Last weekend, the Scotsmontonian and I were walking down Whyte avenue in Edmonton when suddenly, something caught my eye in a shop window.

Actually, it wasn’t in the shop window, it was in the shop but I saw it through the window. Actually, it was on the farthest wall of the shop, but I managed to bionically zoom in on it through the window. I couldn’t believe it. It was my long-lost treasure of childhood. Something I’d been dreaming of finding again for the past 26 years: the perfect Wonder Woman costume.

26 years ago, at the tender age of eight, I outgrew the Wonder Woman costume my mom had lovingly made me. I’ve been wanting another one ever since. Lightspeedmom says I waited impatiently (duh) by the sewing machine. All I remember is that it had straps on the bustier, which was incorrect, but mom wisely wouldn’t have it any other way.

I quickly broke my “I’ll-never-do-the-girlfriend-thing-of-making-you-wait-as-I-try-on-clothes” promise to the Scotsmontonian and swiftly dragged him into the shop. Minutes later, the last costume was taken off the mannequin, tried on and bought. I was as happy as when I was seven.

The previous day, Justice League Heroes had come out and the Scotsmontonian purchased it for us. This is a game in which you get to be various superheroes, including Wonder Woman. So I got to play Wonder Woman, dressed like Wonder Woman.

I’ve since returned from Edmonton and have hung the costume among my normal clothes in the closet. There something intensely cool about seeing it hang there, like Diana Prince’s laundry day.

Morals: it doesn’t have to be Halloween to dress up like Wonder Woman, and like the guy says, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Again.

Cool, my own Where is Waldo game.

(Taken at the 2006 Classique du Parc Lafontaine race - Thank you Eric B!)

I kicked off a new project today, and though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something in the leads meeting felt odd.

On the project I just finished, I had a female production manager, lead programmer, lead animator and art director. We got on swimmingly, like I don’t think I’ve ever gotten along with a group of women before. There’s something about dames who game that’s different from other women. They’ve usually had traditionally masculine interests their whole lives, and are used to being mostly male environments. They each had a beautiful confidence and strength to them, whilst each being all woman, and I adored them for it. After a lifetime of sharing interests only with boys, and feeling a little self-conscious around girls about my enthusiasm for sci-fi and comic books, I revelled in finally finding sisters who had had the same experience. Jokes floated about how our team got priority service from the tools and IT groups because of the pheromone factor, but I didn’t care. I was proud to head such a demographical oddity in the company. I was proud to work for a company where such a team existed.

We’ve tried to keep the team together, but many of those fabulous ladies are now moving on to other things, having been promoted to head their own projects or simply being a better fit on other projects. And I realized that the odd thing about the new leads meeting was that there were now only two of us women at the table.

It may in turn be odd to be surprised at finding myself with a mostly male team… in games development. After all, nothing should be more normal. But I’m happy to have had the chance to take the abnormal for granted for a while.
(PS. That being said, everyone on the team rawks anyway. You know I love you gamer boys too).

This is the last race of the year, I told myself as I kicked myself out of bed this morning and dragged my ass to Lafontaine Park.

I was neck-and-neck with a mysterious person of unknown age and gender for most of the last four kilometers. They would pass me, I would pass them, repeat. They were tiny and crooked, groaning and panting like an elderly person, and I couldn’t tell anything else about them because they were wearing a hat and sunglasses. But struggle as they did, my mystery opponent wouldn’t give up.

I sprinted the last of the race, forgetting about Mysterio until I crossed the finish line. As I was lining up to have my rank recorded, I turned around and there she was, and she was old. An old lady who had given me a run for it, no pun intended. We spontaneously high-fived and hugged.

Her age and ranking had attracted attention, and a volunteer said in appreciation, “Isn’t it unfair how nature distributes talent so unevenly?”

“Nature? Talent?”, she replied. “No such thing. I frikkin work for this!”

Then someone asked her age, and she proudly said 68. Exactly twice my age.

And that’s when I thought, This is so not the last race.

When does this bug occur?

After 8 hours of play. How should we handle it?

Lock up the console and display the message, “go play outside”.

I got off the short flight to Boston and spent an hour staring up at a maze of exposed wires, ducts and tubes in the missing ceiling of Logan airport. What an ugly spot for a reunion, I thought. I wondered if I could snap a shot of the labyrinth of wires without being arrested for terrorist activities, and decided against it. A security officer chatted me up. I tried to look as unterrorifying as possible, begging him in my head to go away. Finally the Scotsmontonian came off his overnight flight.

After a few iterations of trial and error with what our holidays, bank accounts and personal fortitude can sustain, the Scotsmontonian and I have settled into a routine of meeting every three weeks, once here, once there, and once somewhere else. So here we were, somewhere else.

After Air Canada cheerfully reported that his luggage would “surely follow soon”, and I told the story of how an airline once lost my dead grandfather’s body for the 1000th time, we were on our way into Boston. I reflected in the hot and nasty subway that it should really be spruced up, as it’s probably the first Boston experience for many tourists.

When I was little, my grandfather went to Mexico and drowned. The airline lost the body for a few days. A really important person called my mother and apologized. As far as I know, they did not offer to compensate financially by the kilo. 1001.

It would be the last time I called Boston ugly in any way. That Boston is beautiful is something I’ve always known in the back of my mind, but had to see for myself to really know, like the fact that Milk Bones only look yummy. This weekend, the former became glaringly obvious. What’s unique about Boston’s beauty is that its many spots of gorgeous, from the brownstones of the South End, through the impressive sci-fi buildings of the financial district, to the quaint Quincy and neighboring marina, are not connected to each other through corridors of ugly, as is often the case. Boston does a good job of hiding its ugly, if ugly there is.

Our favorite sci-fi building was 111 Huntington, which is topped with a dome of concentric circles. It is surely the site of many an endgame battle between superheroes and villains. I mean, it just looks like it would attract epic apocalyptic showdowns between evil and light. When the circles begin spinning on themselves, they surely open a vortex that sucks cats and dogs (nothing else, mind you) into another plane of existence.

We visited the sites of the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, saw the USS Constitution, Paul Revere’s house and Cheers. I love big cities that are not built according to a grid plan, probably because I’ve never had to drive in one. But there it is, wedge-shaped buildings make me warm and fuzzy. At the Quincy Market, I turned down the Scotsmontonian’s offer to buy me Boston terrier earrings. Then I kind of regretted it.

I had to promise the Scotsmontonian that Cliff and Norm were only on vacation, that they otherwise would be sitting at the bar, and that of course they knew his name.

After two days in Beantown, we took the ferry to Provincetown, a “gay-friendly oceanside community”. After giving us a tour of our seaside cottage, our host handed us a paper detailing the local current events, which had a picture of a person in a gimp suit on the cover. Embarrassed, he tried to apologize for the current leather festival, but we told him we lived in the Village. I never thought posing as a veteran of the fetish scene would get me out of an awkward situation. As if to keep up the pretense, we went for a little walk and ended up going into a fetish shop, the only open shop that night. A small group of round, past-middle-aged female tourists from Orlando attracted our attention when the eldest one fell backwards onto the floor. When I asked what had shocked her so, the owner showed me the rock chick, a female stimulation device. That’s when I decided that the Orlandonians were probably not here for the leather fest. At the same time I wondered if the Scotsmontonian would have offered to buy me that, had it come in a Boston terrier motif.

Last month, there was an article in Runner’s World about the spirituality of running, and about using running as a way to disconnect from the tangible world, to commune with the spiritual. Cool, I thought, then made a mental note of reading more about it, then promptly forgot all about it.

Last night, I went for a treadmill run to forget a work-related trouble that’s been affecting the quality of my sleep. While I was running, I saw the issue scale down to nothing in my mind. It was nothing compared to everything else, compared to me, my will, my lifeforce. I couldn’t even get myself to care about it, even if I tried. I stretched my arms out feeling I could take flight. As I was finishing, I read the following in Runner’s World: “[When running] I break through the invisible plastic shield that separates me from life. I don’t care that I had three drinks last night and decided to be candid. I don’t care if the basement floods. I’m not myself. I’m all men and I’m not a man at all.” That was exactly what I was feeling. I have to blog this, I thought.

Then this morning, Patrick e-mailed me “thought you might like what she says“. She is Julie, friend-of-friends whom I’ve never met, talking most eloquently about the special zen of running, and finishing with a link to that very same Runner’s World article I read last night. That’s transcending the literal world too, and I take transcendence wherever I can get it.