Best Of the Sparkly Blue Dress

The followers of the Sparkly Blue Dress may have been disappointed that more of the pictures weren't readily available during the trip. Fear not! I've gone through the photos from the trip and put all of the pictures up in this album: https://picasaweb.google.com/108657251780585568136/WestWishesSparklyBlueDress#

For those who don't want to click through all that, I've picked the best of the bunch and included them in this post. Enjoy!

(1) At the airport- Charlotte, NC
(2) Near Red Rock State Park, Sedona, AZ
(3)-(9) Navajo Point, Grand Canyon, AZ
(10) Hoover Dam, AZ
(11) Thor's Hammer, Bryce Canyon, UT
(12) Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, CA

West Wishes 5: Why I Almost Left Vidcon

Why I Almost Left VidCon

(and why I’m glad I didn’t)

(For our YouTube video made at the YouTube conference, click here!)

(For a really great video talking about fans and especially teenage girl fans, go here: https://youtu.be/dcnwrqaBr4o)

An hour and a half after getting to the registration line and an hour after standing in a signing line and ten minutes in the exhibition hall, I was ready to leave VidCon. I’d had enough with all the people and the noise and the squeals and the rush. There were all these teenagers around me, talking in high voices and squeeing and rushing off to see someone I’d never heard of and all these vendors selling equipment that I could never afford much less justify purchasing. At that moment, there was absolutely no point for me to be there. This was a conference for someone who wasn’t me, someone who was either thirteen and a little obsessive and a lot loud or someone who was thirty and creating content. I didn’t want to be there.

So, of course, I sat down with my notebook and had a little pity party about how tired I was and how hungry I was and how this wasn’t what I wanted. I listened to guys next to me talk about how this was more calm than last year and how they liked how things were spread out and hearing about how much more overwhelming this experience could have been spiraled me down into depths of self-doubt not seen in… well, days, but I’ve been pretty doubty lately. 

I wore jeans, a fitted tank top, and a flannel to my first day at VidCon because we woke up late and because I assumed there’d be people like me. I saw dresses and dress shirts and snarky t-shirts, but no one who looked like me. My body does what it wants to do and the tank top kept slipping down and I felt like I looked like an old person trying to be young, except I probably just looked like a young person because my face doesn’t belong to my age. I decided that I needed to conform, just a little. I bought a green VidCon tank top. 

Now, I’m not saying that solved all of my problems. I left a signing line because I couldn’t deal with another line with a bunch of high school/first year college students meeting someone who I peripherally knew and also I was hungry. But hours later, after food and music and time away from people, we were sitting in the opening ceremony and wonderful person after wonderful person took the stage and I felt okay. Here was the community I had been missing.

And after that, it was just a battle of remembering that community. Joy was much better at I than I was- she took pictures with everyone she met, talked to everyone she wanted to talk to. I’m not an anti-social person, but this conference was not socially sound for me. There’s just a lot of stuff on youtube and so many different fan groups. There are nerds and nerdfighters and people who enjoy science content and those are the ones that I appreciate the most, but there are also all of the makeup people, the comedians, the people doing pranks and living their lives on the internet, and apparently people that preteens are really, really excited about. But there are people there, like the ones I met at Mental Floss trivia and took a tentacle picture with, and the ones who were in the Wheezy Waiter signing line, and all the scattered lovely interactions around the convention. 

Even without those people, all the panels I went to were beautiful and uplifting and encouraging. The Women on YouTube panel was full of brilliant women who were so empowering and so supportive of each other. The Race and Representation panel was a master class in awareness and boosting underprivileged voices. The Sexual Orientation panel was funny and heartfelt and gave me chills. The Vlogbrothers Q&A was like a little piece of home on a stage, shared with hundreds of other people and going to the Driftless Pony Club/Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers concert was a mosh pit of friendliness. 

The last night of VidCon, you have VidCon Prom, which was planned as the last flight of the blue dress. I wanted a picture in front of the VidCon sign, though, so we walked back around from the arena to the entrance we’d been using all week. I have never been told I was beautiful by so many people in a row.

And then, at the end of the night, walking back to our car, the heels switched out for flip flops, one of the girls walking back to the convention center said, and I quote, “Your dress slays me.” 

Well, damn. Thanks, kid. A perfect cap to a waveringly perfect three days.  

West Wishes 0.5- A Summary

I know, I know, it’s absurd that I’m halfway through my trip to the western US without having posted any kind of update. It does not bode well for the discipline I’d like to have this year. But I’ve been busy, as one should be when one is seeing a new part of the world, and so, while you’re waiting for a real blog post, may I offer you these verbal snapshots, occasionally accompanied by actual snapshots? 

• Sitting with our backs against the terminal wall, just below the window, we hear the announcement that our plane’s delayed by half an hour. There are the expected groans from the gathered crowd but I rush to the bathroom to put on my blue dress because the blue dress is for Big Moments and you cannot deny that sparkling my way back to my gate past all the tired gathered people that airports hold was a Big Moment. 

• Because our connections were tight and we never got to stop between either of our multi-hour flights, for practicality’s sake we picked aisle seats on the flight from Dallas to Los Angeles, which we jogged through the terminal to catch. There was absolutely no way I’d have made it nine hours cumulative hours of travel without visiting at least one restroom. But when the seatbelt sign was turned back on as we approached LA, the girls beside me raised their window shade and I could see large, jagged mountains on one side of the plane and the ocean on the other and that, I thought, was something very new.

• Hanging out with someone else’s family always has the potential to be a tightrope walk, but when someone else’s family lives ten minutes from the beach with the sea breeze pouring in and they welcome you with open arms, friendly dogs, and generous food, the rope turns into a wide platform, the fear of the fall a mile away to either side. 

• There’s this gigantic metal statue of a nude surfer riding a wave on Huntington Beach. We walked a couple blocks out of our way to see it. For exercise. Gotta work off that wine somehow. #adulthood

• For the first time in my life, someone told me to put my phone away, that my friends could wait until dinner was over, and I was left feeling the need to explain that these relationships, my friendships, are enriched by the thirty seconds I take to pull my friends into this moment in my life, to immediately share the raccoon taxidermy holding a kitten or the recipe for the most American burger I will ever consume, and that this sharing isn’t something that takes me away from the table, it’s something that brings others to it. Instead, I hit send and slid my phone into my pocket, because that’s the polite thing to do. LOOK AT THIS RACCOON, THOUGH:

The internet needs to know.

• LOOK AT ALL THESE WIND TURBINES. 

• LOOK AT ALL THESE CACTI. 

• The first time I caught a glimpse of the Grand Canyon, I gasped.

• We decided to do our blue dress pictures for the Grand Canyon at Navajo Point and after getting most of them, we found a ledge. I intended to sit down on the edge and dangle a foot off into the empty space, but all I could make myself do was sit with my legs crossed a solid sixteen inches from the edge. From there, I could see so far forward and left and right and up and down that I knew I should be in awe, but all I felt was afraid. 

More positives and quasi-positives to come, my friends! 

Sparkly Blue Dress

(Editor's note: I have a habit of writing pieces about objects that aren't really about the objects. One time, I wrote about black dresses. This post, though, is mostly actually about the blue dress.) 

So on Friday, I tried on my high school prom dress which I also wore for a formal in college. 

This beauty right here.

Now, for the uninitiated, trying on old clothes is the most direct measure of how far you’ve progressed as a female. Can’t fit into your high school stuff? Don’t worry, happens to the best of us. Can’t fit into your college stuff? Man, who can, am I right? None of us are the sizes we were. 

Did you catch the implications in those responses?  

There's an internal and external judgement, an idea that we were better when we could fit into these smaller clothes. "Don't worry" assumes that you should have been worrying. "None of us" is comfort by association, thinking that one needs to be comforted. Those sentences are the lines of middle-aged mothers admiring their daughters’ appearance, remembering with bitter nostalgia the days when they looked like that. It’s the toothy smile of trophy wives who believe that each pound is another step towards divorce. It’s the byline of the overarching society that puts the teenage female body on a pedestal while mocking the teenage girl mind and spirit.

High School Prom- the last time I had my nails done at a salon.

Now, I never much bought into physical appearance, especially in high school. The female heroes in my books were only told they were beautiful by the men who loved them and that was the only affirmation that mattered to them. Loving someone’s appearance to me was a part of the whole true love package- loving someone’s appearance without loving their personality, their mind, their abilities, was to love incompletely. Y’all, that’s the guiding principle Teenage Me went by. She also thought that love stories dropped fully formed from the heavens and into our lives and that’s why she was perpetually single. Well, that and the fact that she turned down two boys over the phone in half an hour one Christmas break, thereby offending the universe and confirming her spinsterdom. Thanks, Teenage Me. 

But I also didn’t have anything to complain about in high school. I probably have one of the lowest pimple counts of any teenager to exist, especially one who didn’t actually care for her skin in any way. I never had braces. I have nice hair. I was busy enough with enough physical activities that, while never skinny, I was never chubby. And I couldn’t have cared less about any of this. Nobody ever told me that I was pretty and nobody ever told me that I was ugly. Other than myself. I just assumed that I was a little bit ugly, like the rest of humanity. So my appearance moved to a tertiary concern at best.

College- when untagging pictures is a Sisyphean task

I don’t really have anything to complain about now. Sure, I spend more time on the couch than I used to and my muscles and joints are slowly betraying me and my diet is, just, extraordinarily questionable, but I’m not disgustingly displeased with the way I look. I like my style. I still like my hair. I don’t have an occasion to wear anything more strenuous than sweatpants most of the time, so the topic doesn’t really come up too frequently. 

The occasion does come around, though, and Friday’s occasion was pre-West Coast Adventure planning. There’s a VidCon prom and I really wanted to wear my blue sparkly dress. It’s not… dignified, so I don’t think I’ll have much call to wear it again. But I love it. I love being in it. It’s strapless and floor-length and it’s got that stiff mesh stuff that makes dress poof out in the skirt so you rustle everywhere you go. Petticoat? I don’t think it’s a petticoat. Whatever. And the dress leaves a trail of blue sparkles wherever it goes and if that’s not a life goal, I don’t know what is. I have it in my mind that I want to leave a trail of sparkles wherever I go, including the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, and ending at VidCon Prom. The last flight of the blue dress. 

Well, with such expectations, you can understand how disappointed I was when I couldn’t get the dress to zip up yesterday afternoon. Now, it was warm and the end of the day and I had substantial Chinese food and beer digesting in my stomach, so I was still left with hope despite the failure of my usual trick of zipping up the dress backwards and then twisting it around and pulling it up over any problematically large areas. It was just sweat and water weight. Only things between me and my dreams.

So this late-afternoon setback wasn’t all that bad and I definitely got over it- I went to the NC Blackberry Festival Friday Night beer garden with Joy and then we got pizza and went to a bar and it was, all in all, a good night. But I didn’t go back to the tank top and skirt I had been wearing that day. I settled for my comfy jeans and my green shirt, which I know I look stunning in without trying. I knew that I wasn’t excited to try to fit into anything else. 

Because for those ten seconds when I had to admit failure against the dress, all the ways I had learned to hate my body since high school came crashing down on me. Maybe it’s the backfat that I never had back when I was active and healthy. Maybe it's the surprise inches that have popped up across my measurements that came around for the same reason. All this is happening because you’re useless, you know, my spirit said. If you’d just exercised more or got your calories in some form other than liquid, you’d look much better. Look at you now. Your stomach is stretching your skin and your arms are chubby and have you looked at your cheeks recently? They’re like chipmunk cheeks, they’re so large. There’s no way your hair can make up for that, or for your double-chin. And let’s be honest, you don’t even know how to apply makeup to distract from what’s going on with the rest of the blob that is your body. And this damn dress still. won’t. zip. 

The lowest point, though, was when I thought about the girl that I had inherited the dress from. She went to my church and was graduating and was getting rid of old prom dresses and even though I was a couple years younger, we were about the same size. The blue dress had been a little loose in high school, but it was so pretty, I didn’t care. Of course, I wouldn’t let anyone take it in. But now, years in the future, as I struggled back out of the dress, I actually thought, “Well, now you’re fat like her.” 

Maybe I learned to judge bodies earlier than I thought. Other’s bodies. Not my own. 

I’m wearing the dress right now as I type this because I was just so damn proud of getting it on this morning. The trick worked and though the dress is snug, the zipper isn’t particularly strained. That little dumb hook thing at the top is never getting done, though. That’s silly. But I can’t shake the feeling that I feel better because now I feel prettier and more successful. I could get this dress back on. My prom dress from my junior year of high school. My formal dress from sophomore year of college. Yeah, I can still fit in it. Comfortably, ladies. Comfortably. 

And I know that’s wrong. I want to be excited because I get to wear my blue dress in all the places I wanted to wear it. It’s a plan fulfilled. But I can’t help feeling that the plan is dirty now because it’s tied into this body competition. Do I look as good in this dress as I did in high school? In college? As another girl would in this dress? 

Answer: hell yeah. 

You know what? Screw it. I’m going to choose to not participate in that. I’m a little exhausted by the fact that I’m going to have to choose to not participate in a daily mental body competition for the rest of my life, but hey, if it’s what it takes to be a good adult in this world, then that’s what I’ll do. And to the girl I got the dress from, I’m so sorry I even remotely thought disparagingly of your body. You have beautiful taste in clothes and are perfect the way you are. Thanks for making this moment possible. 

So yeah. 

Grand Canyon, here we come.

(Wanna know how this story ends? Find a "Best of the Blue Dress" post here.)