Here I am as the Lady Sif from the first Thor movie. I like her quote before battle – “I will die a warrior’s death! Stories will be told of this day!” Photo credit: Philippe Photography.

I am strongly pro-costume.

I know that a lot of people consider dressing up for Hallowe’en or for a costume party to be waaaaay too much trouble and I respect that, but it is a perspective I don’t share. I love to find a reason to wear something fun and I will go well out of my way to put a costume together.

I like to attend the Sci-Fi on the Rock convention here in NL and the primary reason is so I can dress up as one of the kick-ass characters on a favourite TV show or movie*. On Hallowe’en, even if I don’t go to a party, I dress up to pick my kids up from school or just to answer the door. I just like adding that layer to my life at any time.

The idea of costumes is so much a part of the narrative of my family’s lives that a couple of years ago when my kids woke up one morning and realized they were supposed to dress as a favourite character from a book, we were able to put together two outfits in less than 10 minutes. My older son went as DentArthurDent from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (an easy one – a stripey towel and fake book cover that said ‘Don’t Panic’) and my youngest son went as Draco Malfoy (a cape-like jacket that we have kicking around that my Aunt owned, my Mom wore when she was pregnant with my sister (in 1981), I wore in university, and we have used as a pirate’s cloak, a vampire cape, a plague doctor’s coat, and Malfoy’s robes, combined with a Slitheryn scarf and slicked-back hair). It was as natural to help them put together a costume as it was to find them regular clothes for school.

My version of Siouxsie Sue. This took some time. Aren’t I a vision? (Ha!) Not pictured: ripped fishnets and ridiculous skirt. 

I had some extra insight into my love of costumes and dressing up, when I was getting ready for my friend’s birthday party last June. For the past couple of years, my friend D (good coincidence, no?) has had a themed party. The first one was an R & B party** and last year was a New Wave theme. As I was putting on heavy make-up and teasing my hair to become Siouxsie Sue, I realized how much I miss ‘getting ready.’

When I was a teenager, going out was a big deal. You ‘had’ to spend time planning your outfit, doing your hair and getting your make-up just so. You called other people to see what they were planning to wear. Even family events like birthday parties and holiday get-togethers required you to dress up a bit. It felt like an important ritual (I am also very pro-ritual – I contend that our minds are, too) and it added pleasure to going somewhere. It created more anticipation, made it more special.

(I’m sure I could write a whole other entry about how we were putting on ‘masks’, creating a public persona, and how that is an awful lot like wearing a costume. That’s all true but that’s not where I’m going with this post.)

Going out is not the same for most of us these days. Sure, we sometimes get dressed up but mostly it is ‘come as you are.’  A lot of that has to do with hair/make-up styles being less complex in this era than they were in the 80s and 90s when I was in my teens/early 20s and some of it has to do things being more casual overall (and my teens and 20s were way more casual than in previous generations, I realize that). I think, though, that another part of it has to do with the idea that we’re all ‘so busy’ that we can’t be bothered with the rituals of going out.

There’s a whole cultural thing going on with ‘busy’ and I’m not getting into that either, but I try to catch myself when I say something about being ‘busy’ and talk instead about the choices I am making with my time.*** And one of my choices since my realization about ‘going out’ rituals is to take some time to get ready before I go anywhere that’s important to me. I may not put make-up on, I may not put on ‘fancy’ clothes or a costume, but I do take a little time to think about where I am going and how I want to prepare to spend time there. It feels good.

And, for the record, for this year’s Sci-Fi on the Rock Convention, I’m going as Melinda May from Agents of Shield. It’s a simple costume, but I’ll be taking plenty of time to get ready. I don’t want to miss any of the fun of dressing up.

*Now, I don’t mean that I have the time, ability, or wealth to put together the sort of elaborate cosplay you see at big conventions or that sort of thing. That’s way beyond my skill set and would take the fun out of it for me. I generally go for the spirit of the character rather than the details.

** to give you some idea of my costume approach – I bought some purple velvet-y fabric, lay down on it and had my husband draw around me with tailor’s chalk. I cut it out, sewed it up, made a few adjustments and called it a dress.

***This is a happy outcome of taking the ‘Foundations‘ course from Cairene McDonald. It was absolutely life changing. Read this post for a taste of her brilliance.

We’ve been doing footwork drills as our warm-up at Taekwon-Do for the past few weeks and, despite the intense bouncing,* I’m really enjoying it. I do pretty well with my slide steps, my C-C steps, and my push steps, but the quick switches in direction might just be the death of me. Changing directions quickly is not my strong point – not at Taekwon-Do and not in my work.

I struggle with the choreography of a lot of aspects of Taekwon-Do anyway. A lot of other people in my class seem to be able, on a instinctual level, to get their bodies to follow the patterns demonstrated by the instructors. My instructions have to be filtered through my brain so I have to create a ‘story’ of my patterns, or my kicks or whatever. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate story, it can just be an outline of where each body part is supposed to be at a given moment.** It takes a lot of concentration for me to do my moves, especially new ones (and learning new stuff on the spot is unlikely at best), so when I am going in one direction and then I suddenly have to switch focus and go the other way, there’s HUGE mental flip that has to take place. I’m working on it, and I’m getting better, but there is still a fair bit of work ahead.

I’m part of an online group run by the delightful Fabeku Fatumise and one of his oft-repeated phrases is ‘The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.’ I’ve found it to be an annoyingly accurate observation, and it holds true for this changing direction business.

I also hate changing direction in my work. This is likely related to my brain glitch*** and it means that I don’t naturally transition easily between tasks. So I need an external cue to let me know to switch or I will keep going on task one until it is done. That’s all well and good when it is the only task on my list, but if I am juggling a lot of things, and I often am, that habit doesn’t serve me well. If you were hanging out in my home office with me (which would be awkward because a) I don’t know you and b) my office is in my bedroom) you would hear a timer going off over and over all day. I still get annoyed when the timer goes off but I know WHY I am annoyed – the aforementioned dislike of changing directions – so I take a breath or two, maybe throw a few practice punches into the air, and then move to the next task.

I often take lessons from Taekwon-Do and apply them to my writing practices but in this case I’m wondering how to take work practices (i.e. the timer/reaction) and apply it to my Taekwon-Do. There’s going to be a difference, obviously, because one is a mental change of directions and one is a literal change of directions, but I bet there is still a way to translate the solution from one to the other. After all, in cases like this, the biggest issue is usually how I’m thinking about the problem and that can always be changed.

PS – I also hate changing direction when I’m walking, I like the sort of walk that lets me walk in a great big circle and come back to where I started. Retracing steps I have already taken so I can get back home is really irksome. I mostly ignore the irkedness, but it is still there. Brains are so weird, aren’t they?

*Which is a challenge for the chest and the bladder, by the way.

** Don’t go giving me the ‘No! You just have to FEEL it’ bit, please. I don’t feel it, my learning process doesn’t work like that. However, the more often I tell myself the ‘story’, the more I start to ‘feel’ it and the less I need to repeat the steps to myself. You can tell how well I know a pattern by how much of it I can repeat aloud without moving – my stronger patterns have been handed over to muscle memory and it is almost as if I have lost the words to describe them, my weaker patterns are still a list in my head. I’m practicing my weaker ones though, so I’m getting better all the time. 🙂

***My glitch is something executive function-related which is in the neighbourhood of ADD and is able to be adjusted with behaviour mods instead of medications. I’m very much pro-meds if taking them gives you the space to work on your glitches but my fairly minor situation turned out to be adjustable via better systems and some input from others.

Oh, books!

Books are my favourite things in the whole world.

The only thing better than being totally immersed in a book is having a pile of books to read.* There’s something about all the potential contained between the covers that is deeply satisfying to me. I know that some people stress about the books in their ‘to read’ pile, but I love having books around that I haven’t read because it means that I am always in the beginning of the process, I always have more to discover.

Unread non-fiction books and unread novels feel different to me, but they are both great. Unread non-fiction feels like I am going to learn something, like there is captive knowledge waiting to make its way into my brain. Unread fiction though, that feels like friends that I haven’t met yet. I especially like when I have unread novels in a series, so fictional friends are waiting to introduce me to more people. The idea of that makes me smile even though I haven’t exactly thought of it like that before. I love to sink into worlds that I know (in series) and worlds that I don’t, and I love to sink into a well constructed argument in a non-fiction book – particularly a self-development book.**

I just want to soak up every bit of knowledge that is available to me and I want to know that even more is available when I choose to soak it up. All that possibility is exciting. 🙂

The funny thing is that I have found that writing novels and working on a non-fiction book are almost as exciting as reading them. There is a similar pleasure in constructing the story, in creating the world, in shaping the discussion. It’s not the same as the sense of discovery in someone else’s work but the feeling is definitely on the same spectrum. It’s like participating in a important ritual. I’m going to do my part so someone else has the discover experience, and someone else is doing theirs for me to discover. It’s like a giant energy exchange, like a world-wide conspiracy to entertain and amuse and educate each other and the creation of the entertainment can be as lovely as immersing ourselves in it.

Now that I’ve written this I feel a bit more of a responsibility to get my work out there, like I am part of a chain or a circle, and if I don’t to my part, the formation won’t work, the next step won’t happen. You know what’s weird though? That doesn’t feel like pressure, it feels kind of liberating – like it is the effort that matters more than the results. I love when that happens!

*I also like having books-in-waiting on my e-reader, but that’s not exactly the same.

** I am a particular fan of books about how our brains work with us or against us, and how our brains find stories in everything we do.