[Zairak]

That's it, that's the submissions.

ShizukaMikudou:

I don't have much of anything interesting to say about my summer, and this will likely lose to all the sex-joke-filled-stories, but I can tell a little bit about some of the interesting/funny things I saw at Otakon, my first anime convention c:

I remember arriving at Otakon in the evening before the first day and having a fangirl attack as I saw each and every cosplay, shouting out to the other three in our car which character it was and which anime it was from. The others in the car were my best friend and fellow anime lover, her mom, and my mom.

The next day we all stood in a seemingly mile-long line for the "pre-redistered", but even standing in line was entertaining! Seeing so much anime cosplay at once, I felt like a spoiled anime fan. But the biggest thing that was happening in line was StreetPass over everyone's 3DS's. Evern single second, the StreetPass games filled up to the maximum with other 3DS owners! Underneath the surface, the convention was also a huge StreetPass convention! Everyone was gathering puzzle pieces from each other for their puzzles on their 3DS's and getting to the top of the tower in another free game on the 3DS.

The line went all the way around the convention center and back, then in between some buildings and then finally into the front doors after going around the convention center again. But it was so worth it. Every second of it.

Then we got inside and joined more lines to get everyone's badge. At first I decided to pick the Sword Art Online badge picture, since I watched that anime and liked it, but I wasn't too surprised when I was told that they were out of Sword Art Online. So I went with Wolf Children because I like wolves.

The cosplay at the convention center was overwhelmingly amazing to see. It was like Heaven for the anime fan. We went to a few panels, and they were very interesting. I learned for the first time that Disney's Lion King had ripped straight off the popular old anime show, Kimba, the White Lion. I don't hate Disney - in fact, Lion King is still one of my favorite Disney movies, if not around second place - my opinion would just be that Disney ought to give a bit of credit to the predecessor.

What surprised me in a disappointing way was that when I went to the Pokemon panel, in the giant room full of maybe hundreds of people, nobody was in the Union Room in their pokemon game! But the panel was quite enjoyable.

I got up early and hurried to the convention center to be in time to get into LittleKuriboh's Abridged panel. I came in just as LK and the even earlier panel-goers were right in the middle of creating an inside joke. Next thing I knew, everyone was yelling out "Fudge!!" and laughing at it. In the Q&A session, a guy got the biggest round of applause for coming to the mic eating fudge.

But what was most special about the whole seeing-LittleKuriboh-for-the-first-time was that I got an indescribable happy feeling meeting him. I've never been into celebrities, making LK the first celebrity I was a fan of. I had actually met him the day before at his booth in the Dealer's Hall, and his booth just happened to be empty of any line, so I wandered shyly up and just gaped in pure overwhelmed amazement at seeing it all in real life. LK's wife talked a little to me, and recognized my cosplay. I cosplayed as China from Hetalia, the easiest one for me to pull off. Then LittleKuriboh came back from walking around the Dealer's Hall and greeted me, so I commented on his show, thanking him for saving a dying fandom that deserved more than just the card game fans, and he told me that was the nicest thing he had heard. I felt really special. It was a really cool feeling.

I hadn't planned beforehand on the idea that, if ever given the chance to buy one of the YGOTAS merchandise, which ones would I buy? So I spend a good long super awkward time standing there unsure of what to buy, right in the presence of people I respected a lot. Eventually I decided to walk around the Dealer's Hall to think about it as well as not cause them any discomfort by me just standing there awkwardly. At the last second, I returned and bought a Bakura key chain and the Evil Council t-shirt. I hadn't thought in time before I left home to get something for LK to sign, even though I had thought of maybe at the last chance to print out one of my Yu-Gi-Oh! drawings. I forgot to do it. So I had him sign the Bakura key chain. Too bad permanent marker rubs off of plastic easily. But even though that was a bit of a let down, I was happy enough to have experienced all of that anyway.

I went to a few very interesting panels about making your own manga. They taught me things that I could never learn in any class in school. Most people, teachers, and guidance councilors who help students pick out college careers don't even know what manga is! It's sad. But that has been my dream in life since around middle school: to write and draw my own manga, even if it only impacts a small fandom or touches a few people.

At the convention, though, a lot of people were wearing these high tech kitty ears that read your brain waves and moved according to them. It was funny to see how fully grown older men were wearing big, fluffy kitty ears! Or should I saw, "Nekomimi~?" During the third and final manga making panel, I saw behind a big, heavy, bald man wearing orange fluffy neko ears. When the panel hosts changed PowerPoint slides, the ears twitched as the person read the text. But when the panelists began explaining to us the importance of creating unique characters, even with different body types, they showed a picture of several girls in a line wearing bikini's, and the cat ears began bouncing up and down rapidly! I had to keep myself from giggling aloud.

My fellow con goers and I watched the Wolf Children dub premier together. What was amazing about watching it was not only the movie itself, but the fact that I was watching an anime movie with up to two thousand other anime lovers in the same, giant room. That was... so... exciting. Hearing everybody giggle at the funny parts, "Aww" at the cute parts, cheer at the happy parts, and sniffle at the sad parts was truly amazing.

During the final two days of the convention, I had been so excited at meeting LittleKuriboh, and all that lovely jazz that I talked about in previous paragraphs, that I decided to whip out one of my spare sheets of printer paper and draw Yami from YGOTAS episode 59 where he's making fun of Kaiba and saying "Eh!?" with that freaking awesome narrowed-eyes expression that made the scene my favorite in that episode, and I gave the picture to LittleKuriboh on the last day right as my fellow con goers had decided that it was time to leave. I just walked through the big crowd around his booth and tried to hand it to him as he was hugging other fans, and he seemed to like it, thanking me and saying things like "Aww that's so sweet", and even hugged me.

I was sad to leave Otakon. I could even go as far as to say that I wanted to stay there like it was my home. I had memorized the convention center so that I knew how to get anywhere, and felt uncomfortable and homesick for Otakon whenever we walked several blocks down the road into Baltimore city to get lunch. But I can definitely say for sure that Otakon was the highlight of my summer, far out-shining the cruise ship vacation to the Bermuda islands that my family took earlier.

musigal:

For a no-longer-student who has yet to have children (let alone children of student age), summer can be a bit difficult to define, particularly if she lives in Southern California where summer-like weather continues year-round in seeming perpetuity. And, as exactly such a someone, this difficulty is mine.

There were many possible starting points to my summer. Halfway through May, I was given by a friend moving to Africa for three years the majority of his furniture, and in consequence had to move into a different bedroom in order to accommodate the stacks of wooden rectangles not yet able to be used as the bookshelves and nightstands they were originally built to be due to the fully furnished nature of my parents’ house (in which I currently live).

And then, at the beginning of June, most of the school-aged children on my caseload at work (I am a Speech-Language Pathology Assistant.) were released for their summer break, and rather than spending only Fridays in my car making circles between the addresses of my in-home early intervention clients in Riverside (an hour and a half north of my house), I began to spend Tuesdays and Fridays both in that same pursuit. Even so, my number of billable hours was reduced by nearly thirty percent.

But perhaps my summer truly began when my fiancé, James, was given by his mother a long-promised smoker, and we began our barbecue adventures with brisket, ribs, and pulled pork sandwiches. For it has been a summer with many memories tied to food.

It has been a summer of baking chocolate chip cookies and eating them with a friend, of making blueberry ice cream because I felt like it, and of grilling hand-formed burgers over charcoal on the Fourth of July at the ranch on which my parents live.

But those chocolate chip cookies were eaten while I taught myself to knit and began a Harry Potter scarf while watching classic Star Wars. And I ate the ice cream with friends while I finally caught up on one of my favorite TV shows (Supernatural), which I also watched again with James.

And on the Fourth of July we had a gorgeous, sweltering, fly-bothered picnic before retreating into the swamp-cooler-cooled trailer-house to play board games and talk. Then we drove to the top of a nearby hill and the shooting range there and shot .22 shotguns at strung-up milk cartons and plywood cutouts spray-painted with human silhouettes. After dark, we traveled to a different hill to watch far-off fireworks in the valley that sprouted up like stunted dandelions in a prickle on the horizon while the cool blackness wrapped around us, and James’ arms kept me warm.

James and I talked often in the dark of his room, meandering from topic to topic – circling like questless butterflies simply enjoying one another’s presence – and laughing hard before (and often after) the predetermined time at which I should have gone to sleep, curled up in the soft plaid blanket on his bed while he played League of Legends or DOTA or Dark Souls at his desk until another later predetermined time at which my phone alarm buzzed and I stumbled down to my car to go home in the dark and finish sleeping there.

All these moments are examples of the type of summer I’ve had, but more honestly, they depict the type of life I have, for similar moments took place in February and look to do so in November and beyond as well. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

kudos:

So it has come that time of year once again when the masses of students return to their classes and those of us who have reached old age are suddenly left feeling bereft. Like, how did I get to be done with college already? I feel exactly the same as I did ten years ago as a child just entering her “teen” years. And now here I am, working full time and trying to save money for grad school.

Well, let it not be said that Praise Hewitt has wasted her summer. For the fourth year running, I have worked at a water park, surrounded by the aforementioned youth (most of whom have never had a job before in their lives), giggling about proms at the beginning of the season and recently discussing their school plans as classes start up. Admittedly, not many of them think I’m as old as I am. I guess that’s the blessing of a young face. I’ve been asked more times than I can count by lifeguards who only see me in the break room, “So when do you go back to school?” And I say to them, “Never!” and watch their faces get confused. They figure it out pretty quickly, though, because most of us supervisors are a bit older than the general employees.

Honestly, it’s been a very good summer. I have been blessed to attend a wonderful church. And I work with the best bosses known to man, and the high school kids do a good job once they get their feet wet. My free time has been spent teaching art lessons, knitting Hogwarts scarves (I am a proud Gryffindor), playing D&D (for the first time in three years, and that’s been a lot of fun; I’m playing a half-elf warlock who can set things on fire, and you can’t get much more fun than that.), and hanging out with generally awesome people. I’ve also been watching a lot of “Supernatural” with my boyfriend, like five seasons’ worth.

So I guess in recap, you’re as young as you feel; or at least, I’ve not become a stuffy, boring old person just yet. We’ll see where this next year takes me, but I’m looking forward to great things.