Since I was feeling extremely lazy over the long weekend, I made it my mission to take down my anime RSS feed backlog. It spilled over into today, but I now swear I will not sleep until my feeds are all caught up.

At worst, I had just over 3,000 unread posts staring me in the face. I currently stand at 135 posts, with another 312 sitting in my purgatory (do I keep or trash this feed?) folder. (No, I did not read every one of those posts; for episode-summary blogs, I found that reading the first two episode impressions and then skimming the final episode impression gave me all the information I really needed. For a 26 episode series, that saved me some serious time.)

I don’t know that I’ve ever been a clean Type A or Type B personality*—back in my day, there was no gray-ground Type C nonsense—but the presence of these feeds was like a little weight on the back of my mind, one of many little unfinished tasks constantly irritating me.

[*introspection results: when well-rested, I tend to be Type B. When not well-rested, I tend more towards Type A. Regardless of my level of rest, I tend to project Type B vibes and have certain areas where—reasonably or not—I am Type A.]

I did read some (pseudo?) scientific thing, back in the day, that elected to divide us into neat-freaks and messy types by whether or not we made our bed every day. By that measure, I’m a neat freak. In practice, I like having things in their place—but everything tends to have a nice layer of dust on it.

Enough trying to categorize myself. Onward to victory!

11:14pm update: Holy poop, I’m done. I secretly feared that I would never get that cleaned out—a fear not wholly unjustified, given my recent tendency to not do anything.

I danced a fair bit this evening, with a wide variety of follows. That in and of itself wasn’t novel, though it is certainly unusual. (T_T)

What was different was that a follow/friend fainted after dancing with me. Well, like, five minutes after. Right as we were leaving the dance practice.

Apparently my first thought (not said) when someone randomly falls to the floor is quit screwing around.

In my defense, she’s far too young to be falling to the ground for real. (Of course, it was for real. […]) She claimed it was a lack of water and pushing herself too hard the last couple days, but I dunno. I did walk her home, so at least she didn’t collapse somewhere on campus.

…

I keep finding these weird videos, lately. The most-recent one also fits the title of this post: high-speed film of people getting punched in the face. I can’t tear myself away.

I’m back to my old ways of having eight things to do at once… and ignoring them all. Woo. While I continue to stick my fingers in my ears and sing LALALALALA, here are two things that kept me entertained:

Horrible People: a ten-episode, five-minutes-per-episode soap opera that takes everything I hate about soap operas and makes them awesome. This was originally released once a week, and I think it makes sense to watch the first few episodes to see if you like the show, and then watch the rest once a day—otherwise the next episode previews and recaps start to be overwhelming.

As a counterpoint, Nate noted that just because something is deliberately bad does not make it good. I suppose the show is an acquired (bad) taste.

The Office (Japan version): much less of an acquired taste, though a passing familiarity with the American version of The Office is required. (I’ve seen an episode or two, and that was enough to enjoy this.)

I’m feeling a bit melancholic as I prepare to begin yet another year of my existence. I already get stiff when I kneel for a few minutes; I’ve been trying to lean Ruby on Rails, but it’s taking my head longer to wrap itself around concepts than it used to. The infinite potential possessed by those when they graduate from high school—that I possessed when I graduated from high school—has shrunk to become something finite, and I’m keenly aware of that loss. In high school I used to joke that, as each day became a smaller and smaller percentage of the total life we had lived, and therefore felt shorter than previous days, that we were accelerating to our deaths. Bad news: it’s no joke.

I can’t get half the stuff done in a day that I used to accomplish. (Witness: updates to my blog.) Also, when did it become May of 2008? I swear 2007 wasn’t that long ago.

…

Back in high school, I thought that it would be nice if I were to have a girlfriend* and I could introduce her to my grandparents, because they were some of the finest people ever put on this planet. Now I look at my parents—who are also awesome, in their own way—and hope that my wife* will be able to know them (and they my wife) before they start falling apart. My folks married somewhat late, and I seem to be following suit, so… it’s not much of a stretch to see a situation where that might not happen.

[*Brent <-- dreamer]

And that leads to the idea of living in a world without my folks, and that’s a terrifying thought. My parents are one of the few points of stability in my life, and I fear for how I’ll cope with the world when that point is lost. I have a long-held suspicion that adults are just kids with more life experience, and I’ve not found anything that argues otherwise. (This perhaps explains my high-school fascination with Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.)

…

It seems to me that my ultimate folly, here, is looking too much at the final destination and not looking enough at the journey. Anime demonstrates why this is a mistake: while there are a good number of shows that are loads of fun to watch, there are darn few that actually end well. Nobody watches anime for the endings—and if you only watched anime that featured strong endings, you would miss out on almost everything anime has to offer. [How much that is, of course, is open to debate.]

Of course, recognizing the issue and addressing it are two different tasks.

…

Part of my funk seems to be cyclical; I have periods—on the order of months to years—where I am happier and more outgoing (my high-water mark was in 2000, when I could be mistaken for an extrovert at times) and times when I’m more of a recluse and generally antisocial (low-water mark being around the time I made this blog, actually).

Another part is probably the fact that the girl I was(/am) crushing on in dance now appears to have hooked up with some other guy. This other guy really knows how to dance, too. (This is bad, people!)

Happy Birthday, me. Great birthday present, or greatest birthday present?

…

In random news, it is a small world. In dancing with said girl this evening, she mentioned that she graduated from Central Linn High School. Having no idea where that was, I Googled it and learned that it was in Halsey.

Halsey is a small place. It is also where one of my childhood friends, Teri, moved to sometime in third or fourth grade. Reminded of Teri, and curious what she’s up to these days, I Googled her and got jack squat—save for one college course page (for a Washington college) that seems to indicate she worked on some project with a girl named Lindsey. This Lindsey has a rather unique last name, which just so happens to match that of a Lindsey who is a friend of my friends in Portland.

Also, apparently Lindsey is a published (and award-winning) poet. I had no idea.