A completely full weekend

[dorchadas]

I didn't do much the weekend before last, so I didn't write about it at all. But I did a lot last weekend, so here's a recounting of my deeds:

After I saw a message on Facebook that Hanabusa Cafe, home of the extremely fuwafuwa pancakes, was having apple cinnamon pancakes juts this weekend, I individually messaged a few people and asked if they wanted to go to brunch. All of them either had plans or wanted to deliberately avoid having plans due to later plans, so eventually I threw open the invite to all and sundry, and at 11:15 a.m. goodbyeomelas, dinaraua, takei.tsubasa, ed.mcnamara13, and I all strolled into the restaurant and ordered. We were told that it would be about an hour wait for our pancakes, but none of us really had anywhere to be, so we went over to the corner and asked a woman standing nearby to take our picture.

This is the most instagrammable photo I've ever been in.

I described the whole restaurant as "Instagram-kei" (インスタグラム系), from the cutesy decor to the meshi-tero food to the giant wait, and I stand by that statement. But it was worth the wait and we had a lovely discussion about matcha and then a lot about Japan:

dinaraua: "So is Japan really sexist?"

takei.tsubasa, ed.mcnamara13, and I all look at each other

Me: "Yes."

And then our food came and we all dove in. I know I already wrote a whole post about soufflé pancakes with pictures of my meal, but I'm going to post another one here because they're so good, even if they are pretty insubstantial.

See? It's so Instagrammable.

When we left, dinaraua, takei.tsubasa, and ed.mcnamara13 took advantage of being in the Loop to go check out some of the buildings available for Open House Chicago, which sounded like a great time but I was already late to my next appointment, so goodbyeomelas and I walked to the L and took separate trains.

I switched to the bus since the Brown Line being down at the end ruined my initial transit plans, but I eventually made it to bradford.bensontaylor and his girlfriend's shared birthday celebration (within three days of each other), where I ate a bunch of salmon cheese crackers, pickled mushrooms, and dates, and played a game of Quiplash that bradford.bensontaylor hastily downloaded using his extensive stock of Xbox credit. I came in fourth out of seven, which was acceptable. I had a brief conversation with meowtima in the kitchen, and then I had to leave again to go to the Anime Chicago sampler meetup.

(apologies to bradford.bensontaylor's girlfriend, who I don't have an easy social media reference for. )

I usually write a whole post about the anime I see at the meetups, but I'm rolling it into this post because I arrived late, left early, only saw four shows, and most of them were bad. So here's the shows I saw and my opinions of them, in order of how likely I am to watch any more of them:

1. 俺を好きなのはお前だけかよ, "Are You Really the Only One Who Likes Me?": "Joro" is an ordinary high school boy, best friends with "Sun-chan," the captain of the baseball team, and childhood friends with "Himawari," an extremely genki girl. One day "Cosmos," student council president, invites him on a date and...confesses that she's in love with Sun-chan, and asks Joro's help to get them together. The very next day Himawari tells him the same thing. His internal monologue revealing that he's actually a sarcastic asshole, Joro agrees to help both of them, and while seeking solace in the library he's happened on by "Pansy" who confesses that she's in love with...Joro, even though she knows his secrets.
   
   I have a thing for pale spooky girls, so the question inherent in the title isn't one that I'd be worrying about. But I'm curious to see the internal asshole monologue vs. outward friendly demeanor--a stark honne vs tatemae, if you will--and how it plays out with the cast. All the shows I'm watching now are pretty serious, so maybe a silly comedy would be nice.
   
   All names above in quotes because they're all nicknames.


2. ノー・ガンズ・ライフ, "No Guns Life: Inui Jūzo is a private detective, taking cases related to the "Extended" (拡張者 kakuchōsha), people with cybernetic modifications. Jūzo himself is so Extended that his head is an enormous functional revolver. His eventful but predictable life is interrupted when an orphan(?) arrives in his apartment and he learns that Berühren Corp has implanted a dangerous and highly illegal device in the orphan that allows him to control Extended, and decides to get involved. It's always dangerous, getting involved.
   
   Also, his name is a pun--Jūzo ➡️ 銃ぞ, "It's a gun."
   
   I like hardboiled crime dramas when they're not super dark and gritty, and I don't see how a show where the main character literally has a gun for a head can possibly be overly serious. "Grizzled old man suddenly has to care for a kid" is a pretty established plotline, but if it's done well... I never really got absorbed in the giant amount of dad media that sprung up lately, so I'm not overexposed. Maybe it'll be fun.


3. けものみち, "Animal Road," Eng: "Kemono Michi: Rise Up": Genzō Shibata is a pro wrestler who always fights in an animal mask and has dreams of winning his last match and opening up a pet store. However, in the middle of the match he's isekaied and the princess asks him to defeat the monsters plaguing the kingdom, and for her temerity in asking him to fight animals he suplexes her and flees the castle, whereupon he's delighted to learn that this new world has...animal people.
   
   A furry's delight.
   
   This show was kind of cute, and parts of it were pretty funny...but it's another isekai. Another damn isekai. I'd rather play a video game about running a pet shop, having to capture monsters and feed them, paying adventures not to exterminate the monsters, etc. Like Pokémon crossed with Recettear. That sounds like a great game. Does that exist?


4. アズールレーン, "Azur Lane": Aliens invade and humanity unites to defeat them. In the years after, united humanity splits into four factions--the Eagle Union, Royal Navy, Sakura Empire, and Iron Blood. And then shock! Betrayal! Sakura Empire and Iron Blood split off into the "Red Axis" and sneak attack the Eagle Union and Royal Navy and battle is joined between the...half-naked moe waifus who get their power by absorbing ships.
   
   There's the half-naked moe genki girl, the half-naked moe shy girl, the half-naked moe steely-eyed commander who shows up to save the day, the half-naked moe kitsune incestuous sisters who attack in what is clearly a ripoff of Pearl Harbor...this show is absolutely not for me. It's based on a mobile game that I will 100% never play now that I know what it's about.

After Kemono Michi I slipped out the door and caught a bus down to Churchill Park for the Sukkot celebration.

Since I live in a condo in the city and have no backyard, I can't exactly build a sukkah anywhere and have no chance to dwell in it, so I went to Mishkan's "Sukkot on the 606" so I'd have the chance to shake the lulav and the etrog and say the blessings. And I did get to do those, but the more exciting part was meeting people. There was a woman on the Damen bus who I noticed because she was singing to herself, and then we both got off at the same stop, both walked to Churchill Park, and while I was standing by myself and noting all the families with kids running around, she came over and talked to me. It turned out that she had moved to Chicago, following her sister and her sister's boyfriend, as a way of shaking up her life. She had been a Hebrew immersion school teacher for almost a decade and wanted to do something else--what, she wasn't sure--and moved across the country because otherwise it'd be too easy to just keep teaching forever. She told me she was also trying to learn Arabic and that I should come to the Chicago language exchange and see if anyone there spoke Japanese, which is honestly a great idea. So we chatted for a while, ate pizza and salad, and then everyone gathered for havdalah:

Blurry because I took it hastily, since we were, after all, in the middle of praying

I chatted a bit with a couple other people, including one person from the Mish-Mosh group, and then I had to leave to go to another event. But I stayed long enough that I helped clean up, and then before I left, the woman from the bus gave me her number. So:

Sukkah? More like Love Shack.

I don't actually think she's romantically interested in me, but I couldn't pass up the joke.

The final event was gmarchan's birthday party, and I arrived to find a bunch of Anime Chicago people in the basement poking through his Spotify playlists and offering pointed criticism of his song selections. When it became a YouTube party I ducked around the corner where gmarchan and most of the men were drinking whiskey, and eventually when he took out the (unopened) handle of Fireball that one of his friends had given him and showed it to us with a disgusted expression, my excitement at seeing such an ACEN tradition convinced people to do shots. So I did Fireball shots, played some DDR (I am badly out of practice), tried out Beat Saber and learned that 1) I'm bad at it and 2) I can handle VR just fine, and had a long conversation with spacedragon about our respective pasts. I had thought about going down to Murasaki for Van Paugam's set and to drink sake, but I stayed at the party until like 2:30 a.m., and I crashed straight into bed when I got home, having been out of the house doing things for 15 hours.

Sunday morning I had a little time for myself, so I ate a leisurely breakfast and waited for my parents to arrive. They were coming so that my father could do, as I put it to people later, "dad stuff"--fix things around the condo and bring the new bookcases. When he arrived he spent a while replacing the furnace filter--he had to figure out how to Tetris it out of its housing--putting a brighter bulb in the guest bathroom, installing a integrated-USB outlet near the dining room table, and helping me carry the bookcases up and put them near the wall, so at last I can move the boxes of books away:

Close-up of the map here. And glorious were the deeds of the Exalted. 🔆

Sadly, the bookshelves are still mostly empty because the floor near the wall slopes, so I need to get extra pads for the front so I can level them.

My parents left around 4:15 and I got dressed up spooky to head to another sea shanty sing-along. I got there with about an hour left and stood in the back, in a floor-length tailored coat, and sang a couple songs until thosesocks called me over and said there was a seat if I wanted to sit, so I sat next to the event organizer. Though:

thosesocks: "Though I think dorchadas's aesthetic is to lurk."
Me: "You're not wrong."
Someone else: "And you do it well!"

Despite it being advertised as Halloween-spooky, there weren't a lot of actually spooky songs being sung. What stood out to me were when someone sang "Dead Horse," the song I had been contemplating singing but hadn't volunteered to because I'm still feeling out the group dynamics, and when thosesocks sang a song (whose name I forget) from the perspective of a witch's familiar at the request of the group leader.

When the singing was over, thosesocks offered to give me a ride home, so I waited for her to say goodbye to everyone and then we had a brief discussion on the ride home about how changing politics and lack of contextual understanding makes some sea shanties pretty uncomfortable to listen to sometimes. She dropped me off, I ran inside, scarfed down a pear, changed, and left again to go to Mish-Mosh.

Again, re: the request I won't go too deeply into it, but I was really happy about the prompt this time, which was about our gifts and how we use and misuse them. That required me to sit down and actually list the things I'm good at--I put cooking, translation, and my voice--and then discuss them with others in a mature way, which was a bit difficult. My list was definitely shorter than some of the other people's lists at the table, and I spoke less, but I was glad for the opportunity to talk about it. We all were--going around the circle as we left, we all talked about how wonderful it was to get the chance to meet people and have conversations like this. This was a pilot for Mishkan, and I really hope they expand it out. I'll gladly sign up for much of these groups.

And then I went home, made lunches for the week, meditated, and went to bed.


I was worried that I would end up exhausted from all this stuff, but I had a wonderful weekend. I wouldn't want to do this every weekend, and I'm not doing it next weekend, but it was a delightful change. And tonight I'm going to a party and then to Simchat Torah, so I'm looking forward to raucous dancing.

I hope you all had a fulfilling weekend!

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

That sounds awesome. I love the fluffy pancakes :)

[dorchadas]

They're so good! You should definitely try them if you ever get the chance.

[earthspirits]

The events (and food!) sound fun and very interesting. Liked the photos too! : D