Outdone

I've always been skeptical about anything that my mother ever told me after the fateful day when I learned that she'd misspelled the word "lose" by adding an extra O (loose). It seems silly now, but it was a big deal for a third grader who'd just gotten an award for being a terrific speller.

One day I came home upset because my science fair project didn't win a prize. My demonstration of the power of water's surface tension lost out to an exhibit on the conservation of the wetlands. It was actually a stuffed/mounted duck on top of magazine photos of trees and marshes. Kelly Beal, the girl who won, made a giant Rube Goldberg machine that took up four tables and made my dinky little dishes of water look pretty silly. What a crock. Instead of building up my confidence by telling me how great my project was or blasting the other projects, my mother simply raised her eyebrow and said "get used to it. There's always going to be someone better than you."

Fast forward twenty years into the future, where all of her 'sage' advice has turned a precocious little queer boy into a slightly paranoid young gay man who almost never gets his hopes up. There are few things that get me excited these days, and one of them happens to be be dressing up for Halloween.

I've been making my own costumes for a long time. I've put sexy spins on costumes such as The Green Lantern, The Cat in the Hat, and Inspector Gadget. Gadget was something that I was particularly proud of because the fun little mechanical arm that came out of the hat took months for me to perfect. It's very rewarding and a lot of fun to showcase your creativity. I felt very confident that I was going to look good in this year's costume until I stumbled upon a website called Cosplay.com.

Cosplay is a huge subculture of men and women who dress up like characters from anime, video games, or science fiction and fantasy universes. If you think you've seen it all after attending a comic book convention, then think again. Cosplayers have raised the bar extremely high for fellow costumed roleplayers, so attending a cosplay event with your long hair wrapped up in two buns and calling yourself Princess Leia just won't cut it.

There are thousands of registered users on Cosplay.com and the majority of them have made some stellar costumes. People have done costumes that'll make your jaw drop, and I am feeling a little inadequate with the costume I am currently making. Seeing these elaborate costumes suddenly made me think of Kelly Beal's Rube Goldberg Machine in the third grade. What's worse is that my mother's words flashed into my brain with burning reality. There IS always someone better than me!

You can turn this around any way you want by saying that it's not what others think that matters. You can tell me that the important thing is that I'm doing what makes me happy. But in the end, I'll still be wearing hand-stitched Lycra, standing next to the person wearing light-up robotic implants with motorized parts. Sometimes it helps to not think about it.