I like cons. They’re silly and exuberant and many of my nerdy friends are there. But there are also all these… other people around. Some of them are the “friends you haven’t met” kind of strangers, indubitably, but there are also the “that guy that talks like a robot just farted on me in the elevator” kind. So conventions are admittedly a mixed bag.

Another thing about geeks: they’re often (not all of them, mind, but probably more than average) starved for attention, kinky, and accepting of the social quirks of others. I love this about them, but it puts a little extra pressure on me to be tolerant of quirks I don’t enjoy.

Take, for instance, bad breath. I have nothing against you if you have bad breath. I think you’re, like, fearfully and wonderfully made and stuff, and I’m sure your gorgon breath has nothing to do with dental hygiene and everything to do with a medical condition you can’t control. I’m not saying it’s your fault or that it reflects on you as a person (although I am totally judging you) but I’m still going to want a significant space between your face and mine. I would like you to stay outside the breath bubble, had I my druthers.

…And that’s just one example. But it often comes back to the personal space thing.

But I was talking about general acceptance before I was talking about my raging olfactory hatemongering. Acceptance is good. It’s freeing. Watching some of these people, it’s like a metric ton of societal pressures have been lifted off their shoulders for one weekend and they tool around frenetically, being who they wish they could be every day, in a gentler world.

This is all just a very round about way to say that as I entered the pool enclosure, 90% of the people there were stark naked.

Fandom is populated with some legitimately hot people and a host of other people that aren’t… I mean, that are more… well, people I’m sure are beautiful on the inside. I’m speaking for me here, since everyone finds different things attractive, but I’m going out on a limb and saying that there were three naked people tops at that highly attended pool party who would be considered above-average looks-wise.

Yeah, it’s shitty that my brain made evaluations about which naked people were pretty and which weren’t. They were just hanging out (ha) and not necessarily asking to be stared at and graded by shallow sex bloggers. But guess what? I’m human and I’m anonymously honest on the internet, and my brain probably didn’t do anything yours wouldn’t have. So there.

I wasn’t actually there to gawk at naked or to be naked. I was there to relax a bit in the hot tub before bed. If I flirted with some hot people (naked or clothed) so be it! But personally I’m a little naked shy, so I stripped down to my bra and knickers and grinned at my own cleverness having selected dark colored undies that day.

The sunken hot tub was crowded, but I found some space next to my (betrunked, if you’re curious) friend Crispin Hijanx. We chilled out and maxed, relaxing all cool, trying not to stare directly at anyone’s fun bits. It was all of two minutes before a naked (not ugly, if you’re curious) guy I’d never seen before came up and started small-talking me. I made some fairly bland, exhausted answers, failing in my attempts to not watch a curvy girl with an awesome ass ascend the hot tub stairs and dive into the nearby pool. When she was safely submerged, I turned back to my nameless naked companion.

“So,” he said, now that he had my attention, “you’re not going topless?”

I looked down at my bra “No. No, I guess I’m not.” Actually none of the women there were topless. They were naked or suited. But I guess Nameless Naked Dude thought boobs would be a good start.

“Why not?” Hmmmm. I’d never had a stranger ask me why I wasn’t showing him my tits before. His tone creeped me out: like he wasn’t mad, just disappointed. Like I was cheating him out of something. I suddenly felt oddly exposed. With all the flesh in that room he was feeling petulant that my breasts (probably the smallest pair in the room, even) were going to remain a mystery.

The cute thing about carefree light-hearted nudity is that no one makes that a big deal of it and no one solicits it. Everyone’s enjoying it, sure. That’s natural. But I don’t think that a hot tub needs an Ambassador of Naked. I didn’t have to flash Crispin the “save me” eyes or anything, but the whole exchange did convince me that the best way to get me to keep clothes on is to creepily request that I remove them. Maybe that was Nameless Naked Dude’s cunning plan all along: to keep me covered and hasten my departure. If so, his naked fu is very good.