SUUSI, day 5.

Thursday was supposed to be my gloriously activity-free day. I'd originally planned an all-day nature trip with Alex, and then cancelled it when the program description changed from registration to confirmation. I had also figured that I would need a day to rest and recuperate after two hiking days in a row. By Thursday at SUUSI, many - most? - people are dragging. All my muscles hurt from my insufficiently-trained-for hikes. I planned to update LJ, take a long hot shower, nap, and maybe hang out in the coffeeshop for a while. ( Read more... )

This weekend's other convention.

The first thing I noticed when I got on the light rail this morning was a dwarf with a bright orange wig. The next thing I noticed that the train was much more full than usual - mostly older teenagers.

The orange-hair guy didn't strike me as all that odd, but as the train pulled away I tried to figure out why it was so crowded with teens. The crowd was way too white to be a public school field trip (also, duh, it didn't occur to me until now that public school isn't exactly in session on August 8), and they seemed a little too uniformly nerdy/uncool-looking to be, say, a field trip from a majority-white suburban school. ...Were they from the magnet school for science and math?

The kid in the seat in front of me was turned all the way around, talking excitedly to the kid next to me about manga. Yes, I am slow to catch on. Because it wasn't until he used the word "fanservice" in conversation (as a verb, no less) that the penny dropped.

"Oh!" I said out loud. "It's Otakon this weekend."

"Yes, it's Otakon," said the manga-talker happily. He looked at me: long tasteful flowered skirt, subdued scoopneck shirt, hair-colored hair, lack of makeup, general air of grownup-ness. I could almost hear him thinking A mundane! I can educate her!

"Were you trying to figure out our conversation?" he asked.

"Your conversation seemed pretty straightforward," I said. "I was trying to figure out why my train was so crowded with people who didn't look like light-rail riders. Have a good time."

When I got off the train, there was a big bunch of cosplaying kids hanging out in front of Dunkin' Donuts. Presumably seeing them would've made the Otakon connection clear even to oblivious me.

Falls.

Twice in the last week I've fallen and hurt myself. That seems a bit much.

A few days ago I tripped on the edge of the plastic floor protector under my desk chair at home. I fell sideways towards my desk and landed hard on my right (small) wrist. It hurt so badly that I felt intensely sick to my stomach, and for the first few minutes Michael and I thought that I might've broken my wrist. I've still got a large, painful bump there, although curiously it didn't bruise much.

Then, just this afternoon, I headed out to lunch and apparently tripped over a sidewalk crack or something. I fell hard enough that when I landed my laptop backpack actually flipped over my head to rest on the sidewalk in front of me. And I scraped my left palm, left elbow, both knees, and the tops of both feet above my sandal straps. The elbow, left knee, and left foot scraped deeply enough to draw blood - the others just lost the top layer of skin.

This encounter wasn't as painful as the wrist injury, except for the part where I had to scrub the deeper scrapes with alcohol wipes. (God only knows what germs are lurking on a Baltimore sidewalk.) My elbow still aches, and it's bruising up pretty well around the scrape.

This seems kind of excessive, doesn't it? It's not as if my center of balance has really changed, yet.