deer in the headlights

[freckles_and_doubt]

Lovely moment at about 1am this morning, driving back in a haze of exhaustion from a LARP that did the usual time-distortion post-midnight surreality... at the campus exit, a small herd of about a dozen deer, calmly cropping the grass by the side of the road. They didn't like me stopping to watch them and, with that curiously feline "you're in my space" sort of look, drifted off into the dark. I don't know how they got out of the Rhodes Memorial park, but I have a wonderful mental image of them wandering down University Avenue, hooves tapping on the bricks, to drink at the Chinese fountain. Our daily lives are haunted by the strangest and most unsuspected midnight ghosts.

The older I get, the more set I get in my ways. I don't actually LARP for the plotting, at which I am very bad: I LARP for the challenge of getting into a character, actually being someone different. Glove puppetry LARPing. I like to feel that I know what makes a personality tick. Last night's LARP was fun, and had some lovely space-opera concepts going for it, but my character was a Bad Guy, a total bigot with very few redeeming features, and I find that very difficult to play. You have to believe in someone in order to recreate them, and my ability to manipulate other players diminishes rapidly when I have no unified or plausible sense of myself as a character. Then again, I'm still very tired from this horrible cold, and was definitely not at my best. I staggered home after the deer and spent the whole night dreaming I was ill in bed.

In other news, generally unguided by a witterer response poll that was almost exactly balanced between long and short, I cut all my hair off. Or, not quite all, but a good chunk of it. It's a nice cut. I'm happy ;>.

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Ooh, what kind of Bambis? These?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

They were a lot more solid than impala - actually, I think they may have been fallow deer. There's a small herd of the European species in the grounds of the memorial; they're talking about relocating them (http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=330&fArticleId=3347166). Understandable, but they're pretty. Sigh.

[pinkthulhu.livejournal.com]

I was one of the ones who voted for a cut, so Woo! How does it feel? :)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Odd :>. I've had hair down my back for several years now, it's a strange feeling to miss the weight of it. But it's a lovely, bouncy, layered cut - I find myself tossing my head and running my fingers through it a lot more :>.

[bumpycat.livejournal.com]

We demand pictures!

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's the same for you, but I find that all my challenges to roleplay a "bad guy" stem from my discomfort in isolating those attributes in myself. It's easy to play someone wounded, because I've been wounded. Or a hero, because I don't mind expressing that in myself. But a "bad guy," or particularly a bigot, goes against my ideals so much that I might actually pride myself on an inability to inhabit his essence. Ie: I'm so evolved, I'm sickened by even the idea of bigotry! If I stop making it about me, though, I find that even the most evil character is redeemable. Even bigots think they are justified, and even criminals see themselves as heroes.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, and there's a certain guilty pleasure in creating a bigot who completely believes they represent the only possible way, let alone the right one - my Saturday character was like that, and that was the fun part. I can do sexist matriarchalist with the best of them :>. The problem was that she had no traits I could really express within the LARP that were in any way relatable to anything I think or feel - I suppose, no hook I could hang her on. I suspect it was the way she was written - I couldn't understand her enough to construct her, if that makes sense. There was no "in" to the character, at least of the kind my personal role-playing style seems to need. Which I am cheerfully able to admit is probably a flaw in my personal role-playing style, alas.

[khoi-boi.livejournal.com]

possibly (for whomever plays her at DF) picking up on the "Matri" part of Matriarchal? The whole "Motherly Pride" bit, I think, could be wrung out into a character that was less...just less, I guess. Not saying "earthmother", more like, oh, I don't know - like a Queen Bee seeing off her little Princess I suppose? I'm not articulating that well, I'm afraid.

Well, I'm off to shave of my alarming face fungus, if I can find a new razorblade...