Last night I went to a "dress as your favorite celebrity" party. Since I have a collection of about three costume’s that I rotate around depending on the need, I decided to go with my Star Trek red shirt and go as a Star Trek dude. Yeah, technically a Star Trek dude in a red shirt isn’t a celebrity (I don’t think James "Scotty" Doohan is a big enough celebrity to muster a costume) but the concept of a Star Trek red shirt is a celebrity in and of itself. It’s almost iconic and isn’t the whole point of dressing as a celebrity to dress as something iconic? Besides, it’s not like I wanted to put any effort into getting an outfit together.

The party goes on and I suddenly realize that there’s a problem with dressing up as a Star Trek person at a party. That is, of course, it’s way too easy to be seen as some uber-geek by everyone at the party. After all, when you’re at a party in which most of the people you either don’t know or don’t really know that well, you don’t want to be seen as the kind of guy who guys to conventions. And let’s face it, in Geek culture, Trekkies are the bottom of the barrel, the guys even Star War nerds beat up. Hell, Lord of the Rings nerds beat them up too.

I was doing fine for much of the evening but then while talking to a bunch of people somebody tried to figure out who I was. For whatever reason, they all somehow came to the conclusion that I was Sulu. Now, I could have just played along with the joke and said, "yep, I’m Sulu" and not come off as geeky, but, of course, I couldn’t. Because, as anyone knows, Sulu was a yellow shirt (Federation Officer) and not a Red Shirt. Hello?

Blew that cover.

Then, later on in the night, people started coming up to my shirt, pressing the Star Trek insignia, and saying things like "beam me up, Captain" thinking that the insignia was also the communicator. Once again, I could have played along with it, but, of course, I had to open my mouth. I mean, who isn’t aware of the fact that in the original Star Trek, they used communicators to communicate and it wasn’t until the "Next Generation" that the insignia’s also worked as communicators. Sheesh.

Guess who’s now known as the biggest geek on the kickball team?

Speaking of geeks, in a moment of impulse shopping, I ordered a kick-ass Buffy poster online. The site offered to send it framed, but it would have been another $80 to frame it. Considering I can get a cheap frame thing at Wahlgreen’s and considering it’s a poster for a defunct TV show, I said no to the frame. The thing shows up and I find out Wahlgreen’s doesn’t sell poster frames big enough for the poster I bought. So I checked out a frame store this afternoon and discovered that the cheapest frame I can get for it is over $100. Now what am I going to do? On the other hand, no kick-ass poster is worth $120. Especially when you’re a 37 year old single guy.