Okay.

You guys all had a good Christmas, right? Right? And you're going to have happy new years? Okay? Don't make me come over there with the Good Cheer Bat now... yeah, my brother got me a book by Jhonen Vasquez - and if you don't know who he is, that's probably no bad thing - for Christmas and I think it warped my brain (or what was left of it). There's something very Invader Zim about enforced good cheer, if you ask me...

Right. Now I've got that out the way (though I meant it, rest assured), here's what I've been up to for the past few days: very little. Hit Kent around six at night on the 21st and spent most of the intervening time around various family members - I haven't been online for more than about five minutes since then, when I came on briefly to check my email and get teased by my brother for having a Livejournal.

Speaking of having a Livejournal, I may do a couple of backdated posts about the whole pre-Christmas stuff, but rest assured it's really not very exciting so I doubt anyone'll miss it if I don't.

Although! I broke with the habit of several years and bought myself the first two volumes of the Saiyuki manga in English! Because it was there and I was supposed to be buying a book to read whilst waiting for a carol service to begin, so why not? Why do all the Mary Sues come for Sanzo? WHYYYY? He would just kill them!

SO NOW I CAN WHINE ON saiyuki_badfics FROM A POSITION OF EXPERIENCE.

And, whilst I'm on the subject of hysterical capital letters, OMG MY PARENTS' KITTIES ARE SO VERY CUTE. ♥

My Gewd News (and it's Oh-So-VERY-GOOD):
My brother downloaded every single one of my missing FullMetal Alchemist eps a few days after I arrived. They currently reside on my mp3 player, just waiting for me to get a decent bit of free time so I can start watching them. I'm having a bit of trouble with codecs, but the DivX player I downloaded a while back appears to be handling them okay. That said, I still want a better media player and now just have to wait for my brother to get round to giving me one. Oh well - I have them, so whoo! for that!

Which means I don't have to put kay_cricketed to 10,000 tons of HASSLE after all. Which is probably no bad thing. I'm really grateful you'd do it for me at all, Kay... ♥ but I just felt so presumptious asking you to go to such trouble and not being able to do anything nice back... god damn I hope Kay sees this.

Now. What I really want to do is whine. Yeah. Minature Emo bitchfest ahead! Fear it! Fear the Livejournal Drama!


Why do families always seem to think they have a divine right to dictate to and rubbish their relatives in a way which would be considered, let's face it, both patronizing and blisteringly rude if it came from someone who wasn't a blood relative? Why is it that one grown adult feels they have a perfect right to turn round and tell another they think they're precious or thin-skinned, or practically force them into doing something they find boring or objectionable, just because those adults are parent and child? Seriously, why do they do this? Who thought this was a good idea?

I don't believe I can dictate what another adult - another thinking, rational human being, with likes and dislikes of their own - should do with their leisure time. Why do my parents feel they can do it just because I'm their child? It sometimes seems like my parents only realize I'm in my twenties when it suits them to do so.

(Never mind that it's precisely because I'm in my twenties that being dictated to bothers me so much.)

Why, too, do parents assume the way their adult offspring behave around them holds true for all their social interactions? Of course it bloody doesn't. I behave in one way around my parents because - Goddamn, they're my parents. I don't see why I should have to be fake around them. I don't see why I should have to pretend to my mother that I think everything she does is shiny happy wonderful when SHE sure as Hell doesn't extent that same favor to ME. She wouldn't hesitate to tell me if she wasn't happy with me. Why am I then supposed to be so... well, fake in my dealings with her?

Or does, once again, it come down to the fact that I'm only considered adult when it's convenient for them to do so, when all the rest of the time I might as well be ten years younger for all the progress I've made in the way my parents treat me, and the way we interact?

Okay, I'm done.


Oh! And also I started my Mary Sue parody today! Yay!

(I also found my missing earring.)

... Okay, so I didn't get much done. I'm not getting much if any real time to myself unless i go out my way to ask for it (and, being the solitary soul I am, I'm beginning to feel a bit frayed). But I finally, finally, at last know how I'm going to play it and it amuses me and makes me very, VERY happy. In a weird kind of way. Oh, the fun. Kind of a spiritual successor (probably not a sequel, well, not in the truest sense of the word but I guess there's no reason why it couldn't be) to the wrongness that was Honey Trap. What can I say? I just like it when Ken's pissy with his teammates - which will, of course, be including the Dread Ms Sue.

I'm thinking of Serenity ('Rain') Akegata would be a good example of a wangsty!Sue name. She's going to be a complete conglomeration of clichés - Japanese-American, with long, glossy black hair (but maybe I'll give her hair purple tips or something Speshul like that), pale skin and startlingly blue eyes and the obligatory perfectly formed body. And the obligatory murky past of extreme wangst which she will reveal in a mad rush. And she's going to be the daughter Persia never knew he had, and Crawford's cousin, and Omi's closest friend, and Youji's not-exactly-secret crush, and Aya's wun twu wub and soulmate--

Yeah, I hate her already too.