Good day, milady!

Today I went to Ren Fest with some Tjapkes friends (Lisa, Tim, Nate, and Tad). "Ren Fest" is what you can call a renaissance fair when you're nerdy enough to have gone to several of them. Kind of like in My Fair Lady when Eliza sings that she will "go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim."

Ren Fest is a splendid opportunity to dress up in costumes, to fake accents, and to wander around talking to people who are a little off-base themselves. We went to the Silver Leaf Renaissance Faire in Kalamazoo, which is the one I've been to most often. It wasn't as large as it has been in previous years, but it was still several hours of fun. 

My favorite part? Staring at the birds that appear in the falconry show. They are all dangerous, but they look so cute and cuddly (I suppose this is true of many things). I am fascinated by birds. I could simply sit staring at them for hours.

I love these broadly theatrical events. I wonder if I would get even further into them if I went alone, or if I would still hang back a bit. (This mirrors a larger question I have sometimes: how much is introversion self-censoring, and how much is personality-driven?) It's rather a moot point, as going alone would be sad and probably not something I would do. I might converse a bit more with strangers, but every two minutes or so I would be thinking about how much I wished one of my friends was there.

After Ren Fest the Tjapkes group and Brittany and I hung out for the evening, and Lisa worked on getting some of the knots out of my back, and we laughed ridiculously hard at all manner of ridiculous comments.

All in all, an enjoyable day.