One last plug: Tonight from 9 pm to midnight is the Goth N Ghouls open skate prom at Rainbow Rink in North Tonawanda. It's $7 to get in which includes skate rental. Come in a crazy costume, buy merch and bake sale items, skate around, ogle some rollergirls' tits, and then go to the (e:strip) Halloween bash-- it's a great way to get additional mileage (literally!) out of one costume, and also you can support Crisis Services, to whom we're donating part of the proceeds for the evening.
And now to your regularly-scheduled post:

Halloween is a very special holiday to me. As a possessor of a ginormous rack, and an appreciator of the human form in its many complexities especially the more rounded (or smooth, for that matter) ones, I love the fact that people, mostly women but also certain demographics of usually-pleasingly-shaped men, tend to use Halloween as an excuse to Release Their Inner Ho-Bag.
Last night we had a party at the Knockouts' team captain's house wherein we drank beer, swapped iron-on letters, and cleaned our skate bearings. (The bearings are the little thingies that make our wheels turn, and most of us have no more idea of how to maintain the things than we know how to fly a plane. One of our OCD teammates, who can be relied upon to know how to clean anything [and also is a teacher and thus can be relied upon to explain things clearly], gave a little seminar on cleaning them.)
At this party one particular teammate was talking about how she'd helped her friend with her costume. This other girl was going as Amy Winehouse, and my teammate was in charge of Sharpieing the tattoos on. My teammate took it upon herself to take over design of the costume. The wifebeater was too conservative, so she cut it. The bra was white-- no, that could not be, so she ransacked the girl's closet and chose another one. "That bra is really hoochie," said the costume-wearer. "And it shows now that the shirt is ripped."
"You have to commit to your character!" my teammate said. "What would Amy Winehouse do?"
"You're right," the girl said. "You're right! I have to commit to my character!"
Apparently the tattoos were spot-on by the end-- even smudged a little to mimic how awful Winehouse's real tattoos are. ("Why are you licking me?" the girl asked as my teammate used her dampened thumb to smudge the ink. "Commit to your character!" my teammate snapped back.)
She stood back and admired your handiwork. "Girl," said my teammate, "you are going to make out with somebody tonight."

I think this is the spirit of Halloween. You dress up as somebody else, expose parts of your body you normally wouldn't (but, hopefully, should), commit to a character and do your freaky thing.
I do sympathize with (e:hodown)'s weariness with girls whose idea of "costuming" is to put "slutty" in front of any other word and run with it-- most of the girls who do this have no fucking imagination, so the end result winds up being alarmingly tedious. (I say alarming because it seems terrible to contemplate a situation in which a chick revealing most of her body is tedious, but then you remember that in essence, most humans are idiots, and idiots are tedious no matter what they're wearing.)

So I'm looking forward to tonight-- most of my roller derby leaguemates are anything but tedious, and all are more than moderately hot. Many of them have promised either boobs or ass tonight in their costumes. Given that my impression of the hotness of most of these people was formed during long sweaty baggy-shirt-wearing interludes of getting my ass handed to me, I am anticipating a great deal of awesome.
I'm not saying that this event is a gross ogle-fest, I'm just saying, I appreciate me some scenery and also I look forward to having my boobs ogled over. It will be fun. Also there will be roller skating.
And then I will come to the (e:strip) party and maybe I'll still be on roller skates! I cleaned my outdoor wheels' bearings so I can skate fast in them. :D

And now for something completely different:

This is Chita's favorite hang-out spot. This may become my new userpic. I love the Tits-N-Pussy theme.

I know this is the same night as the (e:strip) Halloween party, but this is a really good way to get two uses out of one costume.
October 27th, the Queen City Rollergirls are hosting an open skate, Halloween-themed: Goths and Ghouls!
Come in costume, we'll have a bake sale and a merch sale, and we'll have a DJ and we'll be here in costume as well, on skates. This is your only chance to skate with the rollergirls!
And we'll go easy on you, because we won't be in our protective gear either and we may be hardcore, but we're not crazy-- we're just there to party. Open skate, bust a move if you got any, otherwise totter around in a circle and we promise we won't hit you.
(If anyone wants to borrow kneepads or wristguards I have extra, by the way.)
Skate rental is included with admission, I believe.

Please come support us and also if you come I'll feel less silly showing up late to the (e:strip) party in an undead-rollergirl costume.

So I found the original post, I guess, about Blogtoberfest.


Oh really?
Yeah really?

If you're not there, we will talk trash about you.

Oh?
And what if we are there?

Eh well, whatever, I guess I'm done feeling ill-at-ease about that.

I think we should invite all these people to the Halloween party, though.

We got Chita spayed on Friday. I had been nervous about it basically since we got her, though friends had reassured me-- most said oh you Do Not Want to Deal with a female cat in heat, but I still felt guilty about life-threatening surgery that is, in essence, entirely elective. Until another friend pointed out that she'd felt like me and had just kept her female cats indoors and not spayed them, and hadn't had much trouble dealing with them going into heat-- but then the 12-year-old one nearly died of pyrometria. Apparently female cats don't have self-cleaning uteruses the way humans do! So if they don't have the occasional pregnancy to clean things out, their uteruses can become infected! Years and years of accumulated infection nearly killed the older cat, and the 7-year-old also had an infection brewing.
So I felt much better.

We got Chita back yesterday. She was yowling and kicking up a racket in the back when we got there-- "Yes, that's her," the vet tech said, "she's the only cat here," but apparently she was just upset at being left alone, because the tech had been petting her and talking to her all morning. So we felt better.
Kenmore Animal Hospital, on Kenmore Ave nearish to Colvin-- they're really sweet people, and not real busy so you can usually get an appointment without waiting too long, and the vet himself, Dr. Malo, is a Zen-like, mellow dude, kinda looks like Steve Wozniak but hotter and younger-- just this big bear of a guy who talks quietly and says nice things. He's thrice-diagnosed Chita as being among the cutest of kittens ever.
And her stitches look good-- well, they're ugly, but you know what I mean.
And she's running around like an idiot. She was a little subdued yesterday, but not as much as I would be after an ovo-hysterectomy. Hell, she was less subdued than I was, and all I had was a bad case of menstrual cramps.

Anyway-- obligatory cat update. And here is a photo of the two of us sharing our Female Troubles in our new bed, which I don't know if Z has blogged, but we have a new Big Grown Up bed and Chita takes up most of it.

I tried to leave this as a comment on allthingsjennifer but I guess she doesn't want to hear it, as when I clicked "post" it just disappeared. (e:zobar) said his got moderated, but I didn't even get that notification. So I guess she doesn't think we're funny, or whatever.
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I would've thought the old stereotype about bloggers/computer geeks being pathologically averse to real-life human contact was outdated, but either no other Buffalo Bloggers besides (e:strip) and Punaro could actually be pried away from their computers long enough to leave the house, or the prospect of speaking to strangers overwhelmed all the other Buffalo Bloggers.

I know the (e:strip)pers can be kind of a close-knit cliquey group, but we don't bite and we'd've been happy to talk to other people... But I was so uncomfortable there, the way all the middle-aged surburbanite ladies were staring disapprovingly at me, that I really couldn't tell whether any of them were trying to socially network or not, and it did a real number on my propensity to happily meet new people. I mean, I'm not shy, but who'd've thought a Ye Olde Busty Beer Wench costume would get so many disapproving glares? At OKTOBERFEST! My skirt was longer than that old dude's lederhosen! Come on. I've never been so disapproved of in my <i>life</i>.

I really won't be terribly eager to show up to any more Buffalo Blogging events in the future-- there's nothing quite so uncomfortable as being told there's a party and then having the person who told you about it not show up. It's an unpleasant timewarp back to junior high. At least when (e:paul) hosts a party at his house, you know he'll be there.
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I mean, whatever-- we had some fun, I enjoyed the pierogis and beer, it wasn't so bad. But Jesus. I didn't go as a stripper-- i decided, somewhat last-minute, that I should go in the spirit of the thing, as a beer wench.
I don't know how many of you have seen me in costume before. Roller derby has cured me of the last tiny vestiges of body shame I had; now I really don't mind if the whole city sees most of my ass, because it's all in the spirit of things. Now, I didn't dress skimpily-- I decided I would opt for 'tasteful', as you never know who'll be at these things. But my 'tasteful' simply involves showing less than three inches of cleavage* and no ass-cheek whatsoever.

So I wore a sprung-steel-boned corset, a three-quarter-sleeved white (opaque!) chemise, and a miniskirt with a frilly corset. I also wore opaque tights with black lace thigh-highs over them. Out of habit, I wore short bike shorts under the skirt, ensuring that no ass cheek would show even if the skirt flipped up. All in all, it was slightly racy, but obviously a costume as opposed to clubbin' gear, and no underwear was exposed.

I got stared at. Other women were wearing dirndls of varying degrees of authenticity. Other women even had short skirts. There were people in all kinds of clothing, including a girl in a black mini-dress and fuck-me boots. Yes, my breasts are unsubtle, particularly when elevated in a corset, but it wasn't a lingerie corset-- it was a reproduction 16th-century noblewoman's pair of bodies, which is generally tubular in shape and elevates but squashes the breasts. I really wasn't showing that much tit.

Anyway. It was a deeply uncomfortable experience, and maybe there were other bloggers who were too busy disapproving of my un-cool garb to speak to us? I don't know. The only other person who self-identified as a blogger there was the dude from Punaro.org, who wouldn't even sit with us, but sat with his family at a neighboring table. I assume they were his family, anyway.
Maybe there were other bloggers there, I don't know. Maybe I should've made more of an effort to find out. I don't know. But I was far too intimidated by the disapproving and faintly-hostile glares of the rest of the Oktoberfest attendees (men too! Since when has a man in his late 30s been so horrified by a woman's cotton-covered breasts that he can't even look at her? People were falling over to avoid looking at me, unless they were glaring at me.) to be able to nerve myself up to go talk to them. So I sat next to the Blogtoberfest sign from 6pm until 9pm, and was carefully Not Spoken To by anybody except the (e:strip)pers.

Awesome-- I feel so much a part of Buffalo's Blogging Community, I'm totally going to more events. I can't wait to be ignored or glared at by yet more people. It's so worth my time and effort. I love social networking.


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• As Edith Wharton comments in The Age of Innocence, and I'm paraphrasing because I haven't read the book in a decade or so,

"Three inches of cleavage is fashionable, but four is just vulgar."