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)