Writing introductions is a bit tedious so....just take a look at my first post if you want to know more....

....and if you get curious about the name of this World or my posts, check out the second one.

Words Just Don't Like You

Something very disturbing has just happened. Apparently there are too many chapters of Bleach for Wikipedia to be bothered about keeping them all on file. They now only list the first 4 chapters of each volume. Because, you know, those extra 4 lines of text were breaking their server and were the sole cause of their new desire for donations. Which means that I now must return to the practice of pulling out the tankobon one by one to find the title I want for my posts. めんどくせええ........

Rukia=Sarah

We dressed up for Halloween & went out in Tokyo. I guess that was a while ago now....I got kinda busy w/Comiket the next day & then right back to work. Nothing too crazy has been happeneing, I'm sure it's just the cold weather that makes me think I'm exhausted all the time. I was trying to be strong against the cold this year by doing things like not using the heater until Dec. 1st (fail) get out my winter clothes in stages (partial fail) & keep the doors off my room till Jan. 1st (epic fail). The heat & the doors both came last weekend, & while I've been slowly working the clothes in & out of boxes it's more out of laziness than actually not needing them. (I know there's a real word for that somewhere....non-need.....)

Lenalee=Katy

I forgot how to talk the other day. Like, I couldn't string words together that made sense. I thought it was just my Japanese was lapsing at first, from too much practice without actual study, but then I noticed it was happening in English too. We sometimes like to blame this on disuse (non-need?) due to living in a non-English speaking country, but.....I didn't think that was it. I tried to explain it to a couple of friends in the car later that week, but they didn't get it. Probably b/c I couldn't say it right.

ANBU=Travis

There's a girl at my office who said some really mean things about cosplayers the other day. I'd like to think she didn't know how insulting she was being b/c I don't think she's very smart. But maybe I'm wrong. I'd also like to think that I'm smart enough to not be upset by it, but.....well, it's not like it's a new feeling.

....this is how she might look when she's a bit older...maybe...less with the wanting to be innocent face....

There's another girl who was asking me a lot of weird questions about myself the other day, under the pretext that she, "just doesn't know very much about me." I didn't like it. It wasn't like I had anything to hide, I answered. It was just weird. And when, in the process of explaining I-can't-remember-what, I told her, "well if you think people are going to be mean to you you tend to be kinda quiet." a few things started to make sense again.

Things that you're able to remember don't necessarily bring happiness...

I Hate Lonliness, But It Loves Me

"I had that dream again where I was lost for good in outer space"

there are things I want, things I want to write, things I'm expecting to happen but don't. so I'm waiting. waiting to write about things I think will happen. because in my head they've already happened, I've already sorted them out and described them. categorized and titled them without ever considering things might turn out differently...

I gave away one of my pins today. not something I do often, though kids give me stuff all the time & I sometimes draw pictures for them. I guess you could say it was a favorite, it was Renji after all.....but yeah. I had to do it.

It seems I've fallen in love with another 10 year old. T*****-kun from K******* Elementary is just the kind of kid that will probably turn into something I hate when he gets older. (I had a little more hope for S******-kun from M*** Elementary who I wrote about a while ago, but he lives in a more rural area so that's to be expected.) T*****-kun's always noisy in class, sometimes to the point of yelling at his teacher to "shut-up!" He's smart, but too easily excited, too quickly bored, too worried he might not be smart after all and he can't let anyone find out. He hates all the girls, and most of the boys. Of course they all think he's really cool. He's not the kid a teacher should want in their class. But I like him anyway. He just wants someone to acknowledge him. And once you do he's really fun to talk to. I gave Renji to him since he'd given me some Bleach cards last week. I'd promised to bring him some of my doubles today but I forgot & felt bad so I let him pick one of the pins on a whim. He seemed pretty happy.

On the way home I saw T*****-kun heading to soccer practice. He had one of these cool looking popsicles (I just happen to have some in my frezzer, but mine are melon)

Anyway, he saw me walking to the bus stop and ran up with one half in each hand (that's the cool part, you can cut them in the middle, or on the end) and said, "You can have one!" with a huge smile. (Seriously, it was Yamamoto-worthy.) So I asked him what flavor it was and he said, "Apple!" (the only part of the conversation that was English and not Japanese) and beamed at me some more. So I took it and said thanks & it was delicious (it really was) and walked off to the bus stop.

...even so, when you don't expect things they happen. and the things you're expecting may never come. may be better off not coming. you should know by now not to wait with baited breath anyway because real gratitude, gratitude for your existence and not just the things you give to someone or do for them, it's easy to see, and far more delightful than hearing the "thank you" you waited all day for from someone who's proven time and time again he'll let you down exactly when you expect him not to.

"Tell me doctor how to shake, a waking nightmare that is only worse when I am sleeping."

"I feel alright, so please don't get me rescued."

Lesson 2-3: Inner Circle Breakdown

I didn't even have to look that title up on the handy "Wiki list of Bleach chapters". I'm reminded every time I go get a title of my friend once saying, "You don't Google anime. You Google porn. You Wiki anime." But anyway, I didn't have to look it up. I've had it in my head (along with a few others) for quite a while. Because I knew I would need it one day. Because, really, when the outer edges crumble, what's left to protect the inside? Nothing. And it can't last if it's left unprotected, if those inside it aren't vigilant.

"I said my confidence, it gets stronger when you're next to me"

Of course, it's not the title that relates to this picture. This chapter comes much later, but it was part of what made me fall in love with Bleach all over again once I got to Japan. This title page was made into a poster which I immediately bought after having saved the scanlated version, emailed it to my phone, & ripped the original out of JUMP. It says good things. Amusingly, at the time I thought Rukia was Mizuiro-kun, making it a picture of 1 girl and 3 boys. It fit ok that way. Then later, I realized how that was kind of stupid because of course, she's a main character so why wouldn't she be on it? So it was actually 2 boys and 2 girls. And it fits better that way.

Last Halloween Sarah & I wanted to cosplay as Orihime and Rukia. That still might be kinda cool to do if we have the money. I noticed the "save Orihime" arc is taking a lot longer than the "save Rukia" one did. To be fair, Rukia's imprisonment was just set up. It was in order to reveal the true villain who coaxed Orihime away. And of course she went. To protect them. Silently. As it's the only thing she thinks she can do. They fight and they fight and still she doubts. Doubts their feelings, doubts their motives, doubts their strength, doubts her own worth more than anything else. And I keep waiting for her to get up and fight. And she doesn't. She just stands there silently, indecisively, watching everyone else suffer. And it makes me hate her. Much as I want to like her and be able to defend her to those fans who call her a useless bitch, I can't.

I took a test on the 7 deadly sins the other day. One of those lame, "which one are you?" things. I thought for sure I'd be Wrath, or maybe Pride, but no. I got Sloth. Fucking Sloth?!? Yeah. But I can't even begin to count the number of things, people, experiences, that I've let go by out of "laziness". So maybe it's accurate after all. Because I'm Orihime. Some of the time.

Good thing Kubo Tite isn't writing my life for me and I can do what she can't.

"please take the message that I'm picking up my chin at last"

Corrosion of Conformity

I really like Bleach. It's been a staple in my manga reading habits for years now, but sometimes I fail to appreciate it's finer points I think. One thing that has stood out to me since moving here and being able to get the real thing, raw and original every week is that the chapter titles actually are written in English. Albeit sometimes very poor and grammatically incorrect English, but it's all the more interesting to wonder just what was he driving at with that particular title? I think Kubo-sensei is actually a little unstable. After reading Zombie Powder and doing some research on it's rather abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, I feel like I can kind of relate to the guy. The pain his characters are in, the lengths they go to, the things they say, it makes sense in a creepy sort of way. That being said, my post titles are, until further notice, Bleach chapter titles.

So a great thing about living in Japan: $3 a week for Shonen JUMP. A not so great thing: reading, speaking, hearing, and sometimes even writing Japanese non-stop has a detrimental effect on my dexterity with my own native language. Old people talked about how they were forgetting English so much when I first got here, but I thought either they were exaggerating or just plain stupid. Yesterday Pin and I were discussing the merits of humans potentially having tails along with a girl we like to call my "wifey". Inevitably, the tailbone we all possess was brought up and we couldn't think of the word to describe it. The word that means something which has no function, but is a vestige of prior species evolution. The two of us just stared at each other in horror for a while. The wifey decided to take a nap, and we went back to our usual, more perverted conversations, but neither of us forgot. Eventually I came up with "prehensile" but that, of course is completely wrong because it refers to tails that can grab things, like a monkey's. Ironically, it also means "gifted with mental grasp or moral or aesthetic perception", which we apparently are not.

So do you know what it is? There's a hint in the beginning of the description. Vestigial. Left over. Completely useless. Blame it on the all night dancing in Tokyo, or the year of reading nothing but manga in it's native format. Either way, I'm forgetting things I'm going to need to make my future as a writer possible. The night before that I couldn't think of the word "translucent". I knew what it meant, I knew opaque, I knew I didn't WANT opaque to describe the partition between the train cars, but translucent was nowhere to be found. Conversely, I've just misspelled that word about four different ways, but I'm not a bit bothered by it. That's been happening for 25 years. Then again, maybe I'm just stupid.