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]

Yes ... and at some point, you get tired of feeling like a freak, don't you? So you don't bother any more. You keep all the relationships with the average woman at the really superficial level, and just wait to get back to the place where you can be a real human again, and not just a person in a mask.

That's not to say I've never had this crap shoveled at me by a guy - there was the odious man from the synagogue Chavurot (friendship group) committee who came out to talk about our interests when I contacted them about trying to find other families in the congregation that we might like to get to know. When he heard we liked SF, he was like, "Ooooh! You mean like ... Star Trek?" The condescension was thick enough to cut with a knife. But still, it was only with other women that it became a pattern. (And yeah, I have a kid, but she doesn't play sports or a musical instrument, doesn't like to go to the mall and hang out ... so now I'm not only weird myself, I'm a bad mom who's raised a weird kid.)

You know, what I really like in a story is guy buddies. And I don't always slash them, either. Justin and Flavius in Sutcliff's The Silver Branch should be very slashable, but I'm not even tempted to go there - they're cousins and friends, and nothing more. Ithink that's why Gentlemen of the Road was so appleaing, because of Zelikman and Amram's buddy relationship. (And I don't feel like slashing them, either!)

[chomiji]

Yes ... close friendships among adult women really do get short-changed in our genre, don't they? That's one thing I like about Phyllis Ann Karr's otherwise rather bad duology Frostflower and Thorn/Frostflower and Windbourne ... the title characters of the first book do indeed become friends by the end of it, and it's pleasantly and realistically presented as an attraction of opposites, but just a friendship, not a romance (Thorn is aggressively het, Frostflower is celibate on account of her calling). Also, The Northern Girl - the only one of Elizabeth Lynn's Tornor Chronicles that I really like - has a couple of good female-female and male-female friendships, as well as some gay (Lesbian) romance.

Oh - the Hodgell includes a great non-romantic, cross-class-lines friendship between Jame and the gentle giant guardsman Marcarn.

[chomiji]

I've been trying to think of why I want to slash certain guys, most particularly in manga. It seems to come down to a particular type of teasing, plus a particular type of interested glances between the two.

Gojyo gives Sanzo these looks - mockingly - and Sanzo never gives them back. Yukimura gives Kyo the sweet, submissive smiling ones - and Kyo does return the dominant, wolfishly grinning answer, in a way he doesn't do with most of the other characters. Not all the time, BTW - when he's legitimately pissed at Yukimura - as in when he realized that Yukimura has entered the Shogun's tournament in disguise, in vol. 4 - there's no smiling at all.

And the Hakkai/Gojyo actually goes beyond that - as my daughter put it (out of the mouths of babes) "They're so married." They don't really flirt ... but during the early scenes in "Be There," when Hakkai is recovering, the loaded looks they exchange: it's two people really, really getting to like each other. The look Hakkai gives Gojyo at the end of the "Jack of all trades" exchange; the one Gojyo gives Hakkai when he greets Hakkai's big revelation about Kanan with "Some people go for that, I guess" - my heart just turns over.