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?

[pinkthulhu.livejournal.com]

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

[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.