I break a vow of silence today. Forgive me, my friends.

Two of my robotics teammates crashed a prom during Worlds.

Let’s call these two fellows Nate and Jonah, to protect their identities. So, Nate sees that there’s a prom going on in the ballroom of the hotel at which we’re staying, and he thinks to himself, “I should crash it.”

Keep in mind that Nate ended up becoming a captain of the team.

So, he talks to some friends, and none of them are interested in joining him, but somehow he manages to reel Jonah into it.

This is the only memorable thing Jonah ever did on the team.

So, they get dressed up in their outfits from Roboprom (which was more fun than I had expected it to be), and they manage to walk into the ballroom unhindered.

And they pretend to be representatives from the Photography Club, so they go around and take pictures of a whole bunch of people.

I remember seeing a picture of that prom’s king and queen on somebody else’s Snapchat feed, along with the caption, and I paraphrase, “I wonder if they’ll ever realise none of these pictures made it into the yearbook”.

You see, they decided to make up a little backstory in case they got caught. They made up the whole schtick about being in the Photography Club, so they could explain away their presence to the many people who wouldn’t recognise them. And if they were hassled further, they had planned to say that they were a gay couple (which they weren’t) and try to pull the discrimination schtick.

They didn’t get caught.

Flash forward to a year later, at the next Worlds. I’m sitting at dinner with Nate (who’s now a captain) and a bunch of other friends, and we’re having a great time chatting and stuff. Then one of our mentors comes over to our table and starts chatting with us. He jokes about how Nate crashed the prom last year, as that incident has now gone down in team history.

Then this mentor says, “There’s no prom at the hotel this year. But there is a wedding.”

We look at each other.

Then we IMMEDIATELY begin planning how we’re going to crash a wedding.

I think the first thing we did was swear each other to secrecy. I kept that vow for a long time, not even telling my mom. You guys should consider yourselves lucky.

We chatted about the Wedding Crashers TV show and other stuff about people crashing weddings for a bit, too, as examples of both how and how not to do it.

Then we had to figure out who was gonna go. We decided that it needed to be two people, a guy and a girl, and they needed to have the most formal of outfits from Roboprom. So we pick Paula (not her real name, God forbid), who had one of the nicest dresses. Then Nate heads over to one of the other tables to rope in one of my best bros, a guy whom I’ve seen in jeans maybe ten times and in sweatpants only twice. He wore a full three-piece suit, plus bowtie, plus pocket square, to Roboprom, an event at which people sometimes wear dinosaur costumes. The dude sews his own ties. And yeah, he was down to go.

We were so hyped about this. I swear, we would have actually done it if the mentor who told us about it discreetly shut us down on the bus ride back to the hotel.

Oh well. The brainstorming was fun while it lasted.

there's a definite difference between how people treat girls and how people treat trans girls. i came back from robotics championships yesterday, and i really felt like that was one of the first times i was treated like the former for a long period of time? like, all of my friends know that i'm a trans girl, and i can tell when they're only complementing me or how i look because they want me to feel better about myself. which isn't a bad thing! it's just different from when they complement someone more genuinely.

the robotics tournament was great! there were a lot of people we had dinner with from different teams i'd never met before. we played egyptian war (a reflex-based card game) with mostly guys from team 2848, and it was honestly really great. guys are pretty obvious when they're impressed by a girl and want to show it. like when they're impressed by a guy, they're more chill, but when they're impressed by a girl, they make sure she knows it? and it was kinda funny and it also felt really validating! because i was winning. and they were letting me know how they felt about that.

really similar things with roboprom, where we had swordfighting (which is why robotics is awesome. our proms have swordfighting)! all the guys would fight each other, disengage, then leave. with me, it was bow, shake hands, swordfight, get ass kicked (i took kendo and i love swordfighting), find me afterwards and ask me where i took martial arts, tell me i'm really good, shake my hand, then leave. it was really great!

also at roboprom we had this giant game of ninja, and i had a group of guys that kept following me while i was playing and cheering for me and shouting "girl power!" and "my money's on the girl" and it was! just! really! great!!!

Okay so I’m going to World Championships in Houston tomorrow night! And apparently, I was nominated for RoboProm Queen? Which is super great!! I think if I win, I get to be the first transgender female to become Queen at RoboProm! Now I just gotta be voted in out of three other contestants, so I’m very excited. If you want to vote for me, my name’s Alina Kim, and you can vote for me here!

"RoboProm 1999"

Annnnd here's another entry in my Archive Splurge! Sorry for missing a couple of days this past week. This one's from sometime in April of 2015. It's kind of funny.

The caption beneath the picture reads: "Roboprom 1999: OOM-9 and Karen". Yup, that's the lead battle droid from "Phantom Menace" and Karen the Computer Wife, both dressed to the nines. Or the 1999s, to be precise.

I'm not sure if I knew it at the time, but both "The Phantom Menace" and "SpongeBob" came out in 1999. It's a nice bit of irony.

Sorry for the bad image quality.

You’re sweet as hell, and I totally forgot to get your phone number or something to keep in touch.  I’m not really interested in anything bigger than friends, but I would love nothing more than to stay connected with you!

Kindest regards,