Orphans, Namida

Happy 2016, everyone! I know I really have not been updating properly. Just a couple weeks ago, what seems to be a falling out of sorts was set into motion, a falling out with a friend who is of utmost importance to me. It drained me. Writing has become even harder as I stew in my emotion. But a theme on this blog is that art impacts life, and it reflects impact upon life.

So I have been reading One Week Friends, a manga about a boy named Hase and a girl named Fujimiya - Fujimiya has had memory loss for years, which essentially means she can only hold memories for a week before losing them. Think Chihiro from the Ef series. But as a result, this manga gets at what makes a friendship. Can a friendship be recreated? Even if memory is lost? Whether due to time, a medical condition, or just something else? So reading this manga helps me unpack my  feelings of despair and now I have a new frame for my situation. Having to struggle so hard for friendship, that you must ask someone to be your friend every week, is both inspirational but also tragic. But it gets my mind off my situation at least partially.

Above is a rather lovely image of Kaori Fujimiya from volume 1 of the manga (shamelessly taken from Batoto.) (Other two images shamelessly taken from Myanimelist.)

Another work that I am enjoying is Shirobako, a beautiful anime about making anime by PA Works. I still have like 9 eps left, but I can tell that it will likely be fantastic. Totally peak zru-core.   As someone still trying to find his place in this world, I find this show so endearing - the characters are not shy about not knowing what's next, but they never give up. Whether it's Rii-chan (below) reading Crime and Punishment and other stuff by Dostoevsky so she can write scripts, or Oi-chan trying to figure out however the hell anime production works.  Or Zuka-chan botching her first audition, mainly because of nervousness. 

The metaness is quite high, especially when it wants to mention "Ava" (Evangelion) or Isao Miyazaki (Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki). There was a pretty awesome reference to En Attendant Godot but they decided to feature two women as the main two character; thus Godot plays a thematic role in the show, but they also add to the original feature. By changing the casting, the play (in the show) takes on a new meaning of young adults, in particular women, trying to find meaning. It's not simply one group that takes on this despair.  The show pretty much stole my heart when it mentioned Brothers Karamazov, one of my favorite books - I keep threatening to spoil how it ends to one of my friends. He's ginger, so it's okay. Rinko-chan's gothic aesthetic is another fabulous part of the show (to the left, to the left). If I had to choose one word for Shirobako, it would be "heartwarming." It's the metaphorical hot cocoa for my metaphorical winter.

Some New Year's resolutions can be established based on my efforts:
1) Try to restore friendship with that person
2) Write 1 "full" blog post a month - an actually researched post that's more than 3 pages long - and two short posts a week
3) Complete at least 300 anime on MAL, with a ratio of at least 65% TV
4) Try to actually finish the story I'm working on
5) Annoy Justin to tears
6) Get into grad school/rough equivalent (such as Fulbright)
7) Read at least 2 long VNs (20hrs+)

8) Finish at least 2 mangas (that are 7-12 volumes in length), so including One Week Friends

9) Finish Shirobako tomorrow

And that's what's been going on, I guess!

A thought occurred to me that I should reflect on this year. 2014 was a difficult year for me, but 2015 is the hardest after 2013 for me. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The year I tried to fight against my tendency to repress my emotions, the year I graduated university, and the year I started having heart palpitations. The year I started taking medication preemptively for my heart, and the year I started taking sleep medication. It's been a rather turbulent year for me, especially since I've faced so much change. After graduating, I noticed that my friendships seemed to vanish into thin air, and I began to doubt myself even more.

My heart palpitations occurred around the time that I realized that I had been rejected from all the graduate schools I had applied to. All that money and effort, down the drain. It set up the rest of the year terribly, even if my grades for Winter and Spring 2015 were good. It throttled my confidence and motivation.

I faced so much frustration when I did volunteer research work, because it made me feel that my hands were terrible. That I couldn't do anything much except for helping with literature, which isn't considered especially valuable. But that's contrasted with speaking with professors and applying for graduate schools, where it seemed that I found that they were friendly and understanding. That even if I struggled, I could keep going. However, I started hitting boredom while volunteering, and now I've settled into complete stagnation.

This was a year that I began journaling around mid October. That's how I know I saw Your Lie in April towards the end (of course memory works too) - that show appeared many times in my journal entries, especially as I began to see Kaori and Arima as extensions of myself. But it also awakened painful memories in me, forcing me to interact with those emotions. Journaling often ends up shallow, but sometimes I find real gems, where I can dig deeply into my emotions. And sometimes it's just made up mathematical modeling of feelings, which does nothing.


Then for a few weeks in November, my mom was gone, meaning that I lived alone. This was while I was volunteering. But I would be alone for most of my time, so I began to feel quite depressed. When I'm alone, the internal demons come out, but there I had no one to hold me back. I just clung onto a "stability" that didn't exist because I just wanted my mom to come home. My little sister visited sometimes, but it didn't alleviated the pain. It reminded me of that time when I fell to sinister emotional depths - it was when I was in Atlanta, at the conference back in November 2014, and I was all alone in the room. I thought of hurting myself but I held back. While home alone, it was a similar situation. Having to go to volunteering felt miserable for those few weeks because I felt ignored, just a burden and useless. And then, without me realizing it, the volunteering ended. I felt satisfied with compiling information for my lab but ultimately, I felt unaccomplished, especially with the actual lab stuff. I just read papers....It was good practice but it felt lacking.

At some point, everything began blending together, so I feel a mixture of sadness and apathy, of hopelessness. Now I'm placing my hopes in my applications, to graduate school and Fulbright. I just want something to work out so I can re-energize after such a hard year. How do I keep going? At this point, I'm not sure. And I feel like my friendships are dissipating, for the most part, save few...It seems like I still could greatly improve on making healthy relationships.

It wasn't all bad, though the good moments felt more sparse this year. I was hugged by my friend, which made me really happy - even if now the friendship is in jeopardy. I'm sure there's a lot of positive events that happened but so many feel small and intellectual. Presenting at my honors thesis defense made me feel really proud of myself - I could put together a professional set of slides and teach people about my research. One of those few events that helps me claim more confidence.

I'm very grateful for my friends and family, those who were there for me or at least tried, and I'm grateful for anime. Especially Non Non Biyori Repeat, Shirobako, Your Lie in April, and Sound Euphonium (and others). This was also the year I tried out Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, helping me get acquainted with mecha, and I also finished Mushishi and Honey and Clover. I got so much more anime done than I ever dreamed I could previously. At least the despair seems to be counteracted by my efforts. I am hopeful that next year I can accomplish new things and grow. And refine the things that are already there.

Ganbatte ne, Zru!

- Zeldaru