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]

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.