Off the prompt "cuddles."

i had a root canal yesterday

i am misery

if you made plans with me for NYC, I will still meet you! But for limited amounts of time before i go back to curl up on grey_bard's couch. Walking around exploring will not be so much a thing.

also right now i am favoring soft foods. and. really hoping my vicodin 'scrip will last the whole trip.

So I will be in NYC June 12-June 17. The purpose of my journey is: fangirl (verb, intransitive).

I am interested in hanging out with my friends and making new fannish friends! Therefore, if you live somewhere reachable by the subway system, I am willing to come to you. If you live somewhere withing a day trip of the city and there's something you wanna do (like hang out with me! or go to a museum or see a show or something social with me!) you could come to me.

I have this vague idea about rereading So You Want to Be a Wizard and recreating Nita and Kit's Ordeal (hopefully without actually changing universes). This might be a multi-day endeavor, or I could just be overly optimistic, given the amount of time I spent communing with my laptop on grey_bard's couch when last I visited. Also probably I should just acquire braces for all my joints now and bring them with me pre-emptively.

More realistic and concrete plans include going out to Coney Island to go to the beach, as I live in a landlocked location but am part selkie on my mother's side and cannot resist the call of the sea.

I am interested in (but last time failed to make plans I followed through on regarding) MoMA, the Guggenheim, visiting the New York Public Library on a day when it is open (last time I managed to go by on July 4th, which is, in fact, a national holiday, when libraries are closed), Paley Center, probably many other historical sites or museums I have not heard of. I will probably visit one of these this time (maybe two, I'm pretty sure the library is somewhere on the Ordeal walking tour).

I will almost certainly spend at least part of one day in Central Park.

Also I am interested in food. I like many kinds of food. I like trying new foods. New York is a great place for this and hey yeah. I also like trying new drinks and would not mind getting medium trashed one night of my trip if a few people knew a good place for that and wanted to hang with me for that ("medium trashed" = walking a bit wobbly, I love people, I may be interested in snuggling other interested parties).

I might like to go see some form of live entertainment (theatrical, musical, burlesque, who knows). Maybe!

But: fannish people. I totally want to hang out with you and meet more of you. You should say hi if any of the above sounds like cool stuff to do! And like, look, I kind of fail at keeping in touch with people, so even if it's been years since we've talked, if you wanna meet up I would be excited for it! Even if we've never really talked personally, just been on each other's reading lists, I would be excited for it! Like, don't think this invitation is just for my besties. This is for everyone I have conceivably run across in fandom like, ever. I am totally serious, I want to hang out with you.

Fair warning: I might talk about Teen Wolf.

Touring fangirl mode engaged for February; niqaeli and I have tickets to and hotel reservations for Escapade, upon the invitation of our dear friends jetpack_monkey, echan, diannelamerc and lizbetann, who were like, "You'd want to come with us, right?" when I visited them last month (my god, was it just last month, it feels AGES ago).

But *plaintive whine* is the, will the, while the Escapade site has the 2012 dates up, nothing about programming or um the vid show looks like it's current. Or even for last year's. So um. Where does one find out about that sort of thing?

A fun-filled weekend of fun has been had! And it's still a holiday tomorrow!

On Thursday night after niqaeli got off work, we drove out to LA to visit echan and jetpack_monkey. An all-night trip; we hoped to get there before the morning rush so I left 21 minutes from the end of the first episode of BBC's Sherlock, which traykor had put on while niq was still at work. Because those 21 minutes might actually matter to whether the freeways were totally clogged or just impenetrably labeled. Never mind spoilers, imagine being 3/4 of the way into any iteration of any Sherlock Holmes story and having to walk away. We arrived on echan's doorstep and despite being dead tired, I asked if we could put it on (I figured we'd watch it from Netflix, turns out they own the DVD). So we did. I have now seen Sherlock. Whoo.

On Friday, niqaeli and I slept in weird bits on and off but not at the same time as one another mostly, and echan came out as genderqueer on the internet, which I had known about for some time and niqaeli hadn't and wow, it was a relief to be on the same page as my braintwin finally. (jetpack_monkey's reaction, which echan IMed me about a couple weeks ago, was an adorable sleepy "Not that surprised. Still my echan." *heart* He is a sweet husband.) Also on Friday, we went out for sushi! At some point, we watched the Tik Tok vid for vampire Nikola Tesla from last year's Club Vivid and I explained in detail what was going on for echan, who has seen about five Sanctuary episodes, out of order. There was dinner from their favorite 24-hour delivery service because apparently most things in downtown LA close at like, six (including Starbucks! I've never known a Starbucks that closed that early!). Then the household (which also includes diannelamerc and lizbetann) decided to watch Being Human UK while niq and I variously went to sleep and passed out. Naturally, having fallen over before midnight, I woke up at about one in the morning and put some Dresden Files on (I watched three episodes! I remember what happened in some of them! I laughed at Netflix's description of Harry as ethics-challenged, because he seems to have a fairly strong personal ethical code to me! but maybe he fails it up later? who even knows).

On Saturday I did not wake at six in the morning like niq, who had fallen down and stayed down instead of Netflixing in the middle of the night, but I did manage to pull myself out of couch for trip to Little Tokyo with her and echan. I had a honeydew melon smoothie, then we went to bookstore and niq got lots of origami paper, then we had enormous bowls of noodles and niq forgot that my tolerance for alcohol is significantly lower than hers, so yes, half a bottle of sake will get me tipsy.

After that we went to Santa Monica: I had expressed interest in beach (any beach) and niq wanted to go to British import shops/a restaurant for tea in the area. Both beach and tea were lovely. Like, half an hour on the freeway + forty minutes finding parking + a good ten minutes of walking across the deepest beach on the coast to dunk myself in the ocean for fifteen minutes (priceless). Neither niq nor echan came in more than knee-high with me (though I full-body hugged echan when soaked to hear zir squawk), both feeling that the water was much too cold for my shenanigans, and it was cold? but I'd been expecting it to be cold and had sort of over-anticipated it so it wasn't as cold as I actually thought it would be? So for me it was pleasant. And wave-diving is fun. Mostly if you dive under waves right it rolls over you and you come back up behind it a few seconds later. Once I hit my dive wrong and got tossed around in the turbulence of the breaker a bit more and came up laughing in glee, so much so that I startled a woman nearby that I hadn't known I'd washed up next to into laughing with me. I, I sometimes forget other people are there when I'm staring out at the wild, wide ocean. On a wading beach, no one much comes out as far as me (you have to be waist-to-chest deep to get waves big enough to dive under), and also I have sort of um. Great transcendental fierce pagan joy that possibly puts me in an altered state with the ocean? Although part of that is wave-diving related endorphins. Even when you do the dive right, you end up with sore shoulders, and when you're standing there letting the little ones hit you waiting for the big ones, you end up with sore thighs. The ocean's like, big. It's all-encompassing and humans are so tiny and you get a bit battered. Endorphins: apparently I was kind of stoned for tea.

(For the record: it is possible I am not a traditionally sane person. Don't try this at home?)

I have always thought I would like to live by the sea. I think I must be part selkie. And I currently live in a desert and my families of blood and choice both live here so I don't know if I'll ever leave, really. But we fantasized about everywhere we would have residences if we won the lottery during tea and I think having a villa on the Mediterranean would be nice.

After that, we went to see My Chemical Romance. Apparently people had been standing in line since like, noon, and so we got there after the line had gone in, around eight, resigned to standing nowhere near the stage but frankly okay with with having done other things besides camp out for the show. echan noted that the mass of people in front of the stage was very tightly packed and not moving at all, no one leaving for drinks or food or bathroom or anything, fairly completely impermeable. Then during the opening number Gerard Way went crowd-surfing and I yelled in zir ear, "Now you know why." They'd been waiting for their opportunity to touch him.

Since I am apparently incapable of not snarking to the internet, I tweeted a fair amount during the show. Er, so I have a twitter account? It is decontextual, I um. Never mind. Here:

[Re the opening act] "Get that girl up onstage, I'm gonna eat her!" "Performance would probably be improved by onstage cunnilingus."
Friendly fans. At top of stair letting people coming up pass before I go down. A dude hugs me and says I smell nice. Seems stoned not scary.
The song "the only hope for me is you" sounds slightly less creepily psychotic when sung in concert to fans.
As per your request: you're a bad bad bad bad man, G-way. #mcr [I actually like House of Wolves a lot, but hahahaha I just. Watching him crawling all over the mic stand...]
"you ready *mumble*" is part of the song permanently in performance??? #mcr [re "Vampire Money"]
E says re Destroya: they burned the dictionaries first? #mcr
Okay sometimes I enjoy them unironically. #mcr [Re Teenagers]

Lost my bet on what their encore would be; they went back to Black Parade to close out the show rather than pulling out Sing.

We tried to go to a bar with food after the show, but that didn't work out well. We ended up getting food from Famima!! which I wish we could have in Valley of Hell, but wiki says they closed like half their test sites and now exist solely in downtown LA. Then we fell down.

Come Sunday morning, brunch was delivery, much hugging was hugged, and niq and I got on the road about 1:30. We plotted many terrible things to do to Ivan on the way, which also involved doing terrible things to Gregor. Having Illyan in my head is oh, my God, a trip and a half. *flail* I cannot even describe. Eventually there will be fic. I hope. The shortish snippet I was going to try for wants to be about 8-12K because Ilyan's going to cross-reference everything. Cry. Yay. Something.

My calves, my thighs, and my shoulders are all sore and tired. When I lay down I can feel my legs vibrating. When I get up it hurts. Muscle aches everywhere. I mean, I was expecting this? Walking, walking in sand, swimming, more walking in sand, more walking, standing at a concert for two and a half hours, then driving several hours will do that to you. (Interestingly my legs didn't hurt while I was driving, only when I stopped. Yet I kept stopping to stretch them out, because I was afraid they would like, calcify in driving stance.) Also that whole paragraph up there about endorphins is pretty hilarious to me now. But I've almost entirely gotten my hearing back after only a day! (Concerts. Concerts are loud.)

Plotting for future trips in both directions proceeds apace. OCEAN. In related news: I am interested in becoming a touring fangirl and driving to visit people I have met on the internet. Contemplate this entry and imagine all the fun you could have with me!

Taking my car in for service tomorrow, partly in re: roadtrip for Memorial Day Weekend. Obvs I want the whole car to be in good working order for a road trip, but is there anything in particular I should be asking the mechanic to look at?