You're looking for answers...

Cross-posted from vampiremonday.

So, I never watched Death Note in 2007. I saw, like, scattered clips with no context, and I wrote it off based on a very incomplete impression and somehow managed to live an entire life with 0 context about it. Like... to the point of big gaps in my understanding of certain cultural cues, both in nerdy US circles and here in Japan. (Example: a few months ago I found a weird Ryuk with an apple charm on the floor at the school where I work and asked, 'Is this anyone's... ugly... little guy?' and asked a Japanese adult coworker when the kids didn't know who said, 'Death Note???')

Anyway, I started watching it at a friend's suggestion and mild insistence.

In a way, I feel like it's good that I didn't watch it when it was new and I was still a teenager. It feels like it strikes a chord in me that is very... aesthetically coherent with who I am as a person in a way that I did not realize at the time that it was popular and new.

It is so resonant with me, here as a 35 year old watching it for the first time, that it is actually making me think about how it might have affected my interests, desires, and choices, had I chosen to watch it when it was making its first rounds in America. I know that sounds silly, but I almost do feel that it would've been a butterfly wing in me making different life choices somehow, even if I have absolutely no idea how it would've panned out.

I'm to a point now where I love the people I still have in my life enough that I wouldn't want to risk not knowing and loving them, even though there are a handful of moments in my mid teens and early 20s that I sometimes wish I could test-run to see how things went if I had done things differently, but it's just a fun and eerie little feeling to experience.

Sure, a lot of my fandoms seem to sort of... click into place like "oh, I am glad I found you," but this one feels... weird. Like a chunk of missing time.

Anyway, I am watching Death Note and really into it and I know I'm 19 years late, but I might write these creatures in some situations later.

About to put my laptop in the jail of a carry-on so I can leave promptly for work in the morning. I'm going to the inane training, because I have nothing better to do all day, and it prevents me from using PTO or awkward apologies despite the fact that a lot of people are gone.

I don't look forward to getting my shit onto buses and trains, but otherwise it should be fine.

Decided, since I have the object permanence of a goldfish these days, to make a list of random things I would like to do if I have time between doing things with bestie. Sometimes, when I visit her, she is playing games or something for periods of time when I have nothing to do but watch her and feel sort of stuck for my own amusement if that isn't all I want to do.

- rearrange and add to dreamwidth icons
- figure out some WIP to work on or start a new one
- download and prepare all the things I have to prepare to sign up for an absentee ballot since I have to do it anyway
- refresh my memory of what I have to do to get the special permission for unauthorized activities on my current visa so I can get started on that right away when I get back to work before it is due again on April 1

CW: Talk about several creepy or NSFW topics. Just. A weird post. Maybe. Proceed with caution or not.

Today, I was taking a bath/shower during which I left some color depositing hair conditioner on my hair for several minutes. This time, I was using a true red, so when I looked down before rinsing my hands, the color and the viscosity of this substance made it look just like I had a copious amount of fresh blood all over my hands.

There was a little prick of instinctive excitement that ran through my nervous system while my conscious mind remained calm and a little amused.

And I was thinking about how so much of my personal aesthetic and interests revolve around this strange tension and contradiction.

I hate bleak, hopeless, gorefest type horror. I am particularly horrified by cruelty for cruelty's sake. And yet, I have an interest in things that exist on the borderline of those things that takes up a lot of my aesthetic sense. I like things that can be creepy but not fully horrifying, or I like horror that defies its genre convention to let love, goodness, friendship, or whatever else "win" over the thing that is so horrifying. That's one reason I think the early parts of New Doctor Who captivated me so much. Of course, they had plenty of scifi, but a lot of it was also centered around various kinds of family-friendly and humanity-affirming horror that could, in the end, be defeated or cozied up to.

( Creepier/NSFW stuff from here )

This song feels appropriate for my mood. It's sort of creepy/playful/creepy/playful in the way that this general sensation makes me feel.

I am the kind of person for whom general strokes spoilers don't bother me at all. In fact, my best friend is pretty correct that strategic, bullet point type spoilers for something make me more inclined to finish it or give it a shot in the first place.

The other day, she finished up the Amphoreus plot in Honkai Star Rail.

She's been playing HSR since launch, but she never tried to get me into it despite my being a slow but interested Genshin player until this plot came around.

I come and go with my ability to focus on even playing video games, but I love it so much.

Participating in a fic big bang earlier this year kind of hurt my confidence in a weird way that most other writing challenges have not. I don't know if it was just timing or what.

I really want my writing juice back. My daydream space seems to be coming back just a little bit, but so far I cannot make it shape anything that I can turn into something I can share. I'm creatively frustrated but maybe not as hopeless as I was. Hope it sticks.

Various updates.

An Up?: As expected in my last long, emotional post on Taylor Swift Album Release Day, my long-time friend reached out as predicted. It has gone better than a part of me thought it would. The contact has remained a bit consistent, even if sometimes she does not get back to me the same day. Sometimes, I still feel like that she decides "tl;dr" about a lot of the things I send her, but I also think it might just be a difference in communication styles.

She gave me a health update and explained that she actually is taking actions to correct a rather severe nutrient deficiency and is feeling better.

I'm really relieved to hear that there might be a reason for her and, subsequently, our connection to get better. I feel like an asshole for being frustrated that she was kind of not available for a year and a half, with rare and variable exceptions, because I know she's had a hard time physically and emotionally, too.

As expressed in a replies to my previous post, there was a period of time back in 2016 when this friend really hurt me in a way that I think was something she kind of "had" to do in order to hit a rock bottom place from which she got into therapy. However, shortly after she got into therapy, I felt like that her conditions for being in relationship with anyone basically meant that she wanted groupies rather than friends. Others needed to support her in her mental health journey, but she had no emotional bandwidth or patience for anyone else's needs.

In the years since, we've talked about how people who are in a bad place who start therapy often kind of take a therapist's guidance and hear what they want to hear. Their first efforts to make adjustments can sound like "actually therapy makes you a terrible person???" but the therapist can then hear from the client and be like, "Ma'am that is not what I said. It's what you interpreted from what I said with a very broad brush."

Anyway, I am hopeful for the friendship, but I just have this broader frustration with the fact that I feel like even in my very close relationships -- close friends, family, etc. -- that I actually put my money and support where my mouth is. I try to genuinely help people instead of just giving them thoughts and prayers. However, it feels like the vast majority of people really do not offer actionable support even when you're supposedly close. People aren't willing to sacrifice anything for each other. And that ends up making me feel like an overdrawn bank account, sometimes, though I don't feel like the answer is to become exclusively self-serving?

Anyway...

A Down: I kind of think the new Taylor Swift album sucks. I've thought about expressing my feelings about it through some kind of open letter to her she'll never read, but I also feel like a better use of my time would be to invest my time into listening to music that I actually like for a while and giving Taylor Swift a time to simmer and see if she can ever learn to onboard valid criticism ever again in her entire life.

It's tricky, because there have been times when she was criticized for simply being a famous white woman, for simply daring to date around and try to fin "the one" even if it's messy, or whatever. However, I think that she has over-inoculated herself against criticism to the point that she hears all criticism as unfair and not understanding of her very unique situation.

Plus, no one can become and remain a billionaire without some damage to their hearts if not their brains.

Her last album, TTPD, contained a lot bitterness including some of it directed at her fanbase. I think she really blames a lot of them for the failure of her relationship with Matty Healy, and I don't think she's forgiven them despite being oh-so-happy with her new man.

There's something so petty and meangirl about this new album, in most places, that it feels like something she should have done in her 20s and not her mid-30s if at all.

Anyway, I was never a hardcore "swiftie" where I was convinced that there was hidden genius and Da Vinci Codes or whatever in every single one of her choices. However, there's a kind of pain associated with finding very clear evidence that a person your age that you ind of viewed as a poetic representation of your generation is being so regressive at this particular moment. But, like I said, billionaires do not have normal functioning human hearts and brains, so there's some hope on my part that she'll be humbled and become someone whose art I like again, but right now there's a sour taste in my mouth.

I don't hate her. I'm just disappointed.

An Up: The other day, a group of people who do global music outreach came to do a three-day workshop with our Year 7 students, and I got to pop in a few times and see performances, including the finale where the workshop cast and then the Year 7s also danced and sang. It reminded me of how powerful live art can be, and I've been filling some of my Taylor-shaped void with revisiting musicals.

I have this tendency to go through months where I only listen to spoken content, so it was nice to have a reminder of how music and dance and things can be like visceral therapy.

A Down: I'm still struggling to find writing consistency and motivation, and it feels like a part of me is missing or atrophied.

A Down: Trying to work stuff out with the OCT and eventual Canadian immigration/work permit options is being a royal pain in the ass. I finally got the fingerprinting company handling my most recent piece of the puzzle to contact me back after emailing them WEEKS ago (they said my email address was generic and sometimes they don't get those? like why provide an email for assistance if you do not notice or answer emails from real-name gmail addresses??? who are you expecting to email you?) and calling two days in a row to leave a message. Initially, they told me they had not received my package at all yet. However...

An Up: The reason they had not received my package at all was because Canada Post went on a strike like two days after the package was mailed from the US. This means it was probably just sitting in the Canada Post's stockpile for days and weeks. However, the guy emailed me back and said they got my package the day after I finally got them to communicate with me.

A Down: I bought a little bookshelf type thing from amazon and thought I could put it together by myself, but I simply do not have the elbow grease to do it manually. I had to order an electric screwdriver, so for now I have pieces of a shelf in a random spot on the floor. One reason it's hard to organize my small space is that I do not have a specific place for everything, so here's hoping I don't get so disgusted that I simply have to pay to have someone cart it away.

I have mentioned probably that specifically since July my creativity has kind of crashed and burned. It sucks a lot, and I had a very bad few days recently with my mental health. I feel a bit better at the moment, but I am still worried about my ability to maintain this outlook.

Currently, I am signed up for the bingo challenge at fandom_empire and have been trying to track things over at communal_creators.

Someone over at the latter suggested this word tracking spreadsheet template. Decided to try using it from today.

I got home about an hour earlier today and slightly less disgusting. It got back up in the 90s F today with humidity to spare, but about time work as winding down, some wind blew in what was supposed to be rain but which was a temperature drop of about 10F in an hour, though that still left it in a more comfortable but still quite warm 80s range.

Managed to clean my dishes that had been sitting for two days. Was going to try to cook something but realized the eggplant from the mail had started to go bad, so screw it, I'll wait for the weekend. I have to work this Saturday but only a half day and I get to sleep in.

I'm still just feeling so brain-cooked and frustrated. I want to be creative, but I always just feel like I'm in trouble for not doing enough to entertain the friends I have who care what I do.

I got a little notebook in the mail. Plan to use it for prayer journaling due to the whole brain-is-too-slippery-and-overheated feeling.

I also wrote in my little Japanese study notebook I started before I moved here in 2024 for the first time since. Something about my old boss's approach to "encouraging" me to learn Japanese just made me pissed off for over a year. At least I am doing something, but I want to do things that don't just feel practical without being too tired to function.

cw: animal death Update on little Charles: Apparently they administered morphine before the euthanasia medication and while that kicked in they let my parents pet him and feed him an ice cream sandwich. And after he was very high and half asleep, only then they gave him that, and my stepmom held him and Dad petted him until he stopped breathing.

In other news, I am thinking about the way being in fandom is just a lot less like being "in" anything and isn't really as fun anymore and how it is connected to the general state of the world.

When coming to this website to make this post, I noticed the site announcement about restrictions on Dreamwidth in Georgia and in my home state of Tennessee. I'm really proud to be on this website and paying a pittance a year to help them keep fighting good fights like this. I don't post here as much as I could, though, because years in the bigger ocean of tumblr and twitter have kind of made me wind down my sense of having anything to say.

I know it's a weird combination of the violence inherent to capitalism and just my brain getting older, but I remember having the ability to daydream all day long in school, writing fic snippets in my notebooks, while also continuing to keep good grades in my classes. I used to be creative and itching to share stuff. There was something about the internet being a place I had to manage to get access to that created a kind of goal at the end, but I still don't think it's "dopamine addiction" or whatever that's causing the main problem. I think it's just the sense that there are little campfires everywhere -- or one big bonfire here and there -- but around them, nobody is actually gathered to listen. People are just there to add fuel to the fire and be angry and hurt that no one is looking at the sparks they added. I'm to blame as is everyone else.

I do try to engage with other people's fanwork and stuff, but it seems like it rarely becomes a two-way street anymore.

You don't have to be friends with everyone you meet in fandom, but I know that back in the LJ and even early tumblr days, there was a sense of knowing who hung around in your neck of the woods. Maybe you didn't always, always engage in reciprocity of comments and reading, but there was enough overlap that there was an excitement to sharing stories and stuff. It was a form of conversation and positing ideas. Now, it's just part of an attention economy where everyone is broke and starving.

I don't know what exactly I did to direct the YouTube algorithm to feed me down this specific rabbit hole, but the other night I found this channel called DarwinsLab. I can't speak for his past videos, but I watched the most recent tree about the nature of dreams, psychedelics, and the uncanny valley respectively. I really enjoyed them, and it felt a little bit like a slight reach backward into what the internet was like and "for" when I was in university and spending all that precious time I could've been forging IRL connections being on the internet (half-joking). It reminds me of Vsauce and watching everymanHYBRID and Marble Hornets and, strangely connected, YuGiOh The Abridged Series. There was a sense of creativity and conversation in those things that I often feel is not present even in the independent or self-made YouTube "content" I often fill my brain with.

When I was back in America for a few weeks, I rarely turned on YouTube, I noticed. Sometimes, I sat in total silence. Other times, I watched the actual TV my parents pay for, lying with little Charlie on the couch while parents were out. There was silence, and it was mostly bearable, though the first night of three that my parents went out of town while I was there (so I could dogsit our little buddy, them having no idea he'd be gone in a month), the house being so much larger than my little apartment kind of made me feel a little insecure like there might be something else hiding in the shadows or another room.

Here in Japan, I listen to YouTube and podcasts a ridiculous amount of the time. I enjoy them, most of the time. I enjoy learning, even when it's just on the level of following a story. Learning the trivia and beats of a true crime case that is common knowledge along with a little editorializing, etc. I have to have some kind of speech-sound to fall asleep here, and I don't know why. I would sometimes turn it on when I was back in the States, but I never actually comprehended more than five minutes of it before passing out.

I think it has something to do with the fact that all of my comprehensible conversations and interactions with human speech are at work here. There's a part of my brain that is just starved for something that feels both personal and novel. And yet, I'm noticing, that I have started to tune out toward the end of podcasts and videos that I normally wouldn't have lately. Then again, I've just suffered a loss, however distant and small compared to a human life. I know that what I'm experiencing at this very moment might not be some super representative aspect of my personhood.

When I try to listen to the part of me that's zoned out, to interrogate why, I find that it's that creative urge in the background begging me to be the one to make something. Only, I spent the whole time I was home trying to give myself space to create something, and the best I did was 15 seconds of simple video editing or so that is nowhere near finished that I may never go back and finish. I couldn't write anything, and I dunno why.

Except, I kinda do. It feels like there's no point to write anything lately. I feel a little bit less pessimistic about this than I did a week ago. I finally got one comment on the Trigun fic I posted recently. Only, I know that back in the past, I would have been able to find a space in which to talk about the aspect of the story that made me write that fic, even if the person didn't fully read my fic themselves, and if I got lucky they might, and that's what I'm missing.

Which brings me back to the YouTube algorithm.

Somehow, in connection with this and other stuff I watch sometimes, it brought me to this video:

Watch on YouTube

It is an interesting take on a lot of things, and my petty connection to my own sense of being unmoored is much smaller than the bigger issues of white grievance replacing the personality and redirecting suburban white anger into fascism. However, one of the things she talks about up front is that Eminem was kind of one of the last release valves for a subculture of young white suburban people that held a space that allowed them to share experience, express anger, and be transgressive or rebellious in a way that was able to both acknowledge their legitimate grievances against those in power and the apparatuses in the mainstream that held them down while also being self-aware of their own privilege in the landscape of a genre of music that was pioneered by Black people. She talks about how she was once a big fan of Eminem, became very critical, and then came back around to the idea that while she doesn't want to absolve him of all the "problematic" elements of his writing and body of work that maybe the flaws and anger and transgression present within his work are representative of the functions of a lot of former subcultures that used to allow young (white otherwise, though the white people are most relevant to her concern in the video) people to help identify themselves in opposition to the mainstream.

I remember being in the fringes of Eminem-enjoying and the weird cathartic rush I got when I learned how to contextually use the "f-word" as an intensifier and was brave enough to do it in a venting rant to a friend over the phone in hushed tones as a tween. I grew up at the intersection of parents who were just really responsible given their means for the most part and "white trash," so there was a certain aspect of that that spoke to me when it was coming out and cool. And I remember that kind of word-of-mouth and slow-transmission of culture that was based on who you happened to have access to.

I also think about the fact that had it not been for my cousin giving me a copy of Shounen Jump he'd worn out as a mousepad after reading it a couple times then telling me about a person he met with a screenname based on YuYu Hakusho in an Unreal Tournament chatroom that I should try to message on a lark who then got freaked out like I might be lying about who I was and how I got their username that I would not, in any way, be who I am today.

Even the dial-up internet had the character of being a decentralized place but where you could, through others, eventually discover things.

The centralized, mainstream, social media internet actively bottlenecks all of that experience and most of it feeds it through an algorithm that serves to make the user and the people similar to and adjacent to the user's habits more like themselves instead of helping to change them in any way.

And while there's this narrative of wanting to embrace who you are, to not let others change you, the thing is that being able to "try lives on" used to be a more natural part of reality than it is now. The kids growing up with social media now are more terrified of being cringe than being anything else. ~Back in my day~, there was a sense that choosing how one wanted to be cringe and learning the rules and not being a "poser" but being fully sincere in your efforts to conform to this type of cringe was a feature of adolescence.

And I think that this connects to what is dying about fandom. Fandom was, at one point, a series of subcultures. Certain fandoms had certain rules, certain conventions (of both kinds), and certain online communities that had idiosyncratic rules and expectations.

Now, you have to cast your bait and line out into the murky depths of a tag or search term and hope that maybe someone who matches your weirdness might see it. There are all these arguments about "purity" versus being as weird and kinky as you want to be and everything in between, and I think this kind of thing is partly because there is no sub in the fandom subcultures anymore, so people keep trying to make the mainstream vibe into what they're most comfortable with. Whereas, in the past, people would just make their own little community about that thing that included 5-20 core members and others who came along to join and that was enough.

And, selfishly, it is SO hard to be creative in this environment where I know that everyone is too overstimulated to care or views me and my attention as competition rather than having a handful of people I can trust to at least care that I had something to say.

It's been a little while since I was on this website. 

I started my new job on April 1 of this year at an international school in Tokyo. I had a couple of weeks before that to settle into my new apartment, but the moment I got moved in, I got sick for a few days. My body really does seem to just give in and give up every time I have a moment of peace from expectation and obligation. 

I am currently writing from my dad's house in Tennessee. It's the first time I've been back in over a year. I was nervous about coming through the airport, as outspoken as I am online about things that suck about the encroaching fascism in the US, but I should know that for the most part as a white woman, no one is really paying attention. 

My flight home ended up being delayed by 3 hours in total which cost me spending 12 extra hours in airports in total. Kinda sucked, but I dislike airports less than most people I've heard talk about it. 

My new job is night and day better than my job that I left, so I feel confident that I made the right decision there. It's a really lovely job most of the time, even though every job has its bullshit. The two things that are most difficult in this job: my direct-report boss is a True Believer in AI and as an English teacher this makes me want to pull my hair out and, because the international school is private and people choose their junior and senior high schools in Japan based on a variety of factors, June and July were just a blur of hardly ever getting a full weekend from my job. We get flex time at this job, though, so most of those events I got paid back in hours I could use. Means I have a few extra paid leave days left over after taking several during the month of August. I think they gave us 10 or so days off besides weekends, and I ended up taking 8 in total. 

And yet, I am stuck in this limbo of feeling of having too much free time and too little. 

While I am here, my dad and stepmom are planning to go out of town for a few days, since they never have a dog sitter. Maybe I'll start to have creative thought again in that quiet. My stepmom is old enough that she turns up the TV loud enough to bother me a little, but I want to sit in the den both as a social grace and because it's where the air conditioning is the coolest. 

I was hoping to get time and inspiration to write or otherwise do fandom interaction or contribution, but my last two fics have gotten next to no traffic or engagement. I did post them a few places, and I have at least one or two kudos, but it's just so lonely to get NO comments in spite of showing it to people. I feel like my greatest strength to make anything is writing, but no one bothers to act like fanfic authors are people offering them their ideas anymore. 

Even before that, I participated in a secret santa type exchange, and my recipient kind of ghosted the entire thing. 

I just really have... idk... a sense of lost competence? I've written over a hundred fics, and I know that it's a cultural shift, but I just... don't have whatever it takes to get people's attention anymore. 

Maybe I should post them here, since people actually treat people like people here, but I feel like it's hard to find the audience... anywhere... for any specific thing I write. 

Anyway, that's my current mope. And because of it, I lost steam on the few WIPs I had and can't think of anything new. 

I’m on vacation now, and having the kind of job I do this year, I don’t have grading or anything to worry about, but my break is a little shorter than it would have been in my public school job.

I’m trying my best to focus on every moment being present with my best friend and away from the things that cause me to feel kind of mopey about my everyday life back in Japan. Plus, when I go back, I’ll only have 10 or 11 weeks left on the job I’m leaving.

In the meantime, I’ll have to secure an apartment for my next job, but even though being a teacher in a school again will be a lot of responsibility, it’s more focused responsibility, so I feel like it will be better for me. Plus, I’m only planning to be there for a year, if my other plans go in order.

It’s hard not to focus on the anxiety of going back to responsibility instead of being where I am, happy. I guess another thing is that I have real hope of my regular life being better in the next 18 months or so, so it’s hard to wait for that long and to imagine it stretching out before me.

However, I am happy that if I just actually manage to ignore my job for the next week or so, nothing bad will happen to me or my students as a result. I just really don’t have quite as much stamina for a teaching job as many do, and it’s the one drawback of my chosen profession, no matter what form it takes.

I’m really happy to be in a part of the world that’s more familiar and which speaks my language, even though I enjoy being in Japan. I came to Japan in order to have a chance at a better living situation than the one I was able to afford in America, despite making a higher salary, but now that I have worked out a game plan to have a life where I can be near my best friend most of the time, I feel it is frustrating and not quite enough. On the other hand, the conversation that led to me actually coming up with this plan and finding out more than I knew before probably wouldn’t have happened if not for the confluence of circumstances and my homesickness and discontent when I first moved. And, I’ve gotten in better shape – losing a little weight but, more importantly, getting my diabetes under much better control. So, it feels like a “meant to be” kind of side quest, but I wish it wouldn’t take so long, but I’m old enough that I don’t want to wish my time away.

Just thinking some thoughts as I try not to waste my time off as I often do, fretting.