Busy Weekend

[chomiji]

The sis-in-law (the one who's married to a minister) had a rotten week: her employer is transferring her, with almost no notice, to a different facility, and as she runs a senior center (basically, daycare for senior citizens), it means leaving behind not only staff, but also clients. So she decided at virtually the last minute to come down (with our nephew in tow) and see the Young Lady's play (our daughter is crewing her school's not-quite-spring musical, Beauty and the Beast) Friday night, because she thought it would cheer her up. This meant I had to clean up the guest room, which was wall-to-wall wrapping paper bits and rolls still, from the last installment of Xmas. But when I got home, there was an Amazon box waiting: I have Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 11 [thanks, megan!!], and Takumi-Kun 2!

Saturday I was not feeling well - malaise about sums it up - and nothing much happened except meals out (lunch at Oriental East, which has great dim sum and forgettable service; dinner at Austin Grill, which is quite good for a chain) and the week's grocery shopping. The Young Lady was crewing again and had to eat leftovers for dinner. Oh well - it builds character!

Sis-in-law left early Sunday morning, and then sanada came to visit! We had brunch at Jackie's (retro American cuisine in a groovy-funky 1960s industrial setting) and talked manga nonstop. A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better. Then we went and saw the matinee of the play ourselves. Energy level good, one or two really good performances, scenery very uneven (the Beast's castle was very, very good, the village scenery was pretty lame), costumes pretty nice (althought the dinner plates were awful), and the special effects were much fun ... during the Beast's transformation at the end, petals fell from the catwalks onto our heads. They were meant to be rose petals, but all I could think of was (a) Sakura of Doom and (b) Nanao dumping baskets of petals over Shunsui. And the casting was the usual marvellous Blair High School racial mix: Oriental Belle, African American Gaston, Hispanic (I think) Beast, and so on. Dinner was what the Mr. calls "the meat place" - Brazilian BBQ.

Comments

[chomiji]

>> you tend to shy away from discussion about female characters a lot in general <<

My first inclination was to say "Nu-uh! No such!" - but you know ... since I started seeing sanada and smilla in RL, this is the first time perhaps in my entire life that I've had more than one FTF girlfriend who wasn't also a relative. And that's not even counting ones like you that I only "see" online. That is flipping amazing to me, to have so many female friends. And that's not even counting my gaming buddy Camille, who's finally becoming a confidante after knowing her nearly 20 years.

This is also probably why, as my shrink noted, I do not tend to seek out solace from my RL female support system, especially my stepmother. I love her a lot, but there's no inclination in me to seek Mommy when I'm miserable. I can include my old friend Kat along with my sister (especially since I've known her since high school), and I'm starting to put some of my online friends there as well ... but my sister is my younger sister, so ... .

On the other hand, there aren't that many manga heroines that I'm finding to be peer-level at all - I like BotI Rin, but she's my daughter's age! (And realistically acts it.) And I don't think you and I have that many novels in common yet ... tell you what, I have to try to re-read Wheel of the Infinite, and you can blog it, and we can talk about Maskelle. (I didn't think that much of Kade.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I've just noticed that, in conversations on manga in general, you seem to mention a female character if one comes up, then quickly turn the conversation to the male characters connected to the female character. The only real exceptions that I've noticed seem to be Shaga and Kousuke(unless we count Akari, but even though I think of Akari as female myself, she is technically a male.) (And I'm not including characters we mutually dislike, such as Tokito and Akito.)

I don't really seek my RL support system, male or female, a lot either, and I grew up close to my mother and we still are close, even though we somewhat drive each other crazy(shall we simply say that a fantasy loving bookworm who's wardrobe only very grudgingly has anything besides jeans and plain shirts, and who's never had a serious romantic relationship at 27 simply is not what she imagined when she had a 2 year old with curly, strawberry blonde hair who loved pink dresses?) I'm actually pretty introverted and solitary in real life.

I don't really have many characters who would be peer level with me, either...I'm younger than you, but still a decade(or a little more) older than most female manga leads(even Rukia, who's far older than either of us, is still written to be read like a 16~ girl.) I don't really need to connect with characters, just to like and understand them.

At this point, I'd have to reread Wheel of the Infinite to properly blog it, and I need to reduce the backlog some, first. I am trying to get ahold of Death of the Necromancer and Riddlemaster of Hed, though, and I'll be blogging those and the other Ile-Rein books when I read them. Ravenna was much more interesting than Kade, but I thought Kade was fun, if maybe a little full of herself.

[chomiji]

(One other thing I need to throw in here - I thought of it while writing my review of the Chabon book: On the one hand, discrimination against women (and later on, against older women in particular) made my mother's professional life miserable. On the other hand, it was other girls who mocked bookish, four-eyed, chunky young Cho - and boys who played space explorer with me and talked SF&F to me, and my father who took me to the bookstore and the planetarium and taught me to use hand tools and listened to my problems - even, later on, about menstrual cramps and crushes on boys, BTW.)