More than just a Dream
Sometimes, I wish I was more ignorant.
I loved anime a lot more before I knew so much about animation history, animation production, world history, Japanese history, etc. I remember watching something on Toonami years ago and being unable to enjoy it, because all I heard were people I knew and had met at conventions. I stopped seeing characters and saw the movement lines of the initial animators and the character expression and posture tests.
I can't read books anymore because I study the sentence structure and the foreshadowing of events. I critique art as I experience it.
Learning Japanese, I've come to realize how vapid the lyrics are for almost every song I ever heard in the language. Learning Spanish, I can't tune to Spanish channels because I realize how awful they are, how surprisingly racist their own ads are, how shockingly religious corrdio are.
I'm relearning all the bones and all the muscles in the body, along with the vascular, lymphvascular, and nervous system. I'm relearning all the pressure points too. Why? Because I'm so numbingly bored.
But the more I learn - and I'm learning at a patient yet surprisingly voracious rate - the more I alienate myself from the world. So many friends want to travel, and I don't because I've done so much of it, all I see is the exact same people doing the exact same things in different places. Atlanta was Hong Kong was London was Louisville.
I contemplate going back to some of the games I got addicted to, just to have something fixate on.
The opposite of happiness is not sadness, it's boredom. It's apathy. It was a stunning realization when the psychological community embraced that reality. It was a paradigm-challenging game-changer when the source of addiction wasn't depression but a lack of stimulation.
I'm bored. I'm unstimulated.
And I'm medicating myself with facts, with data.
And I feel like it's making me worse.
I loved anime a lot more before I knew so much about animation history, animation production, world history, Japanese history, etc. I remember watching something on Toonami years ago and being unable to enjoy it, because all I heard were people I knew and had met at conventions. I stopped seeing characters and saw the movement lines of the initial animators and the character expression and posture tests.
I can't read books anymore because I study the sentence structure and the foreshadowing of events. I critique art as I experience it.
Learning Japanese, I've come to realize how vapid the lyrics are for almost every song I ever heard in the language. Learning Spanish, I can't tune to Spanish channels because I realize how awful they are, how surprisingly racist their own ads are, how shockingly religious corrdio are.
I'm relearning all the bones and all the muscles in the body, along with the vascular, lymphvascular, and nervous system. I'm relearning all the pressure points too. Why? Because I'm so numbingly bored.
But the more I learn - and I'm learning at a patient yet surprisingly voracious rate - the more I alienate myself from the world. So many friends want to travel, and I don't because I've done so much of it, all I see is the exact same people doing the exact same things in different places. Atlanta was Hong Kong was London was Louisville.
I contemplate going back to some of the games I got addicted to, just to have something fixate on.
The opposite of happiness is not sadness, it's boredom. It's apathy. It was a stunning realization when the psychological community embraced that reality. It was a paradigm-challenging game-changer when the source of addiction wasn't depression but a lack of stimulation.
I'm bored. I'm unstimulated.
And I'm medicating myself with facts, with data.
And I feel like it's making me worse.