masks can be, not really. I didn't realize what I was getting into. And I feel like nothing I say here is either not going to make much sense or be met with a resounding "well, DUH," but…all of a sudden I was Not Me. Just that, pure and simple. It wasn't a furry thing or a cosplay thing; it wasn't anything that simple, or that complex, if that makes sense. Confidence was there behind the cloth and metal and leather, and presence, and I daresay some semblance of nobility—all concepts that I normally need to struggle and fight for. And all of a sudden, here they were, and the costume wasn't instilling them in me, but drawing them out. No one could see who I was, I couldn't really see anyone else, but I was dressed in a coat that was grand, a watch that was dazzling, and a mask that was noble (it didn't hurt that I was forced into good posture by the need to keep the latex from dislodging). I'll say it: it was downright empowering.

And irony of ironies, I found it as the Rabbit, a creature that the rest of the world sees as timid and retiring and unthreatening. That's how I've seen myself, so it's been a good analogy for the parts of my life when I've identified with Rabbit, or so I thought. It wasn't until much later in the night that I remembered that Rabbit is also the Trickster, good at cutting off expectations at the knee. And I know almost no one else saw it in me as I walked the corridors that night, and it frustrated me. They saw Rabbit as they knew him: the fluffy little hiding thing, or at the very scariest as a Donnie Darko or Bioshock reference. One stranger ran into me several times, and every time shouted, "You're a bunny!" At any other time I'd have joked with him; that night, I was seriously pondering throwing him against the wall by the collar. Those who truly knew who I was in that outfit, on the other hand, knew it very well—felisdemens called me "El-ahrairah," which, if you know the reference, comes damned close. (She wasn't the only one to see it in full; there are stories I'm emphatically not sharing in a public post.)

As I type this, the mask is safely tucked in the top drawer of my dresser. The watch is resting on top of the same dresser, just above it. The coat is hanging in my bedroom closet just to my right. They'll be worn again, together. I don't know when. Part of me wants to wear them at every opportunity. Part of me, though, wants to save it for those moments when I can wear them with all my heart and soul, and not a penny less.

Either way, Rabbit isn't done with me. Not by a long shot.