The Indifferent Faerie

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Pinky promise that regular dispatches from the front lines will return next week.

This past weekend I went to FaerieCon, a sort of convention thingy like other convention thingies where people with like minds and deep pockets gather to enjoy their mutual interests. I went to FaerieCon mostly to see my peeps from the Spoutwood Fairie Festival (save the date ... May 4, 5, 6, 2012) and to help sit the booth they put up to promote Spoutwood.

It's gratifying work, manning a Spoutwood Fairie Festival booth at a faerie convention about 30 minutes from Spoutwood's location. More than half the people who passed the table had either been to Spoutwood, or knew about it but never had come, or were keenly interested in its nearby location. No hard sell on my end, and Big Red always enjoys seeing the children.

But you know, I have "teacher brain." I call it "teacher brain" because in order to learn the names and key facts about 150 new people every year, you have to let some other cognition slide. In this latest case of "teacher brain," I neglected to note that FaerieCon now has its Good Faerie Ball on Friday night and its Bad Faerie Ball on Saturday night.

I thought I was coming to the Good Faerie Ball, to spend an evening dancing myself to exhaustion. I packed accordingly.

When I arrived at the con, and discovered that I would be seeing QNTAL, a Medieval fusion band, at the Bad Faeries Ball, I was distraught. I've got nothing against QNTAL, they're great, but it's like being told that you're going on a haunted hayride instead of attending the Halloween dance. Both hayrides and dances are swell, but they come with different sets of expectations.

Readers, I did what I could to make my lavender Druid cloak look "bad." Alas, the first con attendee who saw me headed for the Bad Faerie Ball told me, "You don't look bad at all."

Which in many contexts would be a compliment. In this case, not so much.

So I decided to be an Indifferent Faerie. Maybe I'll let the "good" and "bad" in me fight it out for a few days while remaining indifferent. And in the future, I will pay more attention to dates when attending balls, buzzard fests, and bazaars.

The date of the Mummers Parade is easy to remember. But oh, snap! When are those rehearsals?