In the words of Mark Twain…

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Greatly, greatly exaggerated.

This is the whiny post, but it’s also the “this is why I have been very silent for the past few weeks” post. And it’s only whiny for a bit!

Due to a rather silly confluence of:

a) 3 mandatory 12-hour days a week plus one optional 12-hour day (which I tend to take as keeps me socially occupied when otherwise I would not be), as well as alternate weekends and a third Sunday every month, with very little in the way of breaks in the day
2) the fact that I have been doing such insane crazy hours for the past, oh, two years now, with exactly two weeks of vacation time, one week taken in May 2007 and the other in August 2008)
iii) the emotional numbness that tend to accompany (i) and (ii) when combined with a disturbing tendency to sleep less than is custom
四つ目) my own natural tendency towards unnatural levels of stress, real or imagined

posts have been quite sparse this month, for no other reason than I am eternally drained of energy. Arguably I am not MAN ENOUGH to buck up and handle the stress (this is true, of course, since I’m sure I have far too much estrogen in me to really be a MAN), but I’d rather be semi-sane than MAN ENOUGH. And, besides, this nightmarish schedule is going to go away in December, to be replaced with the burning question of every college graduate: what now? But more importantly, more free time and a chance to at least be a psuedo-NEET (I would not quite fit the NEET status, but it would be the next worst thing).

At any rate, since most of the series in recent seasons I’ve been following heretofore are either lagging in subs, I am lagging in watching them, or are about to complete, I’ve been refraining from posting about them, simply because I’d rather not spend time building either expectations or presenting false views so close to the end of a series. I will definitely be posting something on Macross Frontier when it concludes next week (I saw 24 earlier today; it was awesome, and I was most amused by Ranka’s Ayanami Rei impersonation), probably a post on the perinnially confusing, confounding, and conflagrating Code Geass R2 (can I make sense of episodes 21-25? ONLY TIME WILL TELL!), possibly something on the most recent four episodes of The Daughter of Twenty Faces that I have yet to watch (and will not have time for tonight, at least), and, when the new season starts, at least initial impressions of whatever I, insanely, decide to pick up (which is a long list right now, but one that will probably be cleared off pretty fast). I do have a Kaiji draft somewhere around here, I’m still trying to figure out how to say what I want to say without spouting nonsensical gibberish as I usually do, but the results will probably be slightly more comprehensible nonsensical gibberish. And sometime soon I’m going to have to run through Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai in preparation for Umineko no Naku Koro ni, so there might be posts on that.

In other fronts, I’ve also just received a giant order of CDs the other day: the fantastic BOOM BOOM SATELLITES – EXPOSED album, the also fantastic SUEMITSU & the SUEMITH The Piano, It’s Me album, the also also fantastic BUMP OF CHICKEN albums Yggdrasil and orbital period, the also also also fantastic soundtracks to ef – a tale of memories, and the also also also also fantastic new album from Sound Horizon, Moira, which was the whole reason I ordered all that nonsense anyway (and also the one I hadn’t heard before it arrived, and which I still haven’t, uh, heard all the way through). What possible bearing this could have on anything at all, I’m not sure, but I can tell you that Sound Horizon is totally radical and if you haven’t heard them yet, you should. I would explain more but whatever genre I put them in wouldn’t work, but it involves violins and amazing singers and electric guitars and whatever else Revo decides to throw into the mix, including Wakamoto Norio and yukana and Noto Mamiko and Tamura Yukari and Kawashimi Houko and other seiyuu.

I’ve also been picking up books to read like crazy; excluding the not-Japan stuff, I have Zaregoto to go through, Dragon Sword & Wind Child to finish, my fresh-bought copy of FAUST Anthology v.1, Moribito, and, uh, probably other things. Not to mention manga that’s been piling up. Some might get reports, some might not, but that’s how it goes.

So, uh, in conclusion, have a not-to-proportion picture of Nyamo, who I am seriously missing because I have no way of watching more without delving into the complicated world of raws.

I swear I’m not using anime girls as a method of escape from my horrible, traumatic, stressful life detailed above. Or maybe I am! I can’t tell anymore, because there’s all these people making huge broad sweeps and stating that those who might, conceivably, enjoy two dimensional girls in any way, shape, or form, is socially incompetent. Ahh, the wonderful politics of sociology. I have no idea if I am “socially competent”, but people will talk to me of their own free volition and without seeming vehemently repulsed, and they, in turn, do not vehemently repulse me, so I figure I must be doing something right. Unless everything right is wrong again, which is when we have even worse problems.

I’m going to stop now. See you, uh, in an indeterminant period of time, but probably measurable in days! I will still probably respond to personal communiques of either the email variety, the MAL message/comment variety, or even the antiquated blog comment variety–and sorry if I keep neglecting replying to comments. I do read all of them, but I can’t always necessarily formulate something to reply with, or I do and want to but forget about it and beat myself up for not doing it.

You may return to not caring now.

Insults go here: vvvvvvvvv