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Comic Con is a blur.

I don’t mean a blur of parties and alcohol inspired debauchery, (Okay, I sort of do…) but the event itself flew by in a whirlwind of chaos and was over before I knew it.

Something that I have been looking forward to for months came and went in the slow and unfocused blink of a drunken eye, and as I stagger to regain memory of more than a few nights in question, I look wearily towards my camera and treat this for exactly what it is:

A learning experience.

Because as always, I am all about the learning.

And more importantly, I’m always about the TEACHING. As students of life, we can learn from any situation – especially if someone else has suffered the agony of learning in our place. So with that, and my return from a vacation that still throbs in my head and leaves me with that “Just licked a Taxi Cab Driver’s Turban” taste in my mouth, I bring you:

“25 Things I Learned At Comic Con 2009, San Diego”
(May my lessons save you this taste.)

1) Everyone should wear a costume at least once, even if there is no costume party or actual reason to do so. **Unless your costume shows the bottom part of your ass and THAT looks like a hankie full of cottage cheese. Then ya know. Skip the costume. Please.

2) Even on vacation, think of others. Donating blood is a noble and selfless act that can save lives. It is worth the hour out of your week, especially when you get a ton of free swag, toys, and juice and cookies when you’re done.

3) For every hot chick in a Wonder Woman or Super Girl costume, there are twenty that will scar you for life. Seriously. Cottage cheese filled hankies.

4) If you are going to make “Fandango Puppets” out of the barf bags on the plane to pass the travel time and amuse your fellow passengers, make sure that they are empty before turning them over and starting your impromptu stage show. A plane traveling 640mph is not traveling nearly fast enough when you have a lap full of puke that isn’t yours and flight attendants are stingy with the wet naps.

5) Escort services infiltrating Comic Con is like the Ice Cream Man sneaking into a fat camp. He’s going to do very well, very quickly, and everyone involved is going to get sticky.

6) That super hot chick in the super hot costume that you’re lusting over, might be a dude. JUST SAYING. That really, really, really really really might be a dude. Grinding on you. With his dude parts.

7) People will line up for anything, including with absolutely no exaggeration or joke - lines for standing in line. “Hey, are you in line?” “Yes, but this is just the line for the roped off line.”

8) You can’t freak out people from California, so don’t even bother to try. They’ve seen weirder shit than you come free with their breakfast cereal.

9) Crowded conventions floors are the only place in the world where a hot chick will slam her barely covered breasts into you, and then apologize for doing it.

10) Lou Ferrigno looks EXACTLY like someone who would be named “Lou Ferrigno”. He is 57, but still has those weird “don’t F*** with me” arm veins that guys who do things like “throw cars for fun” get so that those of us who might make deaf Hulk jokes stop and think twice before we do. Lou Ferrigno doesn’t need ears. His muscles can hear you.

11) Until you get it back to your hotel room lair, you won’t realize that the amazing and really cool free swag that everyone and their brother is handing out is really just blinky crap. Blinky crap that they probably wanted to get rid of.

12) There is no genre left alive that Hello Kitty has not been integrated into.

13) While shorter, faster, and very convenient, VIP lines piss the million people standing in the regular lines off, almost to the point of violence. Especially if they’ve been in line for 6 hours and you show up slightly drunk 10 minutes before the event starts and get in before them. (**Special thanks again, to Taea and Dar**)

14) Celebrities can walk the floor unnoticed, and are just like you and I. Except when THEY laugh about spending 6k on a C3P0 statue, they can do it. Where-in you’re still looking at a 15 dollar hamburger in disbelief and wondering which internal organ you should sell in order to afford the ketchup to go with it.

15) Crossing Guards at Comic Con might look funny in their day-glo vests and plastic wands, but you shouldn’t mock them. Not because they are just doing their job or trying to help, but because they are really f***ing COPS and they HATE you and your poorly sewn costume. People getting tough with the Rent-A-Cops, only to find out that they are Really-A-Cop is Just-Frigging-Hysterical. Nothing like kicking a cat to impress your friends, only to find out that it was a lion.

16) Dried zombie blood, gore, and red smears on bathroom walls don’t even phase the hotel cleaning staff. In fact, for them – that’s a good day. And no matter how well done your zombie makeup is, you’re still not as scary as the guy staying in room 1223.

17) No matter how well they are paid, or how much they are pandering to their audience – attractive actresses always look like they’re about to cry when confronted with their fans, and you can almost hear them bleating like that goat that they fed the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

18) 4 hours of sleep a night is more than enough, regardless of how much you’ve walked, stood in line, or have had to drink the night before. If you need more than that, you shouldn’t even bother to go.

19) Hotel Room AC’s can only go down to 65 degrees. Unless you befriend the maintenance dude. Then you can have a 60 degree room.

20) You can have Vietnam style flashbacks of standing in line.

21) If you don’t recall the events of the party from the previous night – treat your camera like an episode of CSI: ComicCon. View it carefully, view it alone, and if you are the killer, get rid of the evidence quickly.

22) The average American is caught on camera hundreds of times a day. At ComicCon, this number goes up to over TEN THOUSAND times a day. If you are a hot chick at ComicCon? You’re probably STILL on camera.

23) While 12 year old girls standing in a line two miles long in order to see the cast from Twilight is annoying, 35 year old men standing in the same exact line, wearing the same exact outfits as the 12 year old girls is just f***ing “creepy”.

24) No matter how badly you want a picture or shot of something cool, (like the original Ghostbusters uniforms) someone you don’t know is going to show up in the image with their horrible knock off costume, and ruin it for you. You have to accept this with a grain of salt.

25) A crappy costume might make you feel like part of the event, but a GOOD costume will open doors. And those doors will often have half naked chicks behind them.

**Note** All photos, yes, ALL photos – even the naughty ones I don’t remember women taking will be available via some offsite link for viewing, once I figure out a place that will host them without judging me. And yes, there IS a really bad Wonder Woman costume, but I couldn’t bring myself to mock someone in print, who was just having a good time despite wearing a star spangled thong. **Note**