Off the prompt "cuddles."

is in two weeks, and echan is coming out to see me and

i was wondering if any AZ peeps would wanna do some kinda meet-up? Somewhere in Phoenix metro, like Friday the 15th or Saturday the 16th, fangathering of geekiness to celebrate my 30th 29th birthday?

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!

Deeply amused that echan seems to have inhaled Sanctuary and left me live watching squee in IM while I was not there.

I would clearly be more interesting if I didn't sleep in like, eighteen hour stretches.

(Oh, fine. I only actually slept about eight hours from when I passed out last night, but I totally slept seventeen hours the night/morning/afternoon/evening before to get me out of whack so that I'm only remembering to turn my phone back on at three in the afternoon after killing it outright when the alarm went off at nine at the morning.)

---

I think I've read all the Killjoys fic I can (I want to read fic about the Killjoys not about My Chemical Romance, and at this point I am a little hmmph at the usage of "Grace" instead of "Sunshine," and I realize the primary Killjoys fandom is bandom and I'm a lonely grinch out here and such is life), which is sad, because my brain doesn't want to cycle off it that fast.

I am toying with shooting a Killjoys short. I mean, we have desert and hilarious shades of hair (my streak is lime green at the moment, and niqaeli doesn't see how her checkerboard bun is that interesting but she talks about dyeing it turquoise), we could totally be a chick band/gang of the Danger Days 'verse. echan, would you be up for driving out all the way from Battery City on your totally appropriately decorated motorcycle to participate in a weekend shoot if I get something organized? And like, written? (Because surrealism is all well and good but frankly it can't be as randomly spontaneous as it looks to get done on a shooting schedule.)

My Wicked Witch of the East stockings would have to make an appearance. I'm trying to figure out what I would wear with them to show them off because most of my skirts would be impractical for kicking ass.

Part of me thinks it would be hilariously awesome to write and record an original song pastiching (it's verbable if I say so, spell check, take the fucking gerund) the Danger Days style (for one thing, it would make it totally original work, not original video to a borrowed song, and, among other things, that would make it useable for portfolio as vids are not--echan, I have also been having that problem lately). Part of me recognizes that while I have experience with film production, I don't actually have any experience with song-writing or producing. Which: goddamnit, but it's a neat idea. Does anyone want to chime in and be a co-conspirator?

PS echan EVEN ASIDE FROM MY HILARIOUS FANNISH DORKERY YOU SHOULD CALL ME BACK ILU

Nnng. I can't decide if I'm being ridiculous in a doable way or in a unsupportable way. I priced HD camera rentals for a weekend and also looked into the local Ikea's last chance deals for white, simple line furniture to stand in for BL/ind's that we could realistically smash. And I don't even... this concept is barely a concept right now, I have so far talked to ONE person who would be on cast and maybe crew, and I don't even know if I should be storyboarding for a song off the album or thinking about original stuff.

I have echan's vid stuck in my head, and I don't even have a copy of her draft to watch here. Very frustrating!

Vids I want to see that people around me have pitched lately:

echan's vid for White Collar to the How I Met Your Mother musical number about Suits

My brother's SGU vid to "Cabin Fever" from Muppet Treasure Island

The Red Dwarf vid traykor and I are making to "Never Set the Cat on Fire"

jetpack_monkey's plan to vid Farscape to Alice's Restaurant OH MY GOD every time I think I've found the most hilarious line in this concept ("Just sittin' there on the group W bench") I think of another one ("And there, at the bottom of the cliff, was ANOTHER PILE OF GARBAGE!"). He hadn't heard of the revisited version and I don't know what you could do with the 18 minute gap story but I am cracking up at the mental visuals of Farscape to "I looked deep into the man's soul and I said, Chiiiiiip, was it open?"

Um so. Happy fun times crack vids in Julstown.

What shall I wear to Club Vivid?

Financial aid just doubled my aid for the summer so I actually have some money to play with; I could buy a new dress and/or other things to wear. I could also afford Lady Gaga tickets now! echan won't play dress-up with me tomorrow; she said maybe Monday and. I don't even know. I want pretty shiny things now.

Welcome to the land of shallow.

I keep wanting to tackle deep and being unable to figure out how to phrase my issues.

So I am at: I want to wear pretty, shiny things to Club Vivid.

(ETA: well, that was a spectacular failure, and I am now in tears.)

(ETA2: FUCK. Completely unrelated to the previous eta, I am now flailing about picking out things to wear for club vivid because I FEEL TOO FAT TO COSPLAY. I KNOW THIS IS DUMB. I DO THIS EVERY YEAR. Can I go back to the year I spent entirely too much time deciding if I was going to shave my pits? I think I prefer that level of intellectual body image dissection.)


(ETA3: So I'm considering for my primary expenditure on costume this year, demon contacts. Who wants to lick red corn syrup off my arm at Club Vivid?)

I am dying of allergies. Seriously, zyrtec-D is the only thing that makes my life worth living right now. And sucktastically as well, the sniffling and the watery eyes mean I constantly feel like I'm on the verge of crying. That plus general failure to cope makes me feel like I am constantly breaking down.

I am frustrated with my headspace about Supernatural right now. I'm starting to come out of the fruitcake obsesso place and wake up with the "did you get the number of that truck?" hangover about the last few months and I don't want to, quite yet, I want to actually write and vid a lot of the bunnies I have hanging around. I think part of the problem is that I don't deal well with week-to-week viewing of a show, as opposed to binging. It's killing me to play will I be jossed, will I be kripked, instead of just mainlining. (I realize normal people just watch shows this way. Hi, I'm not normal.)

So I have a plan. I haven't decided if I'm going to implement the plan yet, because there are drawbacks to the plan. But the plan is: I don't watch between now and the season finale, and then I get to mainline the last, what, five or so episodes. In between I would watch older stuff (I still haven't finished watching season 2!) and then when I get to mainline season end, I think I'll get a resurgence of fruitcake interest without the stop and go stagnation frustration I'm getting now.

Drawbacks: I'm actually looking forward to the next few episodes, based on spoilers. Not sure I have the patience. everysecondtuesday, grey_bard, and echan would have a hard time talking to me without spoiling me (though considering how much I've been trawling imdb and youtube, maybe that would be okay? I could just be not-watching-spoiled until I mainline). And then, I don't know, there's vid considerations. Which is totally the last thing on my list because I'm still on waitlist for vvc and feel weird submitting stuff if I'm not going and honestly, vvc is going to be "I'm spending $500 to hang out with some people I like," as opposed to the other thing.

I keep turning myself around on that, too. I had one idea I thought I was doing for challenge and it occurred to me in like, the past two hours, that the drawer vid might be even MORE challenge-suitable. So there's like, three or four things I want to take to vvc. I mean, I guess just in that "to show my friends" way.

Slept a lot. Agreed to clip for the Many Break-ups: Candy Tears vid with niqaeli this week. Got nearly halfway into Good Omens and was confused by how many characters other than Crowley and Aziraphale there were (seriously, I had somehow managed to convince myself it was a fanfic style epic romance with plot as a backdrop). Was first useless as a beta and then worse than useless (I told echan her vid had a pedophile in it). Read echan some fanfiction, including the one where Sam offers to pop Cas's cherry and makes Dean help him pick lube and condoms until Dean explodes, and the one where Cas has to take a temporary host and Chuck tells Cas that Dean will laugh his ass off.

I should go to bed soon. I'm trying to figure out how to start the story I've given the working title of Sam and Cas's Trip to Detroit. Damn it, how do I have no titles for that and like, twelve for the other one? (Seriously: Angels Don't Do Booty Calls. All's Fair in Love and the End of Days. Jimmy Novak's Happily Ever After, With Cheeseburgers. These are all titles I like and consider acceptable for THAT story. I can't find titles for anything ELSE though.)

In my head, Ruby keeps calling Crowley "the Garden snake" and Dean keeps not hearing the capital in that and wondering who the hell Crowley is that Ruby thinks he's totally fangless but capable of helping them.

grey_bard pointed out to me that back in Mystery Spot, the identity the Trickster pretends is totally Jimmy Novak's. A wife named Amelia? A job selling ad time? Okay, so he added a spare kid. But uh. FLAIL. And the thing is? The way the timeline runs on Jimmy, Castiel was probably already courting him by that late in season 3. Suddenly I am wondering if the Trickster's interest in Sam and Dean was reignited by Castiel shopping for a host.

We went to renfaire with traykor on Saturday and now my legs hurt and I have a plot bunny about Sam and Dean hunting wyverns at faire. And I have to tell you. Dean has garb.

So I started in on the fourth season of Supernatural today (skipping quite far ahead of where I'd been before) out of an interest in Castiel. After two episodes echan decided that the easiest way to answer my incessant questions was to skip ahead to 4x09 and 4x20, respectively "fun sextimes with Ruby" and "how the Holy Tax Accountant got touched by an angel."

I suddenly have this huge interest in Jimmy Novak. I want to squish him! For the first part of the episode I very much thought he was going to go home and find his family already dead, and then he started lying to his wife about how he'd been crazy! But he was ALL BETTER NOW! and started wondering how he would ever be a fit vessel for Castiel again, since I knew he'd be in season 5, and then as the denoument approached I rather feared that he'd become a vessel again because his family was DEAD. So I was relieved at how it turned out, all told? And also a bit smug to have called that clearly his daughter was going to be vessely as well, if what made him special was in his blood. Also I really wish Dean had grabbed Castiel and turned him around and made him give the wife and daughter a few platitudes about Jimmy fighting the good fight because he loved them.

I want Jimmy Novak fic. I do not know where this would even fit anywhere in the canon unless you twist things sideways and suggest Castiel can/would let Jimmy out now and again, but I have a sort of horrific desire for Dean/Jimmy. I don't know what is wrong with me.

Recs?

A year ago I moved out of my parents' house for the first time in a meaningful way; before then, I'd lived in dorms, which meant most of my books were at home, and I had no kitchen of my own. A pint-sized dorm fridge and a microwave, yeah--a kitchen? Not so much.

I remember the first year I went away to college I had a 13x9 pyrex baking dish. It fit in neither the microwave nor the pint-sized fridge, which is why it eventually got thrown away--disgusting leftovers had congealed in it, uneaten, because it was too big to save. (I had no tupperware. Seriously, my cooking life in the dorm was severely limited.)

But before that incident, I went downstairs to the dorm kitchen and made apple brown betty in that dish. I used the kitchen in that dorm so rarely that I can't picture where in the building it was, though I have a vague memory of how closet-sized I found it. I can't remember whether I walked to the Safeway for apples and flour and brown sugar and butter, or if my neighbor drove me--both happened, on occasion--but it must have been a specific trip, because even a staple like flour or butter, I didn't have. I'm not entirely sure I didn't have to buy a knife to peel apples. I made my apple brown betty without a recipe, because you hardly need one--arrange apple slices in a pan, mix flour and butter and spread on top of the apples, dot with brown sugar, bake until delicious. I remember the flour and butter weren't well-mixed, so there were white spots all over the crumble-crust.

Still, there were no leftovers.

My current 13x9 glass baking dish comes from IKEA; I bought it on a massive, scary stocking trip echan and I made. We were also buying things like garbage bins and sheets and I think the frame with fabric drawers she got to organize her desk. We were so unprepared for setting up house. I asked my family for a dozen kitchen things for Christmas, a frying pan (I was sort of hoping I'd inherit my parents' cast-iron, they prefer the non-stick these days), a food processor (my parents bought me a better model than they had, which I in turn headdesked and traded down on, because I needed the money more), pyrex loaf pans (my grandmother got me heavy gauge aluminum steel non-stick loaf pans which are still in their wrappers because goddamnit, I meant pyrex). They tried to give me a more expensive kitchen than I'd asked for. That's... honestly, for me, that's not what kitchens are about. I want the same kitchen my parents had when I was growing up. My mother makes fruit bread as gifts at Christmas--it used to be cranberry orange walnut bread, but now she's allergic to two-thirds of that, so now it's other things. She had a pyrex loaf pan and a couple of beat-up aluminum loaf pans, and she was making so many loaves she'd use them all in succession and turn them out and wash them and use them again. The pyrex was my favorite because it washed out easiest, and nothing you did scratched it up.

I've made brownies and fish in my 13x9 glass baking dish. I haven't made an apple brown betty, although I had a craving recently. I haven't made my mother's Christmas cranberry bread, though when I am overcome with the desire, I will probably go to the grocery store and buy a pyrex loaf pan or two and come home and ask the internets who would like a pair of heavy-gauge aluminum steel non-stick loaf pans, free to a good home with cost of shipping.

A great deal of my everyday diet no longer has much in common with my parents' diet, partially because of my mother's allergies, partially because, while my commitment has wavered lately, I am still much more likely to cook fish or tofu than beef or chicken. My mother gave me the cookbook with our falafel recipe on "permanent loan" when I moved out--I make falafel much more often than they do, and I think they might have started making it when I was in high school and vegetarian for the first time. A lot of our family recipes have that sort of oddness to them. Pumpkin crescent rolls are a must at Thanksgiving and Christmas; they date to when my brother could not be convinced for love or money to consume actual vegetables, and are still his favorite food on the planet. We used to make pumpkin oatmeal cookies too. A little pumpkin here, a little pumpkin there, some Vitamin A down your gullet, mister. Orange is the color of our baked goods.

Every once in a while I ask my mother to email me one of our old standard recipes for baked goods. Gingerbread men, I asked for this week. Gingerbread boys, she corrected me. I can't find a cookie cutter, so I'm actually planning to cut my own shapes out with a knife and make gingerbread lesbians. I was inspired to write this entry about the family history of my kitchen because I had ginger, but I had to go shopping for allspice and nutmeg. My spice cabinet consists of everything my mother had two jars of when I moved out, plus all the grated orange peel, and a jar of this and that I bought as needed during the past year. I have bars of baking chocolate in my spice cabinet, but my mother rarely does anymore, because most brands of chocolate are produced in factories with nuts. She keeps a bag of chocolate chips a specific nut-safe brand in the fridge to munch from, but she rarely bakes with chocolate anymore. I have a giant jar of sesame seeds in my spice cabinet from the Asian market, where my mother has a standard spice jar of them from McCormick that probably cost twice as much, because I am far more likely to want them for sticky rice or tofu or what have you.

I'm making gingerbread lesbians as gifts to send across the country. I have one ball of regular gingerbread dough in the fridge right now, and one ball of experimental, because I'm trying to make a gift for viridian5, who has a gluten allergy. I started off with ground almonds instead of flour in hers, but the dough wouldn't ball up properly, so I ended up adding a bit of brown rice flour as well. I still expect them to bake highly biscotti-like, and I'm not sure how they'll roll out.

I want to cook more often, and bake more often, but I don't know how to do it in a vacuum. I don't know how to find the motivation to actually make dinner (as opposed to throwing something ready-made from Fresh and Easy in the microwave) without having family, blood or chosen, here to cook for. Food is a gift, food is something you make to share, food is an art you design to show off to and to please other people. The kinds of foods we make are expressions of our culture, both the broader milieu of our society and the closer traditions of our family. And when we sit down to eat a meal together, that's family. That's community. That's love.

me: [dinner suggestion]
echan: Sure. ...Did you want me to say no?
me: ...no? Why?
echan: Your face twitched. It was like a Vulcan expression.

Remaining episodes to clip: 6. Finished with the main Jill arc.

Season finale: GLEE CAPS. Some narrative concerns covered in GLEE CAPS. Also, does this still work for my vid?

The vid echan came up with this weekend and started clipping today: MORE DONE THAN MY VID. WTF WTF WTF.

Her boyfriend and I are entering a suicide pact over our inability to vid as fast as she does.