It’s awesome. I could be surprised any moment. Will my GMail alerter purr out the words I need to see? Will it keep me in suspense? And I don’t need to do anything: I just sit here, and live the adventure. What will happen next? Tonight—tonight, will my luck change? Who knows! Endless intrigue! Dramatic conflict aplenty! Tonight, or tomorrow night, or in a week?

Damn, life is so exhilarating.

I think I’ve had maybe two days of truly good feelings and exuberant productivity in the last two weeks. That’s pretty lame. It’s not even November yet!

The other night, I realized that it’s been a month since I posted my Aika face. At the time, I thought I’d made a breakthrough. Things were going to change. Get better. Illusions would be dispelled, truths would be clarified, and steps would lighten. Would not the whole world seem more appetizing? A delicious treat waiting to be devoured?

I licked my lips, I waited to want the world.

I waited.

I waited.

This is a kind of waiting that I do not feel is wholly inappropriate. There is nothing to it aside from waiting, no promises or strings or expectations. Kind of like waiting for no one at a train station.

But while it’s the kind of waiting I find ‘acceptable,’ it is not particularly easy.

(Nothing should be easy!)

But I can’t sing that I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait—that, while a kind of waiting I’m far better at, would be inappropriate. It’s a dedication and a commitment. It’s an unfounded and unreasonable pining. One for which the waiter should need permission.

The narrative is, as a housemate commented, making itself clear.

An arc of my life.

With every post, I can find more previous posts to link together. Cohesion is manifesting. Sense can be made of my ramblings. Are you reading this? Or are you too distant?

A new week. Another Monday.

Starting tomorrow, I will make a renewed commitment to positif thinking, to energetic productivity, to Mizunashii Mode, to staying upbeat. For whom? For me, of course. But also for you, in case I’m not just standing outside the train station.

I’ll pass on projecting too much of Shinkai upon myself.

When the first episode of K-ON! was released however many years ago, I watched it, I felt queasy, and I dropped it. It wasn’t my thing. It was too moe, too braindead, too clearly Kyoto Animation’s money machine. I didn’t look back. I had no regrets. I didn’t need K-ON!.

Then something funny happened: I went to a convention, and at this convention they were marathoning the show. I joked about going to see it with my friends, the “joke” being that obviously K-ON! was so bad, who would want to watch it? My friends reined me in. “C’mon, we’re not going to watch that, didn’t you say it was bad?” Yeah. I did.

But what did I do when I got home from that convention?

I’ve always claimed to be weak against suggestions, even my own. I downloaded and marathoned K-ON!. And I liked it. I felt squeamish—it was outside my comfort zone, if only for its aesthetic characteristics, and the characters’ maturity was a bit on the low end of elementary school—but I liked it. I wrote a post exploring a similarity between Yui and President Aria, explaining how even slice of life with faults can grow on its audience and “become” good.

So I had a pretty well-reasoned explanation for why I liked K-ON! in the end. But I like looking silly, so whenever I’d see those friends with whom I’d gone to that convention, I would say overenthusiastic things like “OMG K-ON! IS THE BEST OMG” while they shook their heads and sighed. I was exaggerating, I was looking for laughs and retorts. I liked the show, but I didn’t think it was the best. However…

With episode 20 of K-ON!!, this is no longer an exaggeration.

Would we cry when Alice loses her second glove if we had not been with her for 47 episodes? No. Similarly, HTT’s final concert would not impact us the way it does if we were to skip ahead to it. So episode 20 of K-ON!! is not a standalone best episode of all time… much like Aria the Origination episode 9, it is only as great as the sum of the preceding installments.

If I cried for episode 20 of K-ON!!, the show is good.

Spoilers for everything I’ve written, ever.

Rocks fall; all main characters die.
(I’m serious. Continue only if you don’t mind spoilers, or never plan to read any fiction I ever write.)

Why?

I’ve wanted for a while now to write something more Aria, more Amanchu!—more uplifting, at times empty, at times laden with positive messages. Failing that, something purely humorous. Yes, I’ve written funny things before. Sardonic blog posts designed to amuse through abrasion alone. Ironically tragic ‘creative nonfiction’ that lampoons anyone and anything in order to avoid taking itself too seriously.

Ideas for more pleasant textual endeavors flow endlessly through my brain.

But I never write them.

What I write instead are stories like the Hunter Chronicles. Nothing ever goes right for our heroes, who after uniting and enjoying each other’s company for a brief period are forced to part ways. They only ever meet again as enemies after one of them is possessed by a malicious entity bent upon the unnatural propagation of entropy. The first book leaves one of the two heroes fatally wounded and the other banished (ostensibly forever) to the inferno. Between points A and B, our unfortunate heroes accumulate a score of afflictions and a long record of failures.

What I write instead are stories like “For the Pen.” Our protagonist has failed so hard at everything he’s tried to do in his life that he is obnoxiously self-deprecating. He saves the life of someone who wants to die (accidentally!), in doing so signing a contract with nature that says “please take me and break me.” He and the man he saves try to fight off their fates. Meanwhile the world goes to hell, our protagonist looking on sadly and failing to do anything about it (despite having the power to intervene!).

What I write instead are stories like “The Last Season.” The main character, after seven years of wasting away in a ward for the terminally ill, re-enters the world of the living when her (undetermined and inconsistent) disease seems to have miraculously departed. After a year of building new friendships and new loves, the main character must be readmitted to the hospital. It is unclear if she will ever emerge again.

What I write instead are stories like Tundra of Heroes. The protagonist of each of the three parts faces tragedy. A tavern performer whose alcoholism is his escape from his memories is judged for his sins at the end of a long and bloody journey. An archaeologist whose obsession with his job has robbed him of his social and family life quietly passes far from home while talking to the ghost of his neglected wife. A fallen aristocrat turned psycho murderer joins an army that is invading his homeland in a last-ditch attempt at revenge, only to fail at everything in every way imaginable.

What. The. Fuck.

Seriously?

Seriously?

What is this obsession with failure and misery? It’s there in many of my favorite stories.

AIR sees a young girl slowly lose motor capability and speech as a thousand-year-old curse destroys her from within. 5 cm/s… well, I’ve said enough about that one. Millennium Actress, Simoun, Pale Cocoon, Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora, even Honey & Clover, even in the midst of whatever uplifting messages they may or may not carry—they all smell of tragedy.

Bleh.

So many ideas for iyashikei pieces, so many for humor, and yet all I write is this junk. Once I finish Tundra of Heroes, once I drive the last nails into the coffins of my unheroic protagonists, I promise: I am writing something wonderful.

(Up next, barring the need for more gut-spilling: a list of brief story ideas.)

How I feel right now.

Having been backed into a corner by my housemates (and life in general, *emo brooding*), it seems I must produce my core drill…

… and quantum divide it into an oar.

Mizunashi Mode tiem.

There’s no better way to tear into a blank slate than to do so by discussing blank slates. Aria the Origination, episode four: Mizunashi Akari cheers on the journeymen of two rival companies by encouraging them to try and try again at accomplishing their goals.

“Every attempt is a fresh start!”

She smiles.

Is every attempt a fresh start? Do we wipe the slate clean with every redux?

If every reboot erases the system logs, Tachibana Junichi’s position seems precarious at best. He informs Morishima Haruka that he’s crushing on her again and again in the (obvious) hopes that her facade will crumble. I was there, once: I confessed my feelings to a girl. I suggested that I hoped that they were not too cumbersome, and emphasized that I didn’t want anything to change.

I was probably lying. After all, Junichi clearly has some expectations of his own, and I believe in anime as an accurate depiction of life. I’m not going to go into the minutiae of why this analogy makes no sense—they should be obvious—but I’m trying to get to a place where I can say that Junichi’s displays of perseverance are somehow meaningful.

After all, he’s getting his girl.

Blindly dashing forward and trying again and again in the face of previous failures is exactly what Akari suggests, however. The tabula rasa philosophy is fine and all for giving a bit of encouragement, but ultimately it seems unnecessary for advancement.

Akari’s rivals can become pros so long as they try; trying does not change history.

Junichi has Haruka gagged and bound in the school cafeteria, and she’s swallowing.

He only has to ask one more time, and maybe she’ll say yes.

Did I ask more than once?

No, I fucked up. Christmas came and went in 2007, and in 2008, and in 2009. Unlike Junichi, I have no particular fixation on any particular day, but I do remember the winter break my senior year of high school. Not the worst days of my life by a long shot. But not the happiest.

Aria the Origination started airing about four weeks after I confessed my feelings to a cute, witty, and productive girl whose company I had enjoyed the year before in my AP English and US History classes. Three weeks later, I was watching the above-referenced fourth episode. I loved it, but at the time I only took its message to refer to career opportunities. I applied it to school, I applied it to work.

I didn’t apply it to love.

Junichi has me beat, and he has me beat by three years.

Oh! I’m rambling. Immersing oneself in memories is a sweet luxury, yet I want to refrain for the time being.

Enryoshitai no.

Welcome to this new data interface.

We’re gonna celebrate fresh starts together—and also the stops. It’s definitely useful to refrain from dwelling too long on the past. But every so often, it’s just as good to pass on moving forward.