The Whereabouts of Happiness

I was going to make a reference to this in my next post, but I realized that before I did that I'd have to explain to you the origin of the plastic spoons.

I know, I know. Bear with me.

Back in the early days of Ai-kon, Winnipeg's biggest Anime Convention, it was held at the U of M. Back in the early, early days of Ai-kon, as in, the first one, it was only a Saturday and Sunday event. People were there on the Friday, but it was mostly just to buy passes.

The thing is, I was far too excited to sleep or read the program which told me what time the convention would open up on Saturday. Natrually, I assumed it would open bright and early. Because hey, who wouldn't want that?

(Probably the staff who wanted to sleep in, but that wasn't any of my concern back then.)

I had two of my friends coming to the very first Ai-kon with me. One girl who I'd met in school that year (we were in the same ninth grade class) and one of her friends who had come in from Saskatchewan.

On top of being extremely excited for the convention and spending most of our Friday evening at the U of M even though there wasn't much to do there, we had also dressed up.

I'll take a moment to explain this to you. Cosplay is the act of dressing up as an anime character. It's a staple of any convention, with people walking around in costumes, getting stopped to have their photo taken, and entering in a contest which basically everyone at the con goes to watch.

So what did the three of us dress up as? Well, not only did we dress up - we actually kinda did "cross play" which is dressing up as the opposite sex. We went as three pilots from Gundam Wing. I went as Quatre, the girl in my class went at Wufei and her friend went as Duo. We were cool.

This shouldn't really come as a big shock, as Gundam Wing is the fangirl anime. It doesn't focus on plot so much as sexy Gundam pilots. And that was a-ok with us.

So the girls showed up at my house in full costume on Saturday morning at 9am. Apparently they'd stayed up most of the night too and hadn't bothered to check the program. When we finally took a peek to try and find out what event we should do first we were hit with a shock.

Convention opens at 12 noon.

D'oh! So, what were we going to do for three hours before we could make the trek to the U of M? (This was before the days of mindlessly hanging out in the halls of the University). If you guessed wander around Fort Richmond without getting changed out of our Cosplay, you'd be right!

You'd also be right if you guessed our first stop would be the Asian Food Market. We didn't spend a lot of time there, though. Why waste all our money on food there when we needed it to buy stuff at the convention.

Eventually, we did get hungry. So we decided to go across the street to the worst mall ever. It shouldn't even be called a mall. It has a Zellers, a Safeway, a Shoppers Drug Mart and a couple of other tiny stores. It's totally ghetto, but Safeway was bound to have cheaper food than the Asian Food Market. That's right, this "mall" doesn't even have a food court.

By the time we got to Safeway, we were dying of heat. It was July, so this wasn't really uncommon. After wandering around for a few minutes, we came face to face with the ice cream aisle.

If you can picture three girls staring down a glowing grocery store aisle with looks of awe on their faces that would be great, thanks.

Of course we bought a carton of ice cream since that was cheaper than getting three little individual drumsticks, and I'm not even sure you could get individual ones at Safeway anyway. As we were about to pay, we were struck with another conundrum.

How were we going to eat it?! This problem was easily solved by buying a box of plastic spoons.

After paying for our "food" we sat down at a bench and commenced digging in. And man, was it ever good. We were so hungry that we just gobbled down that ice cream, we didn't even talk or giggle about what we were doing and how ridiculous this all was. (We really did afterwards, though.)

The icing on the cake is that we didn't even make it halfway through the carton before a security guard came up to us and told us he was kicking us out of the mall. We tried to argue with him, saying we'd bought the ice cream at Safeway, and what was wrong with eating it? He told us that this was "inappropriate use of the bench" and that we'd have to leave.

We never did end up finishing that ice cream, since by that time it was probably around 11:30 and time to start walking over to the U of M (another story in itself). I'll leave you with this - that box of plastic spoons and 20 in it, and that day we only used 3.

(Title reference: The name of the 11th episode of Gundam Wing)

Running Around Like a Little Kid...1, 2, 3 and I'm Hit Hit Hit!

As someone who has never so much as taken one class at the University of Manitoba, I sure have spent a lot of my time there.

UMAnime was the first Anime Club I attended, and I went there for about 2 years give or take. At first it was just me walking down to the University Centre, sitting quietly in the back of the club room alone and watching CardCaptor Sakura.

Eventually, it became a total 180 from that. I would go every second Saturday with my best friend and we'd meet up with two other girls there. The routine was always the same, our first stop would be at the convenience store in the University Centre (GPAs I think it was/is called) to buy junk food and then head up to the club room. The girl at the store eventually got to know us so well that she'd be able to tell us if the other half of our group had already been there or not. Because this was vital information. Even though we were about to head up to the club room in five minutes to see for ourselves.

Armed with snacks and caffeine we would sit in the back of the room and talk, draw, giggle and play card games. Oh yeah, and sometimes we'd actually watch the anime that was being shown. That's the thing about being a young anime fangirl. You don't actually watch a lot of anime so much as be loud and obnoxious. Because of this, I'm pretty sure everyone else in that club despised us. I can't imagine why. It wasn't like we left empty bottles of Peach Iced Tea laying around or often left the room loudly while walking in front of the projector.

...Moving on.

A couple Saturdays a year, the UMAnime club would hold an open house. This was basically a glorified club meeting. Instead of watching the shows in a cramped room in the University Centre, they'd show stuff in the rooms in the Armes building. These rooms were actual lecture halls and they were really nice from what I remember. (Nice for anime club, anyway.)

Of course, having the meeting in this other building meant a longer journey from the store to the rest of the action. That was okay though - there was an underground tunnel that led us straight there!

There was only one problem. The store closed around 5pm and these bigger meetings ran much later than that. So, our last trip to the store consisted of all four of us buying everything we thought we would need to get through the rest of the evening.

It's hard for four fifteen year old girls to carry that much Peach Iced Tea and God forbid we put it in our backpacks or something.

As you were probably expecting, one of us drop a bottle and it breaks on the concrete of this ghetto tunnel. I'm pretty sure we all just kind of stood there for a second, before actually doing the smart thing and kind of cleaning it up.

By kind of cleaning it up I mean we threw away the broken glass and half assed wiped up the spill. Then we skipped along on our merry way back to actually watch stuff. That mess? Nope, couldn't have been us. I mean, we actually *drink* our Peach Iced Tea, not foolishly drop it!

We spent another year or so after that going to UMAnime. I guess for whatever reason the spill stayed around for a while and didn't ever get properly cleaned causing a stain. Every time we walked past that stain we took a moment to stop and bow to the bottle of Peach Iced Tea that didn't get to fulfill its destiny of keeping us caffeinated and able to annoy everyone around us.

It was a sad life for Peach Iced Tea, I can see why that particular bottle would lose the will to live.

(Title Reference: Song lyric from Dragonfly by Smile.DK)

Crybaby Saka's Brilliant Transformation!

Hi everyone! If you're reading this it means I actually got this Blogger thing to work. Go me!

You're probably here because you found the link on my facebook or twitter account. In that case I probably don't need to do much explaining as to who I am, because you obviously already know. But in the off chance that you randomly stumbled upon my attempt at a blog I'll give you a short introduction. My name's Steph (though online I go by Saka) I'm 24 years old and I am a Web Developer from Winnipeg.

Whew. That doesn't sound very interesting does it? It's not. My life is pretty boring, but it wasn't always that way. As a teenager I was a total nerd. (Okay, still am..) You'd think that would also bring about a pretty boring middle school and high school life.

Well, you'd be wrong. I practically grew up at anime conventions and anime clubs. Getting a bunch of socially challenged nerds in one place doesn't exactly make for a boring time.

So, I'm basically here to do what people have been telling to me to do for quite some time. Tell you about my messed up, and now that I'm older, hilarious teenage/young adult years. I'm not here to whine - I already did that enough back then. I'm just keen on telling all the stories I have because hey - they're pretty funny.

I don't know how often I'll be updating, but I'll try for once or twice a week. I don't have any type of order or plan for this either. I don't know if I'll tell you in any sort of order, or if I'll just pick out random stories. Also, I do still go to conventions, so definitely expect to see some posts with the tone of "kids these days!" No, I haven't completely grown out of my obsession just yet.

Also, I'm going to try to make all the titles of my posts reference to an anime. This one in particular is in reference to the first episode of Sailor Moon. (The Japanese title, not the super lame DiC dub title "A Moon Star Is Born". And now you all realize how much of a dork I really am..)

Oh yeah, here's the part where I'm covering my ass. This blog is not intended to cause drama of any kind and should anyone I knew in the past come across it (and you probably will) don't freak out. This is just a humorous look at what our lives used to be. (Can't you learn to laugh at yourself after all these years? No? Well, that's okay, sometimes I can't either.) I promise I won't use any real names.

And that sentence above should sum up what all you outsiders (or "normies" as we used to call non convention goers ;) are in for...