I’ll pull you out through the space between the bars - admit that you’re dirty, the world is all yours.

Epon scolded me last night.  “I feel guilty when I go to your wordpress and see all these comments going ‘AJA WHERE ARE YOU’ when you are right here!”   I was like, But I haven’t gone anywhere! and she was like, but you haven’t updated! and I was like, I have nothing to say!

And I still don’t think I have anything to say.  But it seems Epon has made me her slave, so I suppose I will update.

I made a list of things I wanted to talk about on this post so that I could actually have things to say. Because really, honestly the only time I ever get the urge to update lately is when the only thing, I swear, that I want to say is BUMP OF CHICKEN BUMP OF CHICKEN OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU BUMP OF CHICKEN. So I figured I would get that out of the way first.

SERIOUSLY EVERY TIME I HEAR THEM IT IS LIKE, I DON’T EVEN KNOW, I JUST HAVE SUCH A SPONTANEOUS OVERFLOW OF POWERFUL FEELING NOT-AT-ALL RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY AND IT JUST HAS NOWHERE TO GO.  So I want to just make a silly ridiculous post about HOW MUCH I LOVE THEM OH MY GOD WHY IS THE WHOLE OF LIFE NOT SET TO, LIKE, A SOUNDTRACK BY BUMP OF CHICKEN, I LOVE THEM SO MUCH I COULD SERIOUSLY CRY. 

I finally saw one of their PVs which I had been putting off the way I tend to put off things I know I will love so much it will cause my heart to explode. I saw the pv to Guild, which is just like, footage from them at concerts and THESE ADORABLE HAPPY CLAYMATION PEOPLE OH MY GOD.  it was SO HAPPY that I cried.  I CRIED OVER A BUMP OF CHICKEN VIDEO, GUYS. ETA: AND i JUST LOOKED UP THE TRANSLATION AND NOW I’M CRYING AGAIN. I LOVE THEM. LOVE THEM. LOVE. THEM.  

I just cannot even tell you what they do to me.  It’s like they’ve taken a way to tap into the essence of everything that is good, pure, hopeful, joyous, fun, and pure hope and love in life itself, and they’re distilling it into musical form. It is just like that.  That is how I feel about most J-pop in general, but not to the extent that I feel this with Bump of Chicken. I seriously have never known anything like this before outside of classical music and musical theatre.  This is a kind of musical bliss I haven’t experienced with anything new in years.  They make me happier than just about anything in my life ever except maybe Nobuta wo Produce, and when I say “anything in life ever”, that includes Sondheim and choral music, and that is just about the happiest anything can make me.

Now that I have ranted about Bump of Chicken - but don’t worry! I’ll probably say the same thing again next week! - I will proceed to my list of  things to talk about, in no particular order:
- Maya! :D
- Where I have been!
- THE SECOND DEATH NOTE OPENING
- Gankutsuou for Zoe

I will start with Maya because of all the things on this list she is the nicest!  MAYA YOU ARE GETTING PUBLISHED YAY!  I have known about this for a couple of months but now that the news is out and it is official, I can say that I am SO EXCITED, SERIOUSLY.  I have expected this for years and I have expected you to write something phenomenal, an instant bestseller - which I still expect, incidentally.  I could not be more thrilled that this has happened to you, and excited for what is to come.  YAY.  I love you dearly.

Next up, the Death Note credits. 
I had put off watching the Death Note anime forever because I did not want to be traumatized for Issue 58 twice, and then Epon made me watch it, and then I only watched up to like ep 10 for the same reason, but THEN she made me watch The Traumatic Episode anyway, and so I bulked up my resolve and screwed my courage to the sticking place and prepared my box of tissues and hit play and I hear:

hey, hey, ningen sucker - ah ningen, ningen fucker
AKLFJWWEIJFWIOFJWIOJFIETOTUTOUIOIOJIOWEJIOJEISJIOJGIOJGIOAERJIOJFIOJFIOAJAFERFAEIOJEIOFJE.
WHAT ON EARTH. I LOVE THAT I HAD NEVER HEARD THESE CREDITS BEFORE. I HAD HEARD PEOPLE JOKING ABOUT THEM BUT OH MY CHRIST, IT WAS NEVER ‘WTF WTF WTF’ IT WAS LIKE, ‘LOL OH DEATH NOTE, U R SO METAL’ AND I SERIOUSLY HAD NO PREPARATION WHATSOEVER. NO PREPARATION.

Light could have probably fed L to a woodchopper after that and I’d've just been like HEY HEY NINGEN SUCKER HEY HEY NINGEN FUCKER YEAH!
So. Yeah. There’s that.

Gankutsuou climax was ever so slightly anti-climactic, I felt, but it was so tremendously overtly HOMOSEXUALITY WILL REDEEM YOUR SOUL that it was impossible not to love, and I really really loved it, and the whole show in entirety. I could have done without the last ep (why epilogues why) EVEN THOUGH IT MADE ME CRY AND GO “OH MY GOD THEY FINISHED THE SONG THEY FINISHED THE SONG” *BAWLS*, and I loved that they never contradicted Alvert’s flaming gay love for Franz and the Count and that Eugenie’s story arc ended in such a PRO-FEMALE ANTI-TRADITIONALIST way.

The spoilery thing that happens 2/3 in absolutely killed me in a tiny way, like, I was just not prepared for that because you don’t SPOILERY THING the BEST BOYFRIEND EVER IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD WHO IS NOT TOUYA AKIRA OK, which spoilery character CLEARLY IS.

And. Ahhh. Gankutsuou is just so amazingly beautiful. I want to post a whole bunch more screencaps at you (I just spelled that poast) and I can’t at the moment, for which you should be grateful, because. Seriously. Beautiful Gankutsuou screencaps? I have many of them. Almost as many screencaps as I have of Tezuka wearing the exact same expression.

Now I am supposed to say where I have been and I don’t know the answer to that, except that I have been playing lots of DDR - oh my god most addictive and fun and healthy exercise routine on the planet. This weekend I played Princess Maker 2 for like 8 hours straight and was certain that my daughter would marry the prince, except she wound up becoming the court jester because I’d made her charisma too high for royalty. LIFE.

Mostly I have been writing, though, and I have discovered that when you have nothing riding on what you’re writing, no expectations, no one to judge you based on things you’ve written before or things they think they know about you, you get to a place where you just write what makes you happy, and the more you write, the more you want to write.

I had forgotten what it feels like to get to a point where you fall in love with your own story. It is a paradox that fandom makes you fall so in love with things that it makes you want to write stories you love, but in the process of writing them, the better job you do the more expectations build up around what you write - at least, that is how it is for me and I suspect lots of other people. It is nice to strip all that away, and have only a story idea, and a handful of characters, and the chance to write purely with nothing to risk, and no one to disappoint, but only yourself to please.

That kind of writing is addictive. And that is mostly what I have been doing. Playing DDR and writing. Which is a lot like going, holy shit, my life without LJ? BEST LIFE EVER WHO KNEW.

This morning I taught one of my students the “Where I’m From” poem, which every good middle school and English teacher knows is this template poem-writing example, only, me being completely unable to follow instruction of any kind, I hate the general template, so I threw it out and we just made up a new one off the cuff.

She wrote about pit bulls and unwrapping her christmas presents and then rewrapping them and pretending to be excited the next morning so her parents wouldn’t know. :D

I wrote one too, and here it is.

I am from
     staring up at the sky on clear summer nights
I am from
     dancing to “Seishun Amigo” in the middle of the street
I am from
     driving to Kansas and over the causeway
I am from jazz
     vivid warmth and bright colors, singing without words and playing without notes
I am from knowing
     too much at the wrong times
     and not enough at all the others.
I am from my name:
     a song, a book, a cheese, that’s me
I am from
     bright felt hats and the wrong kind of music, played too loudly on the wrong kind of street
I am from
     music
     every kind of music, and the bright
     soaring searing soul-swelling expansion of your chest
     Bach Brahms Bernstein Bump of Chicken ampersandheartssemicolon, all in me, forever and ever

Omake
   I am from
   bad Japanese and a hope for the best -
for the endings of stories yet to be told.