being a social being: automatically fail. + arashi occasionally

i wondered why the last couple of days i have felt like i never truly woke up all the way - slightly under the weather and slightly groggy, like the inside of my brain was a little fogged over between the synapses. i realised, eventually (through the fog) that i am not sick but simply recovering from our holiday dose of family togetherness, which was delightful, but stressful to an introvert like me. i don't like much in the way of excitement, and i always need a proportional amount of time insulated from the world at home in my armchair, with blankets and hooked up to lj and aim and a steady supply of fanfiction. the family togetherness was of extra intensity and duration and the anxiety on this trip was especially high, so the recovery is taking longer. at this point it lacks only a certain quantity of mindless tv consumption (where to start?).

wax and i gave mece (my elder brother-outlaw, and the father of carmela) a boardgame called SAMURAI, because he is quite into samurai movies and samurai swords and things like that. well, he and his wife are into board games, and last night i went over to try it out with them.

something you have to understand about me is that i am horrible at strategising. i hate it, but i'm also naturally bad at it. as soon as a game flirts with the idea of involving strategy, i lose at it, even if i have not in fact started playing it yet. (i like board games, but i prefer fast-paced and light-hearted ones usually, and ones which depend more on skill or random chance. i adore pictionary because i'm good at it, and am also very fond of sorry, a revenant of high school pe classes.)

SAMURAI involves a lot of strategy. it is an EVIL game. it's like the twisted offspring of the time go and chess got really drunk and intimate in a dark alley, and then ran into risk on the way up to the hotel room and invited it in on their night of debauchery. and it is somehow more obnoxious than go or chess or risk, although on the plus side it's played on a map of japan and involves wee buddha figures and also mini japanese folding screens for each player. enough strategy was involved to make my head hurt a little and also to let everyone get bored while the others thought over their moves.

and now for something completely different... arashi daily occasionally.

aeslis: oh man! aiba straddling--well i'd imagine someone else.
cim: i got a cap, don't worry. XD
aeslis: *imagines that's Jun there*.
( and after that the conversation verged a little bit on the porny )

i resolve to not lose any pencils + yuletide

the cat survived the operation and is fine for now and awaiting some test results. not out of the forest, however.

also ( new year's resolution generator )

also, people. manips: just. say. no. *weeps just a little bit*

i've already finished reading this year's yuletide (you know, all the fandoms i know and want to read fic about) and the most exciting things, i think, were:

• a truly awesome clerks story 


• a truly exquisite poirot story, which i mentioned a couple of days ago


• a very cute i heart huckabees story


• a small collection of kiss kiss bang bang fic


• a single animal factory story (set during the movie, not on a parrot farm like i personally would set any fic for this fandom, but still pretty great)


• a totally cool addams family story about gomez and morticia's first meeting

here is where i am keeping track of my holiday-fest reading.

you'd almost think we were making phones around here. no, you wouldn't.

i'm freaking out because the online bank let wax log in, but it keeps telling me i have the wrong password. i opened up my brand-new password table and the first one doesn't work and i guess i have to go to the bank in town today and ask what's up with that. wax asked if i forgot my customer number, but i'm sure i haven't - how could i possibly? i've had it for years. it'd be like forgetting my phone number, haha, i still can't remember my phone number... what is it, 2769 at the end or...? [eta: hah, i was totally right! \o/ "you're so super, baby," says wax drolly.] social security number or my address or something.

wax is trying to convert her system to linux. i wonder if that means our LAN won't work now or something. it does mean that her wallpaper doesn't feature jensen ackles for the first time in about a year.

we got the spring h&m catalog in the mail today ("spring is in the air!" chirps the ad copy. dude, it ISN'T. it's still DECEMBER.) and it's distressingly full of pastels and baby gingham and early-60s, late-50s mary tyler moore and stepford wives type stuff. i hate pastel clothes. each new season of fashion keeps annoying me lately. there's been the knee-length pants and lacy shit trend, the freakish 80s trend encompassing both off-shoulder sweaters and calf-length leggings, the flounced miniskirt trend and before that the longer flounced 'folklore' trend, the stupid floating belts over shirts and up around the fucking ribcage trend, the pastel suits trend before and now just when i'd thought pastels were gone... walking around downtown can be so hard on my sensitive eyes.

i want to go to the movies. :/

arashi ficlet

i wrote this months ago, seriously, but it got too long to be posted together with four other pointless vignettes and then i keep forgetting to post the damn thing. oops.

in the lead (≈1100 words), ohmiya; TOTAL AND COMPLETE CRACK from a series of chats with elfiepike. this belongs to what she delightfully dubbed the "shotgun wedding" verse, inspired by this stuff from the kansha kangeki ame arashi video, in which ohmiya... had a shotgun wedding. in a field. and then some more weddings.