Anime Procrastination

Those of you who know me, know that I tend to not have a lot of free time. As if being in my junior year wasn't time consuming enough, I've also been very active in my job hunt for the past 2 months, as well as working 2 jobs, searching for a place to live in next year, and all the work that goes along with each. However, you might also know that in what sparse free time I do have, I have a tendency to burn it up through watching anime. These days I rarely watch more than 20-40 minutes a day (and sometimes not at all), but there are some days when I'll go on a binge and watch 8-9 episodes in a row. I do complain a lot about not having enough time to do stuff, but I guess that is fairly hypocritical given how I use some of my free time. Yet, I also feel that anime fulfills several very important desires in my life.

Number one, I enjoy stories. I enjoy learning about characters, seeing their interactions, linking them with my own. I enjoy experiencing their emotions, feeling their pain, reveling in their joy. Maybe it's because they're in Japanese, maybe it's because they're far less commercial than American television, but I feel that most anime's tend to have a lot more depth to them than most mainstream television. Which brings us to point number two.

I appreciate the depth and thematics of each show. Every anime I watch has an overlying message to it (if it doesn't, it's usually not exciting to me, so I don't watch it in the first place). I have a file on my computer that keeps track of all the anime's I've watched over the course of my life (believe me, you don't want to know how many that is), and each entry is accompanied by how good I think the series is, and what message or theme I got from the show. This way, when people say "watching anime is so useless, you shouldn't spend your time on such a fruitless experience," I respond to them that they're not useless. I have many mini-lessons that I've learned from each anime, some of them greatly affecting my view on life and my overall interpretation of the world around me.

And last but certainly not least, anime is simply how I choose to entertain myself. Some people play sports, some people play video games, some people go out and drink themselves stupid, some people do drugs, all in the name of self-entertainment. It's just that most people believe that watching anime is socially unacceptable, and thus anyone who does so must be an uninteresting or uncool person. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps it is uninteresting and uncool people who watch anime. But like so many others, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I leave you with "Howling" by abingdon boys school, the OP for the anime, Darker Than Black.