Paranoia

Blubber - Judy Blume

2012-02-03T20:11:00.002-04:00

Blubber is a good name for her, the note from Caroline said about Linda. Jill crumpled it up and left it on the corner of her school desk. She didn’t want to think about Linda or her dumb report on the whale just then. Jill wanted to think about Halloween.

But Robby grabbed the note and before Linda stopped talking it had gone halfway around the room.

That’s where it all started… there was something about Linda that made a lot of kids in her fifth grade class want to see how far they could go… but nobody, Jill least of all, expected the fun to end where it did.

This is a story about bullying.

Jill Brenner is in the fifth grade; and at the beginning of Blubber she is in class listening to her classmates presenting projects on mammals. The last person to present that day is Linda Fischer, who Jill says is the pudgiest girl in the class (but not in the grade). Linda is doing her project on whales, which is why Wendy decides to start calling her ‘Blubber’. She passes a note around class and Linda has a new nickname before her presentation is even over.

Just like that, Linda becomes the official outcast of the class. Everyone in class, including Jill, does their best to make Linda’s life miserable. They call her Blubber, never Linda; they trip her; take her things; make her call herself Blubber; and they constantly tease her about her weight, among other things. There’s even an incident where Jill, Wendy, and Wendy’s best friend Caroline corner Linda in the bathroom and school and try to strip her.

No one seems to like Linda very much; especially Jill, who always blames Linda when things go wrong for her. The classroom teacher is completely unaware as to what is going on, and the bus driver on the school bus Linda, Wendy, Caroline, Jill, and some other classmates ride just ignores what happens.

I can’t really say that this book has a direct plot. It’s like Judy Blume wrote what happened during about a month-long period in Jill’s life and it just so happened that there was bullying going on at the time. The bullying isn’t even always talked about. Jill talks about things like Halloween, costumes, stamp collecting, Jill’s best friend and her family, her own family, what’s going on in her home, and so on. Most of the book is actually this. While there’s no set plot, there is a specific chain of events that leads to an ‘end’ to the bullying.

It starts on Halloween night. While out trick-or-treating, Jill and her best friend Tracy Wu play a prank on a mean man named Mr. Machinist who lives on Linda, Wendy and Caroline’s street (they cracked rotten eggs in his mailbox). They’re almost caught and they end up getting their picture taken by Mr. Machinist as they’re running away. Actually, they get away completely when they crack the eggs; they’re only caught when they return to show Wendy and Caroline what they did. So the only ones who know what happened are Wendy, Carolin, and Linda (who saw them outside from her window).

At first, this seems like something random that happens that has no bearing on the rest of the story, but then Mr. Machinist goes around town with the picture he took of Jill and Tracy to try to identify the two girls, who were in full costumes with masks at the time. He somehow does figure out who they are and the two girls are punished.

We never do learn who told. Tracy suspects Wendy, but Jill blames Linda. She reasons that it’s Linda trying to get back at Jill for the bullying since Linda kind of threatened to get back at her. Jill tells Wendy and Caroline about her theory, and Wendy agrees with her but says that they really need to find out the truth. They eventually decide to put Linda on trial to get her to confess. They spend a while planning out the whole trial, but they aren’t able to actually do it until a few days later.

Linda misses a few days of school, but she comes back on a rainy Wednesday. Lunch recess is held indoors, so as soon as the teacher leaves for lunch the class gangs up on Linda and locks her in the classroom’s supply closet. Wendy declares herself the judge, Jill is the prosecution, and the rest of the kids are the jury. Wendy is about to start the trial when Rochelle, who Jill tells us is a new girl, points out that they can’t have a trial because they didn’t give Linda a lawyer. Rochelle insists that Linda needs a lawyer and Wendy pitches a fit.

Wendy, who is basically in charge of the class (the Queen Bee, if you will), starts getting pissy because things aren’t going her way. Jill, probably finally realizing that Wendy is a horrible person, goes against Wendy for the first time all book and agrees with Rochelle that Linda needs her own lawyer. She ask that Rochelle act as defence, and Rochelle accepts.

Wendy continues to resist deny Linda a lawyer until Jill finally calls off the trial and lets Linda out of the supply closet. Wendy is very angry with Jill now, and tells her that she will be sorry.

The next day Jill arrives at school to find that she has suddenly switched places with Linda. Linda now has her name back and seems to be Wendy’s new BFF. Jill has become the class’ new official outcast and everyone, including Linda, now refers to her as B.B., or Baby Brenner. Jill has now become Blubber.

However, Jill handles things a little differently than Linda did. Jill tries to keep things from getting to her and showing her classmates that they can’t hurt her. It all comes to a head when Jill is cornered in the bathroom by Wendy, Caroline, Donna, and Linda. They try to make Jill insult herself before being allowed to use the bathroom. When she refuses, Wendy tries to get the other girls to pull Jill’s pants down. (What is it with those girls and taking off clothes? They did the same thing to Linda near the beginning of the book.)

Jill knows that she can’t fight against the girls, one of whom is bigger than her, so she tries a different way of getting away. She questions Caroline’s best friend status with Wendy and when it comes out that Wendy isn’t exactly a very good best friend, Caroline and Donna leave the bathroom.

Jill’s bullying stops immediately after that, kind of like Linda’s seems to have. Caroline and Donna become new best friends, Wendy turns to a girl named Laurie, Jill starts hanging out with Rochelle, and Linda is alone again. Things in class seem to have gone back to normal and Jill’s life outside of school remains largely unaffected.

I think that this is my favourite book by Judy Blume, just because of the ending. I’ve known people to say that they don’t like this book because it seems like the characters don’t learn the right lesson, or any lesson. That’s the exact reason why I love it so much. I sometimes get frustrated when I read books where everyone, even the enemies, is BFFS-Forever by the end. I rarely see that happen in real life. There’s nothing wrong with everyone being friends in the end, I just don’t like it. Can’t people just be allowed to hate/dislike each other in children/YA books?

Anyway thank you, Judy Blume, for telling it like it is.

So, I wanna talk about Jill. Jill is in the fifth grade, in a classroom with a hierarchy. Wendy is at the top of that hierarchy, she’s calling the shots. She’d also the one that starts all the ‘Blubber’ business. Jill is somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy… as long as she stays on Wendy’s good side. She even says it herself; it’s not a good idea to cross Wendy.

Anyway, back to Jill. Jill is the one narrating the story, so she’s the character we get to know the most. Jill lives on a very short street with her parents and younger brother Kenny. Her family is pretty normal, and Jill is a very normal girl; which is why it should come as a surprise to no one that she also participates in bullying Linda. Judy Blume is pretty good at writing realistic children.

Jill joins in on the bullying partly because everyone else is doing it, and partly because she can. Jill doesn’t seem to particularly like Linda, even after all the bullying stops. She doesn’t even sympathize with Linda when she’s put into her position. I don’t think that Jill really even gives much thought to Linda or her situation.

If Jill has learned any lesson here, it’s to stand up to people like Wendy. It’s a pretty solid lesson, but not the lesson most people would expect from this kind of story.

On the other side of the coin is Linda. Linda is probably the ideal bullying victim: she’s quiet, shy, lonely, and it’s easy for people to walk all over her. She doesn’t seem very likable or sympathetic, probably because she can be whiny and she’s quick to join in on bullying Jill (at least, that’s why I don’t like her). Wendy initially starts bullying her about her weight, but Jill even tells us that Linda may be the pudgiest girl in the class but that there are two other girls in the fifth grade who are bigger; and then there’s a boy in the class who is bigger than all three. Jill talks about that boy every now and again, but when she mentions his weight it’s not really insulting, it’s just observations.

The bullying in this book is pretty bad. I mean, you have the standard stuff like name-calling and playing keep away with possessions. Then you have the really extreme stuff like trying to remove clothes, and locking someone in a closet. And all this from a bunch of fifth graders! It’s a good thing this story takes place before social networking sites happened. I can imagine the dark turn this story would most likely take if someone like Wendy had access to anonymity online.

Speaking of places in time, the copy of Blubber that I have says that this book was originally published in 1974, so this story must take place in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Having said that, this book doesn’t read like something that happened almost 40 years ago. I was reading this and picturing my own elementary school experience, which was in the late ‘90s/early 2000s. Blubber doesn’t really date itself, except for mentions of Unicef collection on Halloween (does that even happen anymore?) and someone writing a check for a dollar.

All in all, I really like this book. It’s a very simple story about bullying and how hateful some children can be. The bullies aren’t very complex: they aren’t children with tortuous home lives who bully because they’re taking things out on the wrong people, they’re just ordinary children who are mean and bully because they can get away with it. There really isn’t a strong anti-bullying message here, but I don’t think that’s what Judy Blume was going for. She was just out to tell a simply story about elementary school bullying; and I think she succeeded.

I Survived The Fall

2012-01-15T18:32:00.002-04:00

So, I'm sitting here on my laundry room floor (where I had to come for the internet), crying my eyes out.

I have just finished watching the last Series 2 episode of Sherlock, and I've made it through.

I won't spoil it out there for anyone, I'll just say that I'm sitting here crying to myself, almost sobbing actually, and I've never done that before over a show.

The episode was fucking amazing, and the ending damn near done me in (I'm sure my whole face is bright red right now, not just my eyes).

(/grosssobbing)

Tomorrow's the 15th you guys!!

2012-01-14T17:48:00.002-04:00

Is everybody ready for the last season 2 episode of Sherlock tomorrow?

'Cause I'm not!

D:

I can't really remember ever being so emotionally invested in a TV show before now. I can barely read angst fics for Sherlock when either Sherlock or John die without turning into a crying mess. And thats all fanfiction.

Tomorrow is The Fall, which is canon.

My tumblr dashboard is already half-full of post-Fall angst and sadness. It's probably gonna be completely full tomorrow night.

... I need a shock blanket...

A Very Sherlock New Year

2012-01-03T21:45:00.002-04:00

I was super pumped on New Years Day for the airing of the newest Sherlock episode, A Scandal in Belgravia. Really pumped.

I was more excited for Sherlock than I was for Christmas (I REGRET NOTHING).

My tumblr dashboard was (and still very much is) full of Sherlock related fun, which included multiple reminders of when the new episode was airing live on the BBC iPlayer and how fans who don't live in the UK (like me) could watch it.

So here's what happened on Sunday.

I made sure that my computer was able to get the episode to stream live. I even checked it almost obsessively throughout the day to make sure it actually worked.

It did.

I was beyond excited.

When the time finally came for the episode to start, I sat as close as I comfortably could to our wireless router (to prevent losing the Internet connection, which happens all the fucking time on my laptop for whatever reason) with my laptop on my lap and the brower opened to the BBC iPlayer page.

I was a bit late getting to the show, but that was alright, I had only missed a few minutes at the most.

Then the show started and the opening scene was at the pool with Moriarty and I was all arm flapping in excitement for almost a full minute (damn near knocked my laptop off my lap too).

My excitement didn't last too long, however, when the live stream started to skip. The episode would play for a few seconds, then pause for a minute or so, then play again for another few seconds. This was insanely annoying, both because I was actually missing bits of the show and because it's generally annoying to watch something that's skipping on you (like that bit on my Whitechapel DVD, annoying as fuck and right in the middle of a car chase scene too, naturally).

And then it eventually stopped working all together, and I couldn't get it going again.

All those weeks waiting and preparing for this day were dashed then.

I was practically devastated. It's not often that I get this excited over something, but when I do, I really do. I know it was ridiculous to get into the mood I did (the I-need-to-have-murder-on-my-TV-now mood), but I did get into that mood. I also almost got to the point of crying, I was that put out.

A few hours later, after I had calmed down a bit, I went on tumblr. There I found links with the episode already out for download.

Excitement through the goddamn roof!

It took almost an hour and a half to download the episode, but I did. And I watched it right away.

And I fucking loved it!

So much fun watching this episode (except for the Christmas awkwardness, but I'll live), it was fucking amazing!

I love this show more and more every time I see it.

So that was how my New Years Day went.

The next episode, Hound of the Baskervilles, comes out Sunday. Hopefully I won't have to go through all that again, although I probably will.

Totally worth it though.

Year! A New One!

2012-01-01T12:36:00.002-04:00

Happy 2012 everyone!!

First post of the new year, on the first day of the new year.

And it's just to say that SHERLOCK SERIES 2 STARTS IN A FEW HOURS!!!!!

It's playing live online at 8:10 in the UK, but with the time difference it's like around 4 o'clock or something here.

So... FEW MORE HOURS!!!

SO EXCITED!!!

I HOPE IT WORKS!!!

:D!!!!

The present no one else noticed

2011-12-26T16:07:00.002-04:00

Not going to do a big re-telling about Christmas this year (although one of my brothers did get a girlfriend and so we shall mock him, har har).

Anyway, just want to talk about something that happened at my mémé pépé's house.

So a bunch of us were sitting around the kitchen table (me, some aunts, uncles, and cousins), and I was sitting there with a book in my hands (as I usually do). The book I had was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, the new edition with the BBC cover (Christmas present from my brothers). I had it in my hands and it was just sitting there with it and my parrain (godfather) noticed it.

And what happened next was just so awesome I can't even.

He asked me if I'd seen the new series that came out and I said I had, and then he started talking about it with me. We talked about how awesome it was, how we preferred the first and third episodes to the second, how the cliffhanger at the end was frustrating but still awesome because OMG WHAT HAPPENS?!?!?!, and how Series 2 starts January 1st.

It was epic.

Parrain is actually the only person I personally know that's actually seen the series, and who likes it, and who's even talked about it to me (Parrain is one of the few people I know who discusses interests and stuff like that with me out of the blue, needless to say it's not something I'm used to but I love it every time it happens).

It was an almost magical moment (I am so pitiful TT^TT), and it probably only lasted a minute or two. But it was fucking awesome.

Merry Christmas to me.

OHSWEETFUCK

2011-12-22T20:21:00.002-04:00

WELCOME TO THE CAPSRAPE PARTY!!!

I REALLY HATE TO DOUBLE-POST BUT I JUST HAD TO POST AGAIN TO SAY THAT BLOGGER FINALLY DOESN'T HATE ME ANYMORE!!!

I CAN JUST PRESS THE 'PUBLISH' BUTTON AND THIS POST WILL PUBLISH!

IT'S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!!!

A Moment of Awesome

2011-12-22T20:16:00.002-04:00

Okay, about an hour or so ago, I made my first non-giftcard online purchase! With an actual credit card!

I feel so awesome right now I don't even know!

I'm so excited!

:D

Then I'll get to pay the bill, like a real adult!

(probably the first non Sherlock-related excitement I've had all month)

(oh! just wait 'til January 1st, when I'll attempt to watch the first new Sherlock Series 2 episode online, now that should be an interesting post, no matter how well it goes)

What is this I don't even

2011-11-20T18:45:00.002-04:00

So, Marzgurl is picking apart the Twilight books on her blog, and I'm reading, and they're awesome and hilarious.

But anyway, there are quotes included with Marzgurl's commentary, and they're quite... disturbing... very.

For a few years now I've been hearing about how Edward is, like, totally hot and sexy and the perfect boyfriend and blah blah blah. I've seen it written on the Internet and I've heard it in conversations around school and home. I've even heard it said during fucking book reports... in late high school from people who should have been able to come up with better reasons for really liking a book... much better reasons.

All that is to say that I'm reading these quotes, most of which contain Edward, and I can't see anything that would make people refer to him as the perfect anything. He's actually coming across as very creepy here (and it didn't even get to the part where he breaks into Bella's room to watch her sleep, which is wrong on so many levels).

I'm getting the vibe that Edward is someone that girls should stay away from, not someone that girls should flock to and practically worship (ohh, those book reports *facedesk*)

When people say that Edward and Bella's relationship comes off as abusing, it's a pretty accurate description. The two haven't even started going out yet and already Edward's being controlling and shifty and scary.

It bothers me more than a little bit that so many women put Edward up on a pedestal.

And I'd say to stick with Jacob... but he does turn into a pedophile in the fourth book soooo... yeah.

Why do people like this series again?

Yes, well

2011-11-17T21:26:00.003-04:00

Hmm.

Well, I can certainly see what all the fuss is about.

That certainly is some sexy-ass font.

(and I don't know nor care about the context of that passage, thankyouverymuch)

I had to laugh

2011-11-15T21:28:00.002-04:00

"Twilight: a young woman's journey as she chooses between bestiality and necrophilia"
-comment by BrianSierk on an article on some website I'm too lazy to link to.

Random time! :D

I saw this in a comment on an article comparing Bella from Twilight to Katniss from The Hunger Games and just had to post it somewhere. I almost posted it to Facebook, but didn't because it probably wouldn't go over too well.

But, yeah, I just really like this.

I've come to share my sad

2011-11-08T20:42:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I was on deviantArt last night and one of the people I'm following posted a journal about reading this really sad fanfic that reduced him/her to tears. And then all the comments under the journal went along the same lines. So I decided to read it. It was a Sherlock Holmes fanfic, and I'm not really part of the fandom so I thought I'd read it, find it sad, and then move on.

Wrong.

It wasn't just sad, it was SAD and DEPRESSING and OMGWHYDIDIREADTHIS!!!

I totally did cry while I was reading the fic and I still come close to tears now while thinking about certain parts of it... nuuuuuuuuu.

So I've decided to share the sadness with everyone. I do warn you, though, it is really, really sad.

Along with that, I'm also sharing two other fics I read before that pretty much drove me to tears. These three fics are the only ones I can remember actually making me sad (because I usually don't read angst, mostly to keep myself sane).

So, on y va!

Warning: all three fics contain character death and sad.

Alone On the Water: This is a Sherlock Holmes fanfic, and seems to be currently very popular with the fandom for being sad and depressing and reducing people to sobbing incoherently over their keyboards. This fic is beautifully written, very emotional, and I'm told that it captures the characters' (mainly Sherlock and John) personalities amazingly well (I personally wouldn't know since I'm not a fan).

Holding His Gaze: A Detective Conan fanfic, which I think is the first fic to really shake me up over character death since that one Dragonball Z fic that practically traumatized me when I was younger. This fic really got to me when I first read it because it was just too sad. This fic is also beautifully written and is full of many different emotions and asdflfkajfa. I'm not really a huge fan of that bit at the end, but it's probably a good thing it was there or I might've sobbed in a corner for days afterward (like I'd like to do right now after re-reading Alone on the Water).

My Slytherin Pride: Obviously, this one is a Harry Potter fic. Honestly, this one scared the shit out of me when I first read it years ago. It hit me on one of my paranoia levels, I think. I didn't really cry at it the first time I read it - I was too busy being scared/disturbed - but I cried a few times when I re-read it over the years. This fic is written in letter form and presents a different side to the character narrating than what we usually see from him. All three fics have character death in them, but this one has a character massacre going on, which is probably the main reason it scared me so much the first time I read it (kinda like that Dragonball Z fic, but on a different level since DBZ was a big part of my childhood).

So there you have it, three really depressing fanfictions. Enjoy!

Now, if you don't mind, I'll just return to my corner and sob some more (goddammit, Sherlock! D:).

Lord of the Flies

2011-11-07T21:49:00.003-04:00

The office where I work now is normally full of flies.

Huge, black/blue houseflies that keep bouncing off the window and skylight and make loud buzzing noises. They don't really bother me or my cousin (who I share the office with), as long as they stay on the window and don't dive-bomb my head, I'm fine.

Today, though, there were a lot of flies on the window, like 30 or so. So my cousin asked the janitor if she could spray them with something that would kill them. So the janitor comes back with some Raid and sprays the window.

And don't the flies go fucking nuts?

They started bouncing off the window and flying around the room and buzzing louder than ever. A few of them even started dive-bombing us and our desk. It was crazy.

And they were some fucking loud too, which is never good for my nerves. I was jumpy the whole time, I probably scared my cousin a bit.

The funniest part of the whole thing though, aside from having the floor littered with dead flies (I have no idea why I found that funny), was that when the flies would eventually hit the floor they'd try to get back up but they'd only end up spinning in circles 'cause only one side of their wings would be working. Funniest thing ever.

We got so many flies out of the office.

... of course, they'll probably all be replaced by tomorrow.

Road to Nowhere

2011-11-01T20:16:00.000-03:00

I started my new job today at a lobster plant near home.

I have no complaints with the work itself, from what I saw today it's mostly going to be data entry and filing and stuff like that (things I've done before).

If I have one problem with this new job it's this: the building where I work is in the ass-crack of fucking nowhere.

It takes about 40 minutes to get to my work from my house and maybe the last 10 or 15 minutes of that drive is on a shitty paved road and then a shitty gravel road full of potholes. And turns everywhere! (this whole town was built on a fucking turn, I guarantee it... my kingdom for a straight stretch of road)

Driving wasn't too bad today, but when the weather starts to get really shitty, as the weather around here often does in the winter, I'm gonna start having some major problems on my drive (most of which stem from me being neurotic, but that's nothing new).

I cringe when I think about how that road's gonna be when it's covered with ice and/or snow. And I know that the snowplow probably won't be down that way too often since it's basically back roads. The paved road is in bad need of repair, and the gravel road just needs to be paved.

And the potholes, sweet fuck! There's hundreds of them, and there's almost no way to miss most of them because they're all over the road and camouflaged so you don't see them until you're practically driving through them.

My parents better take a good look at our van now, because I don't know what kind of shape it'll be in after I'm finished working for the season.

I Recommend This

2011-10-26T00:30:00.002-03:00

I just finished watching the live-action drama for the manga IS. The drama is 10 episodes long and the full title is IS Otoko Demo Onna Demo Nai Sei (or IS Not Male Not Female Life).

First off, I liked it. I thought it was great. It's not as good as the manga, of course (book to movie type adaptations rarely are), and it probably only covers a few volumes, but what it did cover it covered it well.

The manga goes from the main character Haru's birth until sometime in the furture that I don't know because I've only read up to volume 11 in the 17 volume series. The drama mainly takes place during Haru's first year of high school, with some flashbacks thrown in for the first episode.

The drama did well with the material it used, and also fleshed out a few characters that I don't remember being fleshed out in the manga. It also made me like some characters that I disliked in the manga.

Also, we could've totally used more Leon. He was awesome, and most definitely the funniest one there.

I recommend this drama. If you are a fan of the manga be sure to check it out. Even if you've never read the manga be sure to check it out.

With the Light Volume 8

2011-10-10T22:02:00.004-03:00

With the Light 8

While trying to create a place in society for her autistic son, Hikaru, has been an uphill battle, Sachiko Azuma has long known that perhaps the toughest place to find acceptance for him is within her own family. Despite some progress made, Sachiko’s mother-in-law still treats her grandson as a nuisance and sees him in many ways as inferior to his little sister, Kanon. Now that the Azuma family has moved into Masato’s childhood home, Sachiko must not only adapt to life with her mother-in-law – she must also help Hikaru, whose developmental disabilities make it notoriously difficult for him to accept changes to his routine, like adapting to this new living situation and a new school. As Sachiko tries to balance caring for Kanon and Hikaru in the face of her mother-in-law’s constant disapproval, will the Azuma family emerge from what seems like the darkest of tunnels into the light?

Told in completed chapters as well as unfinished pages that the creator drew while battling a long illness, this final volume of With the Light serves as a legacy to the late Keiko Tobe’s inspiring dedication to bring to light the hardships and joys of raising an autistic child for readers around the world. (from the back of the book)

Here we are, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve made it to the last volume, the final instalment of Hikaru’s story. It’s been a long time since we were first introduced to Hikaru and his family and it’s been a long road to get from there to where they are now. And where are they now? How does Hikaru’s story end?

Well, let’s find out in With the Light’s final volume, Volume 8.

The volume starts off with a normal day at the new Azuma household. It’s still summer vacation so the kids aren’t in school, and Azuma-san is still off on her trip visiting with Okumura-san and Professor Ryoumou. Masato has a cold and plans to sleep it off so Sachiko takes the kids to a nearby park for an outing.

Before she left (during Volume 7) Azuma-san had told Sachiko that she shouldn’t let Hikaru be out in public with Kanon, but she’s not here now so Sachiko decides to take them out behind her back. I’d like to think of this as Sachiko finally starting to grow a back-bone and taking a stand against Azuma-san’s ridiculous ‘rules’ and criticism. Small steps, you know?

Hikaru leaves the house before Sachiko and Kanon so he’s ahead of them for most of the walk. Sachiko makes sure to point out that Hikaru isn’t just running ahead of her, but that he keeps looking behind him to make sure that Sachiko and Kanon are still there, and when he gets to the point where he doesn’t know the rest of the way he waits for Sachiko and Kanon to catch up to him so that they can go the rest of the way together. These are things he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) have done when he was younger, so we’re getting affirmation that Hikaru really has grown over the course of the past seven volumes.

There are quite a few signs that show how much Hikaru has grown up and matured: he’s become very independent and is able to do a lot of things with little to no help, he interacts with more people, he communicates primarily with words, and it’s getting easier for him to adapt and adjust when things change around him. There’s a scene in the park in this volume where he runs into a dog and instead of freezing, like he did in Volume 4, he tried to get away from the dog (and I think he might also have swore, but no one mentioned it so I’m probably wrong).

We cut away from the park to Masato, who has just been awoken from his nap by the phone ringing. The caller is his older sister Fumiko, who really hasn’t been a part of the story since Volume 1. That changes now. Fumiko tells Masato that her and her family are in Japan for a bit and they will be visiting the house soon. This promises to be very interesting because we don’t know what Fumiko’s feelings towards Hikaru will be.

We don’t have too much time to dwell on that because we cut over to Ryoumou-san’s house where Azuma-san is currently vacationing. Azuma-san is surprisingly comfortable around Ryoumou-san, despite the fact that he is autistic (Asperger’s, actually). I wonder why. Is it because he is an adult? Is it because they aren’t related? Or is it because he’s extremely high functioning to the point where he can pass himself off as normal? Either way, she doesn’t seem to have any problems being around, and interacting with, Ryoumou-san.

I’m not quite sure how long she’s been on her vacation, but at this point it seems like Azuma-san’s about to go back home. Before she leaves, though, she has a conversation with Okumura-san about how autistic people can sometimes find one thing they’re really good at and use that to get a job to help support themselves. He mentions something about an autistic artist he knows of and Azuma-san gets really excited about this because she remembers that Hikaru used to draw a lot when he was young.

Uh oh.

Sure enough, as soon as Azuma-san arrives at the house she starts in on Sachiko, telling her that she should sign Hikaru up for art or piano lessons. Uh… she means well. There’s a break from this while Hikaru sets out the placemats for dinner. He’s very excited about being able to finally set out the whole set now that Azuma-san’s back. He pulls her over to the table and sits her down so that he can put down her place mat. Azuma-san looks quite happy about this.

When Masato comes home, Azuma-san starts talking to him and Sachiko about Ryoumou-san and all his achievements. She tells them all about the books he wrote, and then she tells them about his odd quirks and how he has Asperger’s and ADHD. Then she starts talking about putting Hikaru into some kind of lessons and that maybe he can be a famous artist one day. Masato tells her about Hikaru’s history with art, and that they’d love to support any talent he has but he has to get used to his new school and get settled in his new routine first.

It’s good that Azuma-san is taking an interest in Hikaru at all, really. Actually, Azuma-san’s attitude towards Hikaru has changed a little bit. It’s almost like she’s finally come to terms with the fact that Hikaru is never going to be ‘normal’, but she doesn’t really think about it until he does something strange. She’s pretty surprised when she finds out that Hikaru can now water the garden by himself when he wasn’t able to before her vacation; and she seems interested as Sachiko explains how he learned to do it.

There’s one point where Azuma-san and Hikaru are alone in the kitchen when a mosquito flies in. Hikaru sees it and says ‘Bug’ and Azuma-san tells him to go slap it. It doesn’t look like Hikaru understood what she meant because all he does is say the word slap and the mosquito flies off. Azuma-san then demonstrates what a slap is, but Hikaru just repeats himself. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), Azuma-san doesn’t berate him or say or even think anything about it. It just happened and that was that and they moved on to other things. (Later on, though, Hikaru sees another bug and slaps at it like Azuma-san showed him. Bonding!)

Azuma-san still gets on Sachiko’s case a lot. That most likely won’t ever stop (Unless Sachiko just snaps and starts cursing her out, or something like. But that won’t ever happen… no matter how awesome it would be). She’s always criticizing Sachiko about how she cooks, cleans, and raises her kids, especially when it looks like Hikaru’s needs are put before Kanon’s.

There are four ‘completed’ chapters in this volume, and the last completed chapter involves the five members of the Azuma family going on an outing. Back in Volume 1, when Hikaru was about two years old, Sachiko and Masato took him to a temple for some kind of religious ceremony. Hikaru had a very public meltdown during the ceremony because he couldn’t handle all the different noises there (including Buddhist chanting, which he doesn’t like). This same temple is where the Azuma family go to clean the family grave. This visit is completely and totally different from that first visit. Hikaru is older now, and more mature, and Sachiko is considerable less stressed and isolated.

Everything goes pretty well at the grave. Both Hikaru and Kanon help clean the grave and they both pay their respects. There’s only one hiccup when Hikaru wanders off for a bit and goes around to other graves and switches the flowers from one grave to the next. All that is solved almost immediately and the day goes on.

After that, there are two more chapters left in the whole series, and only their storyboards are published because Tobe-sensei didn’t have time to finish them (sad yet?). The storyboards are actually pretty easy to follow, easier than I thought they would be. They’re basically rough layouts of chapters, complete with the original Japanese text in Tobe-sensei’s handwriting and all done in pencil. This format isn’t the ideal one in which I wanted to finish the series in, but it still manages to get its story across and I can’t really complain about them.

The second last chapter (Junior High Episode 29) starts off right in the middle of Fumiko and her family visiting the house. It’s hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure it’s early evening at this point because Masato is sitting at the table drinking with Fumiko’s husband. Fumiko and her daughter Noa, who is the same age as Hikaru, are talking in the room with the shrine when Hikaru opens the door and peeks in. He does this a few more times before telling Fumiko and Noa to leave and sitting down at the shrine for his daily routine of ringing the bell (or whatever he does that makes the dinging sound). Fumiko and Noa watch him for a minute before going to Sachiko for an explanation.

This is where Fumiko and Noa surprised me. For whatever reason, I was expecting Fumiko to be like Azuma-san and start going off on Sachiko; but I forgot that Fumiko has been living in America for the past few years. Autism is viewed very differently in America than it is in Japan, and I think it mostly has to do with the different cultures. Fumiko has no problem with Hikaru’s behaviours, and is completely non-judgemental of Sachiko (total opposite of Azuma-san).

There follows a conversation about autism in Japan and in America. Sachiko is pretty surprised to find out how different (better) things are in America for people with disabilities. Fumiko is also pretty surprised about the difference, especially when they get on the topic of teachers and schools.

Fumiko and her family stay the night at the house and return to America shortly after. Everyone goes to the airport with them to see them off and Sachiko muses about how she’d like to take Hikaru and Kanon to America some day.

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to wrapping up Eri’s storyline. We see Eri working at some kind of maid café (Okumura-san and Professor Ryoumou appear for a brief, funny cameo). She seems happy and well, and we’re led to believe that things are going pretty well for her… until we cut to a shot of Shouhei standing outside the café looking quite pissed off.

He waits for Eri to finish her shift and as soon as she’s outside he starts arguing with her. He then hits her and kidnaps her, eventually tying her up in his apartment. From what little we know of Shouhei, this behaviour is pretty out of character for him. If the series didn’t have to end so quickly it’s possible that this behaviour could’ve been built up to, but that’s not what’s happened here and this sudden violence on Shouhei’s part has come completely out of nowhere. So, Eri’s tied up in Shouhei’s apartment, and it’s Tsuchiya-sensei and Gori-sensei to the rescue. This story ultimately ends on a happy note and it looks like Eri’s in a good place now.

Junior High 30 is the last chapter in the whole series (SAD!), and its job is to wrap up everyone else’s storylines. I think it does a good job. The main part of this chapter takes place during a karaoke gathering with the usual group of old friends. The conversation among the mothers tells us all we need to know about what’s going on with Hikaru’s friends. Oota and Kanata don’t end up together, but they’ll probably still remain good friends. Also, Kanata is in a band that I’m pretty sure was named after Hikaru. Gozaru-kun was being bullied in school until Nobuaki and another boy put a stop to it. Moe wasn’t at the gathering because she was on a date.

There were unfortunately no updates on Oki-kun, Aoki-sensei and Wakabayashi-sensei, Hiroaki, and Miyu, but I’m sure they’re all doing fine.

Finally, we have Hikaru and his family. Where does Tobe-sensei leave them? She’s convinced me that they’ll be perfectly fine. Sachiko and Masato help start a parent support group near their home. Kanon is making new friends from school and the neighbourhood. Hikaru is steadily moving forward at his own pace. Soon he will be in high school and, although we won’t see it, he’ll do just fine.

That is the end of Tobe-sensei’s amazing series, With the Light: Raising an autistic child. It’s shown us 15 years in the lives of one amazing family as they live through the ups and downs of raising a child with autism. Tobe-sensei made it possible for others to see what it may be like to live with autism, and hopefully she was able to teach people and start to improve the way other people view those with special needs.

I’d like to thank Tobe-sensei for bringing us such a wonderful series.

…

The book’s not over yet, folks. After With the Light’s conclusion, there are two oneshots written by Tobe-sensei before With the Light was serialized. They can’t be too much older because the art isn’t too much different from early WTL. Both oneshots have kind of the same feel as WTL, they are both feel good stories with casts of caring characters and strong messages.

The first oneshot, Thank You, Sensei!, is about a substitute teacher who isn’t permitted by the board to stay with her class after her contract runs out and the original teacher doesn’t return to work. She forms a close bond with two of her students who have lost faith in the adults around them.

The second oneshot is called Spring Sunshine and features one of the cutest little boys I’ve ever seen in manga. More manga should feature children with missing front teeth! Anyway, Fujita is a crotchety old man who hates everyone and Suguru is the friendly young boy who befriends him. This story is so sweet and adorable and manages to be both sad and uplifting at the same time.

And that is all, folks.

With the Light Volume 7

2011-10-04T14:26:00.002-03:00

With the Light 7

For most parents, their child’s teenage years are just as bad, if not worse, than the terrible twos. But for Sachiko and Masato Azuma, the situation is further complicated by their son Hikaru’s autism. As puberty strikes, Hikaru’s growing sexual awareness creates uncomfortable and embarrassing situations, and begins to affect his little sister, Kanon. The already-taxed Sachiko has to find ways to alleviate the problem, while being mindful of the affects her approach may have on her children and on the people around them. But when Masato must again relocate for work, the pressure further falls on Sachiko as the decision is made to move in with her mother-in-law, who has always been less-than-accommodating to Hikaru’s needs. With new challenges arising daily – Hikaru tackling adolescence through the lens of autism, Kanon struggling with peer pressure, Masato throwing himself into the new job – will Sachiko, the Azuma family’s rock, succumb to the cracks that have begun to form in her generally cheerful outlook on life?(from the back of the book)

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Today we’re going to talk about puberty. Well, Sachiko is going to talk about it, anyway; but only for a little bit.

You’d think that they’d spend more time on Hikaru’s puberty since it takes up about half of the summary. Unless by ‘puberty’ they mean the fact that Hikaru is starting to become a bit rebellious and independent. They mentioned ‘sexual awareness’ so I don’t think that’s the case.

It’s hard to believe, but Hikaru’s already 14 years old. The little baby we met in Volume 1 is now a teenager, for better or for worse. The way the series lets us know that Hikaru has reached puberty is to let us know that he has started to touch himself. It embarrasses Kanon for all of a few pages because he does it (over his clothes) while she and her friend are in the room. This problem is immediately solved by Sachiko telling Hikaru that he can touch himself as long as he does it in his room. So he does, and then it never comes up again.

Aside from that, there is another sign that Hikaru is now a teenager: rebellion. An example of this is him refusing to properly ask for a reward sticker after completing his chores (saying ‘here’ instead of ‘sticker please’). Another thing he did was that he wouldn’t let Sachiko sit next to him on the bus to school. There’s a panel on one page with Hikaru sitting on the bus and Sachiko standing a few of seats away because Hikaru didn’t want her to sit near him. I must’ve giggled for five straight minutes when I saw that. He’s wanted to ride the bus on his own for a while now; this is as close as he’s going to get to that goal at the moment.

Another thing he’s started to do is take more notice of what the people around him are doing. There are two main instances of that in this volume. One is at school where he was pestering a boy about washing his hands after using the bathroom (he ended up getting in a fight), and the other one is at the supermarket where he confronted one of Kanon’s friends and a complete stranger about robbing from the store because they were carrying things in their arms (to Hikaru, shopping means putting things in a basket otherwise you’re taking without paying). Both of those things are things he was taught as a child and they are rules he has followed all of his life (wash hands after using the bathroom and use a basket at the store before paying). He hasn’t tried to get other people to follow these rules, or any other, before now.

It’s good that he’s started to interact more with the people around him, but he still has a lot to learn.

There’s also a Kanon centric arc in this volume involving bullying. Now, Hikaru and Kanon are seven years apart in age and have never attended the same school at the same time; so Kanon being bullied because of Hikaru has never really been a major concern (it has been a concern, just not a major one). I don’t think Kanon’s classmates have ever really seen Hikaru, or if they have it’s only in passing, so they either don’t know him or aren’t aware of his odd behaviours. This was bound to change since Sachiko and Masato aren’t trying to keep Hikaru’s autism hidden.

This first comes up one day when Kanon and Hikaru go to the park. Hikaru gets out of the car first and takes off running with Kanon close behind. Hikaru is excited so he’s being very animated and making a lot of noise, shouting ‘water wheel Archimedes’ over and over. The two run past three of Kanon’s classmates, who are in the park on their way to some kind of English prep school class, or something. Anyway, Hikaru and Kanon run by them to the water wheel and the three classmates remark about how Hikaru is weird. Kanon calmly tells him that her brother is not weird, he’s just happy at the moment. She says this very matter-of-factly because, to her, Hikaru’s behaviour isn’t weird at all, it’s actually fairly normal for him. The classmates call Hikaru weird a few more times and then Sachiko shows up and the three children run off.

Now, I wouldn’t call this bullying just because of this one incident. Kanon and her classmates are only six or seven years old. To a child that young, I imagine that seeing someone twice their age acting like a young child is pretty strange, especially if it’s a stranger. Hikaru does have pretty weird behaviours, but they’re not weird for him. Kanon doesn’t see his behaviours as weird because she’s used to it (although I imagine that if she’d seen someone else doing those same behaviours she’d probably think it was strange, she probably wouldn’t really say anything about it though).

What I’m saying is that these kids have every right to think that Hikaru is strange, because they’re not used to him. What they don’t have the right to do is bully Kanon because of it. I really don’t understand the logic of bullying Kanon because of her brother. I can only assume it’s because Hikaru’s not around for them to make fun of behind his back, which is what they’re doing to Kanon.

One of the girls from the park has a birthday party and invites every girl in the class except for Kanon. The boy from the park and one of his friends see Hikaru and Kanon at the supermarket with their mother and they see Hikaru telling people (one of Kanon’s friends and a complete stranger) that ‘taking without paying makes you a robber’ like I mentioned above and they start laughing about it to themselves. I’d like to take a moment to mention the friend that Kanon runs into at the supermarket, Kuroiwa-kun. He’s the first one that Hikaru confronts about being a ‘robber’. At first he’s confused and surprised about it, but then Sachiko and Kanon explain and he doesn’t give it a second thought even though he’s never met Hikaru before now.

There’s probably more going on off-panel, but that’s really all we see happening. Point is, people are making fun of Kanon and her brother and Kanon is very bothered by it all. Then one day, I think it’s the day after the supermarket incident, Kanon and a friend of hers are on their way to school when they run into the boys from the supermarket. One of the boys starts in right away, making fun of the incident in the supermarket and calling Hikaru stupid and retarded, among other things. He won’t stop, even with Kanon’s older friend yelling at him, and that’s when Kanon’s finally decided that she’s had enough.

She rushes the boy, Iida-kun, and knocks them to the ground. They get into a fight which is only stopped by Kuroiwa-kun getting a teacher. I am very proud of Kanon for this. Getting into fights is not something that should be encouraged, but Kanon is defending herself and her brother in the only way that she knows how. So I say good on her.

They both end up in the nurse’s office where Iida-kun gets a talking-to and we get a very moving scene where Kanon breaks down and starts yelling at Iida for calling her brother stupid. Hikaru is her big brother and to her he’s the best big brother in the world and she loves him very much. Kanon looks up to Hikaru and she doesn’t understand why others would make fun of him. She calls him ‘stupid’ all the time, but it’s one thing for her (his sister) to call him stupid when she’s angry with him and knows that he’s really not stupid, and it’s quite another thing for someone else to call him stupid and really mean it.

That’s pretty much the end of the bullying arc. There might’ve been more things that happened, or would’ve happened, but there’s no time for that because the Azumas are moving!

Masato’s been transferred (again) and his new office is in Kanagawa, which is fairly far away from their current home. Masato decides that, instead of buying a new house somewhere closer to his work, it would be cheaper to move back to his childhood home… with his mother.

So that’s what takes up the second half of this volume: moving the whole family to Azuma-san’s house, getting settled in, and working on finding Hikaru a new school. They all decide to move in over summer break to give the kids a chance to adjust before school starts, and they’ll need that time to adjust because I’m sure living with Azuma-san will not be easy. In fact, Sachiko thinks of it as living with Gunji-sensei (although, personally I prefer Gunji-sensei).

It really sucks that Hikaru and Kanon have to move away from the only home they’ve ever known. As they’re leaving, Sachiko thinks about all that they’re leaving behind. Places like the clinic where Hikaru was first diagnosed, the streets they all walked down together and where tantrums sometimes took place, Shichigatsu Cho Elementary, the water wheel at the park, and Sunshine House. Sachiko thanks the town and they all head off on their latest adventure.

Hikaru and Kanon adjust to life in Azuma-san’s house fairly quickly. Hikaru’s sleeping schedule is greatly disrupted, but other than that there really aren’t any major problems for him. In fact, the ones that seem to have the most trouble adjusting to this new arrangement are Sachiko and Azuma-san. Azuma-san has to get used to having her house full of people again, including living with someone who has a disability, which is a completely new experience for her. Sachiko’s problems mostly stem from having to deal with Azuma-san’s attitude about Hikaru. Azuma-san does not make things easy for Sachiko. She is constantly looking down on her, or complaining about something. She’s basically being the stereotypical mean mother-in-law here.

There’s only really one major setback that happens in this volume. Sachiko has to leave the kids in the care of Azuma-san for about an hour or so while she runs some errands. It’s a stormy day complete with thunder, lightning, and flickering lights. Stressful things keep happening for Hikaru and he is completely on edge when Azuma-san grabs his arm from behind. Up comes the other arm and it catches Azuma-san right in the face. Luckily, Kanon is there to help calm Hikaru down, but it still really spooked Azuma-san.

That event is, I think, the main factor that makes Azuma-san really want to take a small vacation. She packs her bags and heads off to somewhere a good distance away with her old ballroom dancing partner, Okumura-san. They are both staying with Okumura-san’s friend Professor Ryoumou. Ryoumou-san is quite odd: he wears sunglasses indoors, very blunt, scatterbrained, and accident prone, but he’s also very smart. Azuma-san doesn’t really know what to think of him, and then she doesn’t know what to think about anything when Okumura-san tells her that Ryoumou is autistic.

That’s what all went on with the Azuma family. There was a continuation on Eri’s storyline from last volume. Eri, who is the same age as Hikaru (14), is now dating 20-year-old Shouhei (unfortunately, I’ve seen worse in other manga so I’m just gonna let this one go), whom she met near the end of Volume 6. In this volume, Eri is going through a pregnancy scare. Luckily, she runs into Tsuchiya-sensei, the nurse from her elementary school. Tsuchiya-sensei is actually no longer employed as a nurse and is now married to Gori-sensei and pregnant with him. Tsuchiya-sensei becomes a source of support for Eri in this volume, and it is implied that she will continue to be in future. It’s a good thing too because Eri definitely needs some sort of competent role model in her life, since her parents aren’t exactly doing a very good job.

So that’s Volume 7. For the few months when I thought it was the last volume I didn’t think it ended the series in a good enough place, although I still loved this volume. Thankfully, there is one more volume that will hopefully provide a hopeful conclusion to Hikaru’s story.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

2011-10-03T14:58:00.002-03:00

I am afraid of almost everything, but not all the time... and I've been like this for years.

I have no idea what it is, but sometimes I'll just be hanging around and then I'll read or see something scary (usually on the Internet or something I'm reading/watching) and then I'll suddenly be overcome by an intense fear... or paranoia.

Just happened a few minutes ago.

I was alone in the house all day with no problems, wandering around all over the place including the basement. And then I read a story on the Internet about the Black-Eyed Children and suddenly I'm afraid to move away from the couch. I'm afraid to even look around the corner in case I see something there (not even the Black-Eyed Children I was reading about, could be anything).

This happens every time. It even happens out of the blue. I'll be watching like... a sitcom on TV or something and I'll just see something completely innocent and then be terrified of it. Then I'll start turning on all the lights and purposely making noise just to hear it.

My house, which was a completely safe and comforting place for me a few minutes before, becomes a terrifying setting where I expect to see strange things and danger pop out of nowhere.

And having an overactive imagination certainly doesn't help matters.

Even noticing that the teddy bear sitting on my shelf looks like it's looking at me in the mirror fills me with fear!

Goddammit!

A Post About Manga

2011-09-26T14:17:00.003-03:00

I finally got With the Light Volume 8 in the mail this morning and I just finished reading it.

The series is over! I'm just gonna go be sad for a bit now.

I loved this volume, the ending isn't as final as I would like it to be but I liked it. But more on that some other time.

Is it weird that I still get surprised when I find out that other people read manga?

I was listening to an episode of Weekly Manga Recap yesterday and one of the guys mentioned that a friend of theirs (Benzaie) also read manga. I did a double take and was all like "he reads manga too?". And I'm not quite sure why.

I only really started reading manga when I was about 11 or 12, maybe younger. I would look through the Shounen Jump magazines in the grocery store. I didn't really know anyone else that read manga at the time, I don't think anyone I knew read manga then (or if they did they certainly didn't tell me about it).

I think I'm still stuck in this mentality that I am the only one that reads manga (which I know is untrue). I know my friend Meaghan reads manga (or she did, I'm not sure if she still does), but we never really talk about it. I don't talk about manga with anyone, really.

That's why I'm grateful for the Internet and this blog and livejournal and all that. Manga and anime are really big in my life and I have no one to talk with about them. I read a lot of books, and I can sometimes talk about them to others, but manga and anime seem to be a taboo subject around here.

I know I sometimes go on and on about manga on this blog, but if I didn't do it here, where else could I? I grew up being looked down on for even being interested in manga and anime. It's kind of a big deal for me to go from keeping all this a secret to actually having discussions about it.

Like today, I got WTL8 in the mail, and I've been excited about this day for almost a year now. No one really seems to care. All I get are the weird looks like "you're still reading that stuff?", and then sometimes people ask me why I'm reading stuff from Japan like it makes a difference where I get my reading material from.

It's weird.

'Bout that furnace I mentioned

2011-09-19T17:47:00.003-03:00

I mentioned in a previous post that when I was a baby I lived in a trailer that had a furnace right there in the kitchen.

Here's a picture of it.

I've never even once gotten burned by that furnace. That's because my parents took the proper precautions to keep me away from it. They never left me unsupervised in the kitchen and if I had to be left alone in a room for any length of time, I was in the livingroom either in the playpen or with a baby gate in the doorway to the kitchen.

Baby Bait

2011-09-18T13:00:00.001-03:00

Yeah, I'll always go for the book.

It's like the equivalent of waving keys in front of my face, only it's a book.

Memories of Europe

2011-09-08T23:55:00.002-03:00

I have a deviantArt account. I've had one for about five years now, I actually got it a few months before I started this blog.

Anyway, in May 2007 I went to Europe on a school trip and I was gone for 10 days, and then I came back, and I haven't really spoken about it since (except to say that it was fathoms better than my Ottawa trip). So I went through the pictures I took while I was there and I picked out a bunch of them and I'm in the process of editing them on picnik and uploading them to deviantArt under a series title of 'Memories of Europe'.

They're pictures I took, mostly of scenery and buildings and stuff, and in the artist's comment (underneath the picture) I'll sometimes include a little anecdote from the trip related to the picture.

It should be interesting and I have quite a few things to talk about.

The deviantArt folder is here and it's all organized backwards so that the first picture is at the end of the gallery.

So go over there and check it out if you're interested in what went on in Europe and to see some pretty cool pictures.

With the Light Volume 6

2011-09-05T00:12:00.002-03:00

With the Light 6

For Sachiko and Masato, it seems like only yesterday that their children, Hikaru and Kanon, were little. But these days, Kanon is about to start elementary school, while Hikaru is getting out into society and going to junior high by bus. However, in the outside world, some of Hikaru’s insistences that were acceptable when he was younger are not so anymore. When one such habit creates chaos during the morning commute, Sachiko has to find a way to clear up a serious misunderstanding with Hikaru’s fellow commuters and take steps to curb any behaviour that might stand in the way of Hikaru living in the world as a “cheerful, working adult.” Furthermore, dealing with the negative perceptions that others – including her mother-in-law – have about Hikaru begins to take its toll on Sachiko, especially with Masato occupied at work. Will the stress of facing new challenges presented by Hikaru’s autism drive a rift between the two? (from the back of the book)

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Hikaru in a junior high uniform everyone! He’s gotten quite big over the course of 6 volumes; he’s already 12 years old.

This volume doesn’t really bring up Hikaru’s schooling. He’s in the hands of competent staff now and he’s progressing fairly steadily, so there really are no problems there. It’s the same pattern from earlier volumes, not much is shown if everything’s going well. It’s sad that he can’t be with his childhood friends, who attend Shichigatsu Junior High, but they do get together every now and then (karaoke fun, yo).

Strangely enough, this volume seems to put a lot of focus on health problems. This wouldn’t be a problem except that when the characters talk about it they all sound like doctors. Seriously, Sachiko’s mother gets heart surgery and suddenly everyone is an expert on clogged arteries.

So, Sachiko’s mother gets heart surgery. This new development doesn’t come completely out of nowhere (very unlike Aoki-sensei and Wakabayashi-sensei’s romance) because it’s been mentioned a few times before in earlier volumes that Sachiko’s mother has weak veins, or something. Because of her mother’s health problems Sachiko has to go be with her in the hospital and help her father out at home. Can I just mention the fact that Sachiko’s father is practically incapable of running a house? I mean, he can’t even hang up clothes to dry. I know that his wife’s the one who took care of the house, but didn’t he help or learn anything at all? Didn’t he ever live on his own? Is this normal?

Anyway, Sachiko has a lot on her plate these days. She has to take care of Hikaru and Kanon, be a housewife, work, help her parents, and volunteer at Sunshine House. She’s running around a lot, probably trying to do too much at once, and is tired and stressed out. Then she thinks that Masato is cheating on her.

Yeah, this comes completely out of nowhere. The only thing that would ever even suggest this is a remark Sachiko’s mother makes one day when Sachiko visits the hospital without make-up on. We all know that Masato isn’t the cheating kind, and Sachiko says as much, but he does pick the wrong time to start giving advice to a young female co-worker. Funny thing about all this is that it was a big enough event to get mentioned in the book’s summary, but nothing really came from it. Sure Sachiko was slowly heading towards a melt-down and Masato was helping out a co-worker for quite a bit, but I can’t believe that all that was building up to a small fight that only lasts for a few pages half-way through the book, and then never comes up again past Masato receiving a New Years postcard from the co-worker (like, the next day).

… glad we had this unnecessary drama.

There are a lot of things that happen in this volume that happen in the other volumes: little glimpses of life in the Azuma home, some small scenes from school, Hikaru doing this and that, the usual. Hikaru goes to karaoke with some friends over winter break, and while that happens there’s a cute story where Oota visits Tanaka in the hospital (appendicitis). Also, Kanon graduates from daycare and starts first grade at Shichigatsu Cho Elementary.

One thing that’s fairly new in his volume is that we see a lot of Azuma-san (Masato’s mother). There are a lot of Kanon-centered things going on (daycare graduation, starting elementary school, some kind of festival) so it probably isn’t so surprising that she’s showing up a lot.

I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I really don’t like Azuma-san. It’s bad enough that she’s a snob that puts image above everything else (people like that are a pet peeve of mine), but she does it at the expense of Sachiko and Hikaru. She does love Hikaru, I’m sure of it, but I’m also sure that she’s ashamed of him. She doesn’t say it outright but it’s pretty obvious by the way she acts, especially in public. I won’t go into much detail, but I’m pretty sure she’s of the opinion that Sachiko should keep Hikaru away from the general public. She was really starting to come around a bit when Hikaru was younger, but she changed her tune when Kanon was born. It’s almost like she was ‘settling’ for having Hikaru because she had no other options (since her other granddaughter, Noa, lives far away), but then Kanon was born and all her attention was focused on her. Now that Kanon’s getting older and is able to do more things, we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of Azuma-san next volume.

Another new things in this volume are the two small scenes that happen from Hikaru’s point of view. One is when he’s cleaning during New Years, and the other time happens while being babysat by Masato’s mother (which actually went pretty well despite, well, Masato’s mother). The one at Masato’s mother’s house is pretty funny and I often refer to it as ‘The Marvellous Misadventures of Hikaru Azuma’ (the face he made after drinking a special soup he thought was barley tea was just hilarious).

These scenes are interesting because they are the only times I can remember seeing Hikaru with his own thought bubbles. Hikaru can communicate verbally so he has plenty of speech bubbles, but it’s not until we suddenly see thought bubbles that we realize that we know very little of what exactly goes on inside Hikaru’s head. From what little we see, Hikaru’s thoughts seem pretty simple: mostly one or two words long, sometimes longer if it’s something he memorized. Also, the panels depicting what (I’m assuming) he’s looking at are fairly simple, showing only specific things (wipes, a garbage bag, pudding cups, whatever he’s focused on at the time).

I really wish there were more of these scenes throughout the series, I would’ve loved to see things through Hikaru’s eyes.

Well, that’s Volume 6. Hikaru’s getting older now and, because of that, his autism and any problems it may cause are starting to get easier to deal with. Hikaru is learning more about the world around him and it’s easier for him to communicate with people now. The series would get boring and repetitive if all it showed was Hikaru going through life doing the same things over and over without any obstacles, so that’s probably why we’re given stories that focus primarily on other characters.

Something I’d like to mention that isn’t exclusive to Volume 6: I love the relationship between Hikaru and Kanon. It’s probably more noticeable now that they’re older, but I’ve always thought that Hikaru and Kanon’s relationship was completely normal. You can really tell that they’re brother and sister. It’s obvious that they love each other but they also fight a lot, as siblings often do, further proof that Tobe-sensei can write realistic children.

Hikaru is autistic and Kanon is neurotypical, there are so many ways in which this relationship could go wrong because of bad writing. Luckily, Tobe-sensei made both children normal. Hikaru is autistic, but he isn’t a savant and he doesn’t have any crazy special skills that leave people in awe of him. Kanon is a very normal little girl and is neither saint-like nor ‘wise beyond her years’. Because of this, they’re interactions with each other are believable and fun to read.

Hikaru knows that he is the big brother and he does have a special relationship with his sister (I think she’s the only one who can argue with him and deliver blows to his ego). On her part, Kanon is seven years younger than Hikaru and living with him is all she knows. I’m pretty sure that Hikaru is the only autistic person Kanon knows, but she doesn’t find him at all strange or weird (even though the things he does are sometimes unusual). To her, he just is, but that’s not to say that he doesn’t annoy Kanon at times and when he does she lets him know. That’s what I think Tobe-sensei did really well: she wrote Kanon as a very realistic character.

Kanon is only a little girl; she’s six years old in this volume. She understands that Hikaru sometimes needs leniency on certain things and that there are some things that he may not understand, but she also doesn’t let him get away with everything. They’ve been fighting and arguing on a fairly regular basis since Kanon was born. They get in each other’s business and they annoy each other, and that’s what makes it so great. A real child isn’t going to let another child get away with bothering them, even if the other child has disabilities, and the same goes for Kanon.

When they get along it’s sweet and funny to see, but sometimes they get on each other’s nerves (which can also be pretty amusing, come to think of it). Luckily there isn’t too much of one or the other. That’s all I have to say on that subject unless something comes up in the next volume.

Cast Round Up

2011-09-02T01:22:00.012-03:00

Pretty soon I'll be finished talking about the With the Light manga, after that's finished (or probably before, who knows) I'll be talking about the With the Light drama.

I already have a post on here about the differences between the manga and the drama, but now I'll be doing recaps/reviews of the episodes one by one.

The drama is 11 episodes long and each episode is about 40-something minutes long since they were intended for an hour-long television time slot.

Anyway, this isn't a post for talking about the show. It's a post for talking about the cast/characters of the show... some of them.

Onward, ahoy!

Here we have the school staff that work closely with Hikaru. These four are pretty much the only faculty we actually see during the drama but they aren't the only teachers working at the school (I hope).

The principal (who is a woman in the manga) is played by Watanabe Ikkei and is the Mr Awesomesauce of the show. The music teacher is played by Ichikawa Mikako. The manga didn't have a music teacher so I'm not really sure why one was included in the drama but, whatever. I also don't know the reason why they switched the genders of the next two teachers. Sakura-sensei is played by Takeda Shinji and is the drama version of Wakabayashi-sensei, who was a woman in the manga. Sakura-sensei teaches the mainstream class. Rio-sensei, played by Kobayashi Satomi, is the drama version of Aoki-sensei (male) and Hikaru's Special Education class teacher.

I don't know what the actress' name is, but in the drama this girl's name is Moe. The best way to describe her is that the writers of the drama took Moe and Eri from the manga and made them one person and called her Moe.

Masato's mother is played by Takahashi Keiko and Sachiko's mother is played by someone else whose name I don't know. The two of them show up a lot in the drama and this is the version of Masato's mother that I like the best. Sachiko's mother is awesome in both versions, but I don't hate Masato's mother in the drama like I do in the manga.

Wataru and Kenta are two of Hikaru's classmates and friends (along with Moe). Wataru is the drama version of Ishida-kun and Kenta is the drama version of Oki-kun. Despite the changes made to the names and ages, the characters' personalities are pretty accurate.

And here we have Miyu, whose name in the drama has been changed to Hotomi. Hotomi's character is just as if the writers took Hiroaki, changed him into a girl, and gave him to Miyu's parents.

Hikaru's father Masato is played by Yamaguchi Tatsuya. He's a pretty awesome character, I like him a bit better than the manga version because I find him a bit more realistic and... three dimensional, I guess?

Shinohara Ryoko is Hikaru's mother Sachiko, slightly less preachy and slightly more reserved than the manga version.

And last, but not least, we have Saito Ryusei as Hikaru himself. If I have one problem with the drama version of Hikaru it's that he almost never shows any emotion. See the picture of him there? That's pretty much the way he looks for the whole show. Aside from that, though, I have no complaints.

Look forward to episode reviews/recaps/whatever coming in the near future. Also keep an eye out for reviews of the last three With the Light manga volumes.

Going way back

2011-09-01T21:43:00.002-03:00

I guess I've always been a reader.

I've known my letters and numbers since I was about 15 months old and I started reading when I was about three or four years old.

I've always been big into reading, which is strange because my parents don't really read much and neither do a lot of my relatives. But I've had books around since I was a baby (as you can see above), and I still have loads of books around now.

I love reading.

Well that's... dumb

2011-08-31T15:07:00.005-03:00

Okay, so, the sale of walkers is banned in Canada. So are the walkers themselves, I suppose. (And by 'walkers' I'm talking about baby walkers here.) Walkers can't be sold in stores and it's even illegal to sell them at yard sales and all that.

Baby walkers are banned in Canada, and have been since April 2004... and I can't really see a good reason for it.

I've seen reasons for it online: babies in walkers have a higher risk of injury (pulling things over on themselves, reaching more dangerous objects that would normally be out of their reach, falling down stairs, etc), and babies in walkers learn to walk later than babies who don't use walkers.

... eh?

Now, I didn't research any of this, this is just stuff I came across on the Internet and thought was quite stupid. I haven't actually seen a baby walker in years, so I don't know if their design has changed at all from what I've seen growing up, but I've seen old pictures of babies in walkers and I never had any problems with them.

I had a walker when I was a baby, so did my brothers and so did some of my cousins. I have never once heard any stories about either me, my brothers, or my cousins having any of the problems mentioned above because of our use of walkers.

(Pictured: Baby!Me in a walker. Not Pictured: Danger or Injury)

The walkers that my brothers and I had as babies were basically the equivalent of a parent holding us by the arms to let us pretend to walk, except that there were wheels instead of parents and we were being supported by the lower body instead of the arms. We moved the walkers with our feet, so it was kind of like walking without actually walking.

There was never a higher risk of injury us because of the walkers, and here's why: our parents didn't stop supervising us just because we were in walkers. My parents didn't just put me in the walker and wander off somewhere where I wasn't in their line of vision (that's what the playpen was used for). I was supervised when I was in the walker the same way I was supervised when I was actually able to walk around for real when I got older. Actually, there was probably more danger for me without the walker than there was with one.

(... yeah I was weird)

When I was a baby I lived in a trailer that pretty much posed no danger to me walker or no walker (except for the furnace right there in the kitchen but I never had any run-ins with it... because my parents aren't brain-dead). My brothers, on the other hand, were born while we were all living with my grandmother. My grandmother's house was pretty much one story except for the small flight of stairs in the kitchen, a flight of stairs which was easily accessible to everyone there and was located right next to an even longer flight of stairs (that only one brother ever fell down and that was when he was much older) that goes into the basement.

Not once did me or my brothers, walker or no walker, ever fall down either of those flights of stairs. My brothers are twins and the two of them each had a walker, so that's two babies in two walkers wandering around and not once did they ever hurt themselves while using them. It's my belief that babies who get hurt while in the walkers don't get hurt because they're in walkers, but because their parents don't pay attention.

My brothers never once fell down my grandmothers stairs in those walkers because they never got a chance to. My parents, grandmother and any other adult present made sure that my brothers didn't go near the stairs. And even if they did somehow get to the stairs there was a gate there to prevent them from falling down.

So it's my opinion that the walkers themselves don't cause injuries to children, inattentive and unprepared parents do. Just like you wouldn't leave a toddler walking around unsupervised, you wouldn't leave a baby in a walker unsupervised.

(2 babies, 2 walkers, 0 problems)

So that's it for the first problem. Now onto the second one: delayed walking.

I have no idea if that's true or not. I don't really see how walkers could cause that unless the baby is in the walker all the time with no floor time or anything (but again, that's the fault of the parent and not the walker itself).

All I can say to that is that my brothers and I all had walkers. I started walking when I was 10 months old, and both of my brothers were walking by their first birthday.

Digimon Season 3

2011-08-30T12:33:00.003-03:00

I've never actually watched Digimon Tamers, and here's why.

Digimon Adventure (just called Digimon in North America at the time) came on TV in the late 90s, when I was about 8/9/10 years old. I don't remember it being really popular around school (not like Pokémon was at the time), but I remember me and my friend Meaghan being really into it.

We thought that Digimon was an awesome show and we collected the cards and the toys (action figures and Digivices, although I never had a Digivice, although my two brothers did), and we sometimes played Digimon at recess at school. Digimon was one of my favorite shows at the time, I liked it better than Pokémon.

After Digimon Adventure was over the next season, Digimon 02, started airing. Digimon 02 was a direct sequel to Adventure, and it wasn't called Digimon 02 at the time, just Digimon like the first season so it was pretty much the same show to us. Digimon 02 was a lot like Adventure in the way that the art style was the same and the characters were the same and the overall idea was the same. I loved 02 when I was a kid, but I haven't watched it recently so I don't know how well it holds up now (I've seen Adventure subs, still awesome). I actually don't have many memories of watching it as a child, but I must've been really into it because I can remember doing imaginative play with elements specific from 02.

ANYWAY, so yeah, I was really big into Digimon as a kid. Now, I remember seeing the epilogue to 02. I remember specifically watching it on the TV in the living room in the afternoon during a late summer or early fall afternoon. I think this happened in the early 2000s, putting me at about 10 or 11 years old.

Now at the time the epilogue aired, I knew that there was gonna be a third season. There were previews advertising it on the same channel that was airing 02. So 02 ended with the epilogue (that most people on the Internet are saying that they hated), and I was excited. I don't really remember my reaction to the original Chosen Children's occupations, but knowing me I probably didn't think too much about it (I was probably more interested in the way the kids looked as adults). What really caught my attention in the epilogue was the that Chosen Children now had children of their own... and all these new children had partner Digimon of their own.

I thought about all of this for probably all of two minutes and came to the conclusion that the third season was gonna be another direct sequel primarily featuring the original characters' children (along with featuring the original Children as well, of course).

So I was excited. I couldn't wait for the new season to start so I could see Tai and his friends once again but this time as parents, hopefully playing the same role that their parents played in Adventure to their own children (I still think that would've made for an awesome show).

I couldn't wait for the third season to start and, luckily, I didn't have long to wait.

I started watching Digimon Tamers (still just called Digimon) when the first episode aired on YTV. I knew from the get-go that the show was different. The art was different, the world was different (Digimon trading cards existing in the show's universe, whut?), and the action was different.

I was introduced to our new hero, Takato. He was wearing goggles so I thought that he was either Tai or Davis' son, still under the impression that this was a direct sequel to 02. I watched the show for a few more episodes and only ended up recognizing two characters: Terriermon (who I first saw in the American Digimon: The Movie, though it was a different Terriermon, of course), and a teacher at Takato's school who I'm still convinced is Kari (but I'll probably actually have to watch the show to make sure).

I eventually realized that Digimon Tamers wasn't a direct sequel to Adventure and 02, but it's own show... and I was pissed. I was so disappointed that it wasn't a direct sequel and that the original group's adventures were over for good that I stopped watching the show and refused to watch any season beyond 02.

Fast forward to sometime last year when I learned that subs for Adventure and 02 were available for download on the Internet. I got real big into Digimon again and was able to enjoy it again like I did when I first saw it. I started watching Digimon-related reviews online and even started imagining writing a Digimon fanfic (that will probably never see the light of day).

Now, the only reviews I watched (and really the only ones I could find) were for Digimon Adventure and Digimon 02. Then one of the reviewers started to do Digimon Tamers. I've only seen one part of it, but I have to admit that it looks interesting. Now that I've gotten over the disappointment from my childhood, I want to watch this show now. Maybe I'll like it, maybe i won't, but I'll be able to give it a fair shot this time where I couldn't before.

Sunny Days... at 2am

2011-08-14T22:37:00.002-03:00

I had to babysit from around 10:30 at nigth 'til almost 3:00 in the morning last night... this morning... whatever.

The kids I was babysitting (two cousins and some other girl) were all pretty young so the only television in the room was turned to Treehouse TV the whole time.

I could almost feel my braincells dying... I'm really starting to hate children's programming. I hate modern children's programming anyway, I've seen some of the shows that were on when I was growing up and most of them are still pretty decent. (And will someone please call CPS for Max and Ruby please? Where the fuck are their parents at anyway?!)

I know that I've long outgrown the age range for these programs, but I think they're just really bad, so it can't just be that.

Sesame Street was on at 2:00am (why?? they have an awesome show like that in their line-up and they only put it on at two in the morning?! I had to sit through some awful programs and then finally there's Sesame Street and it's on at two in the morning! I am pissed.) and it was fucking awesome. I laughed like a fucking maniac almost the whole time, it was hilarious. Major nostalgia moment, and it was a new episode too so it wasn't like I only liked it because I remembered seeing it when I was young.

Why can't more children's shows be like that? And why are most kids' shows done up in 3D CGI whatever? Did small children suddenly lose the ability to see in 2D? It seems like everything I see aimed at kids is 3D CGI these days. And shows that were originally in 2D (Mickey Mouse, Franklin, Winnie-the-Pooh, etc) are now CGI... and sucky (well, okay, Franklin isn't that bad now, it's pretty much the same as when I was growing up... but Mickey Mouse's Clubhouse makes me want to hurt things).

But seriously, we need more Sesame Street. They should run different episodes five times a day with reruns from the 70s, 80s, and 90s mixed in with the new episodes.

With the Light Volume 5

2011-08-09T18:07:00.001-03:00

With the Light 5

Another school year might be over for Hikaru Azuma, but his mom has no time to rest. With both a new teacher and new classmates of different ages and varying disabilities ahead in fifth grade, Sachiko starts preparing for the difficulties that come with sudden changes to her autistic son’s routine. Despite her best efforts, Sachiko meets with significant opposition from the new teacher, and the Azumas have to cope with Hikaru acting out as a result of the stressful changes at school. Moreover, when the time comes for the family to decide on Hikaru’s junior high, the local education administrators seem to think that a school for the disabled is the best fit for Hikaru, partly because of his recent behaviour. But Sachiko, who has done her research, knows this isn’t the case. Will she and Masato be able to convince the authorities and specialists that they know what is best for their son? (from the back of the book)

We all say goodbye to Gunji-sensei in the beginning of the volume. It’s been a bumpy ride with her as the Special Education teacher, but she does redeem herself in the end. I’m almost sad to see her go, mostly because I know that what’s coming next isn’t good.

After that it’s spring break, where Masato stars in a silly commercial promoting the mushrooms made by his company. It’s the only time Azuma-san shows up in this volume. Some her friends are visiting her when they see the commercial and she’s very embarrassed about it when they recognize it as Masato. Then she calls Masato up to yell at him. Azuma-san is very obsessed with outward appearances.

When spring break is over it’s time for Hikaru to start the sixth grade (OHMIGOD it’s his last year of elementary school guys! Let loose the excitement!). Hikaru, Miyu, and their mothers go to the school a few days early to meet the new Special Education teacher. They arrive and meet the vice-principal in the Special Ed classroom. I don’t know how long that particular vice-principal has been working at the school, but we see him a lot in this volume where he never really saw him at all before.

We are then introduced to the new young, male Special Ed teacher. His name is Akamatsu-sensei and he is hands-down the worst teacher Hikaru and Miyu have ever had. It’s not apparent right away how horrible Akamatsu-sensei is; actually, he seems like a great guy at first. He’s fairly young, maybe around Aoki-sensei or Nishiwaki-sensei’s age, and he seems to know a great deal about autism without Sachiko having to explain it to him.

Honestly it looks like Hikaru’s last year in elementary school (sixth grade already!!) is going to be a pretty positive one, probably up to Aoki-sensei standards… and then Honda-san notices a few things that no one else, possibly including the readers, picked up on. For one thing, she notices that Akamatsu-sensei doesn’t bend down to the children’s level when he speaks to them; he also seems to use big words just to show that he can use them. There are also signs that he doesn’t clearly understand Hikaru and Miyu’s autism, he starts comparing them to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, for one thing, and he seems a bit disappointed when he’s told that they don’t have any super special talents.

There’s no time to dwell on this, though, because classes start a few days later. It’s April 6th and the first day of sixth grade for Hikaru. There will be two other students in Special Ed this year. They are both younger than Hikaru and transfers from mainstream classrooms. Before I get to them, I’d first like to mention that Akamatsu-sensei starts having a hard time from the beginning. He barely has all four children in the class alone with him for five minutes before he starts yelling.

I don’t think that Akamatsu-sensei is a bad teacher (even though I don’t like the man), but he has no business being in the Special Ed classroom. He’s a smart man and I have no doubt that he understands autism or any other disability he’s read about, but he doesn’t understand the children and he can’t handle them. It’s one thing to know that children in his class do certain things, but it’s another thing altogether to know how to handle these behaviours.

Akamatsu-sensei does a terrible job in teaching the Special Ed classroom because he expects all the children to learn the same way that the mainstream students do. What he fails to realize is that these four students are in the Special Education class because they don’t learn like the mainstream children do and need extra help. He also expects them all to work at the same level, which would be stupid even if they weren’t in Special Ed because all four students are in different grade levels anyway.

There’s something going on where the kids’ parents come in to view the class (like an open house or something) and Akamatsu-sensei is reading the children a story. He reads the story straight from a book without any visual aids or gestures or anything. There are three autistic children in the room and neither of them is paying attention because they’re unable to follow along. The only one who was listening was the dyslexic and Akamatsu-sensei gets mad at him for incorrectly writing something on the board. Then he tells the students to make a morning glory out of paper and gets mad when one of the new children doesn’t realize that he has to make a pretend morning glory (as opposed to making a real morning glory out of paper).

I could go on and on about how Akamatsu-sensei fails at his job, but I won’t because I don’t want this to go on and on. Just let me say that compared to him, Gunji-sensei is on the same level as Aoki-sensei. Yeah, think about that. Even Gunji-sensei was able to work with the children. Akamatsu-sensei was never able to get any real work done; he didn’t even take all the kids outside, not even to the gardens! He didn’t listen to what the parents had to say, even ignoring documentation from doctors (along with Principal Kouda, big surprise there). The Special Ed class was always in chaos when he taught and the year ended with virtually no learning taking place.

On to the new students! Iguchi Ryota is a fourth grader and was transferred to Special Ed from the mainstream class. He is very active and has problems with staying on task, paying attention, and personal space. He doesn’t have a diagnosis in this volume, but Shibusawa-san (from Sunshine House) believes that he might have ADHD and high functioning autism (possibly Asperger’s). Akamatsu-sensei yells at him a lot because Ryota is always knocking things over and forgetting things.

Kanemoto Tsubasa is the other new student and he was transferred out of the third grade mainstream class. He’s a calm, shy boy who doesn’t really cause any trouble for Akamatsu-sensei and can often be seen helping to look after Miyu. He has trouble reading and writing, but is completely normal otherwise. Like Ryota, Tsubasa doesn’t have a diagnosis when he enters Special Ed, but his mother does take him to a doctor on Shibusawa-san’s advice. Tsubasa is eventually diagnosed with dyslexia, but Akamatsu-sensei doesn’t believe Tsubasa’s mother when she tells him.

This volume isn’t all about how Hikaru’s last year of elementary school (!!) is probably just as stressful as his first; there are other things that happen outside of school. Like Hikaru being bullied. Yup, it’s finally happened. Hikaru is on his way home from school one day when he starts getting harassed by two junior high school boys. I just hated reading that part, the two boys are pulling on Hikaru’s GPS and nametag and trying to get money from him and Hikaru has no idea what’s going on. Luckily, Ishida-kun happens to walk by and sees what’s going on and gets the boys to stop. Unfortunately, Ishida-kun’s not enough to get the boys to stop completely. Sachiko goes with Ishida-kun’s mother to the school to get the teachers involved but no one will help. It’s pretty terrible that no one can control two 14-year-olds.

The events in the second half of the volume jump around a bit. It’s time to choose Hikaru’s junior high school and Sachiko and Masato have to practically fight the system to get permission to enrol Hikaru in the junior high they want him to go to. Hikaru also goes on a trip with some classmates but it didn’t go anywhere near as well as his first trip in Volume 3 (mostly because Akamatsu-sensei doesn’t know what he’s doing). There’s also some karaoke thrown in. And then Hikaru graduates elementary school.

It was wonderful to see Hikaru graduate. Compared to the entrance ceremony six years earlier it’s proof that Hikaru has grown so much since then. The book didn’t spend too much time on it because, well, nothing really happened. Hikaru graduated and then he went home. But Hikaru wasn’t the only one who graduated, all of his friends graduated too. So not only did Hikaru graduate elementary school, but he graduated with all of his friends. I so smiled big the whole way through that segment.

Hikaru’s time in this volume is pretty much over at this point, just a few other scenes of him (he’s learning to ride a public bus now). He also said a final goodbye to his yellow hat and backpack, so his elementary school days are officially over, this is important because his yellow hat has turned into something like a ritual to get him to school (since he was only supposed to wear it during first grade but ended up wearing it all six years).

The last big story in this volume is about Katakura Eri, a girl who went to school with Hikaru and who comes from an abusive household. She hasn’t really been featured in the series much until now and I don’t really know why she gets her own story in this volume, but whatever. I suppose it is interesting to see what she’s up to now since her family were kind of main characters in the first volume and we haven’t really seen them since.

With the Light Volume 4

2011-08-01T20:42:00.000-03:00

With the Light 4

When staffing changes at Masato’s company get him transferred to a dead-end job in the middle of nowhere, more suffering seems imminent for the Azuma family. However, Masato approaches the situation with aplomb and comes up with new ways to pave the way for Hikaru and those like him to become “cheerful working adults”… with surprising results. Hikaru himself seems to be getting closer, bit by bit, to achieving this goal as the Azumas decide to foster their son’s independence in a variety of ways, including getting to and from school on his own. But when Hikaru encounters an old acquaintance on the way home and leads Sachiko to a horrific discovery, will the Azumas be able to return a favour and help out a friend in need? (from back of book)

Okay, this time the summary on the back of the book is pretty accurate. Sachiko does make a horrific discovery, but more on that later.

This volume doesn’t really feature Hikaru directly much at all. He only really shows up a few times just to let the readers know that he has an amazing memory (think Reid from Criminal Minds), that he’s advancing in his development (he walks to and from school on his own and spends a lot of time in the mainstream class now), and that he’s a total sweetheart (he is a very good big brother to Kanon).

This volume starts off with Masato going to work. He was demoted at the end of the last volume and it hasn’t really started affecting the story until now. First of all, there will apparently be a decrease in Masato’s salary, but money has never really been mentioned except in passing or as a reason as to why certain things can’t be bought, or whatever. The really big change in all of this is that Masato has basically been shipped off to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere (since some of the higher ups in the company are trying to get him to quit because they have no real grounds to fire him).

Working at the warehouse/office looks just miserable. Masato is confined to a small room with only a table and a window. There is no air conditioner to help with the sweltering summer heat and all the other workers either ignore him or aren’t allowed to talk to him. He isn’t given anything to do and the only thing he really has to work on is his laptop brought from home.

The upside to all this is that he has a lot of time to himself… and he’s certainly up to something.

We don’t find out until later what’s going on with him, but at the end of the first chapter Masato says that he’s finished working on something and it all seems pretty important. He keeps going to his new office every day, much to the annoyance of the two higher ups there who are just waiting for him to quit, until he gets a call from his old work partner Tanigawa saying that big changes are going on at their old workplace.

Masato takes advantage of this new opportunity and manages to get himself back into his old company in a good position. His first order of business is to take the warehouse he had been demoted to and turn it into a place that would hire people with disabilities as workers. This volume talks a lot about disabilities in the workplace as Masato and his new employees learn about how to smoothly run a company and turn a profit while working with people with disabilities.

This part of the volume is awesome because I don’t think a lot of people (me included) really think about people with disabilities having jobs. Then Masato and co. take a fieldtrip to a company that has been employing disabled people for over ten years. We’re shown how a company like this might be run, and what kind of adjustments would have to be made for everything to work effectively.

This is a pretty big deal for Masato. Not only is he about to start managing a company where he expects a grand majority of the workers to have some sort of disabilities, but this is kind of a glimpse into Hikaru’s possible future. Hikaru won’t be in school forever, so companies like this are very important if he is to become a cheerful working adult when he grows up.

After the workplace arc is over, it’s time for Hikaru’s AAPEP evaluation. The AAPEP is to evaluate his functional skills to see what he can already do and what he still has to work on. There are forms for Hikaru’s parents and Gunji-sensei to fill out concerning Hikaru’s skills and when and where he uses them.

Hikaru goes to Sunshine House to be evaluated by a psychologist named Soejima. Soejima-sensei has Hikaru do a number of different tasks: sorting things, playing basketball, asking for food, following orders, working through distractions, and other things. He does pretty well (there’s no tantrums or crying) and the results allow Hikaru’s parents and teachers to create a personal curriculum for Hikaru.

It’s getting close to Christmas in the second half of the volume. School is going well; Kanata seems to be under a massive workload, and Hikaru still wanders as he walks home from school on his own. There most likely won’t be a repeat of Hikaru’s Adventure (from Volume 2) since most of the neighbourhood kind of watches out for Hikaru… that and he has a GPS tracker on him.

It’s on a detour while walking home when Hikaru is found by Oki-kun. The two meet while Hikaru is looking at an outdoor Christmas tree (he still loves shiny things) and then they are found by Sachiko. Oki tries to run away when Sachiko shows up and he almost gets hit by a car. When Sachiko checks him over to make sure that he hasn’t gotten hurt, she discovers bruises all over Oki’s torso. She invites Oki to come back home with them and then takes him to the doctor, where they find out that he has a fractured rib.

No one’s really seen Oki since Volume 2 and this is the first time he’s shown up since he left. He looks like he’s doing better than before: he’s put on some weight and he’s dressed appropriately for the weather. It would seem that all is going well for him, until Oki goes back to where he now lives and we see that not everything is as it seems.

Masato goes to visit Oki and discovers that the school where he lives is terrible. It doesn’t specify how many children are actually there (I think there’s only four or five that are shown, but there are more), but there’s a poor teacher-to-child ratio. The principal is totally clueless as to what’s going on, one of the teachers believes strongly in corporal punishment (with a baseball bat), another seems to be there just for show, and the only sympathetic one we see seems to be in way over her head.

Luckily, it’s Masato to the rescue and CPS, or whatever the Japanese equivalent of that is, is called in to help. Oki-kun’s arc wraps up on a positive note. This arc moves away from the subject of autism to shed some light on child abuse and abuse happening in institutions. There’s even a brief scene where Sachiko talks to Masato about her almost abusing Hikaru when he was younger and how lucky she felt that she found support and was able to change her ways.

The last major thing that happens this volume is that Kanata moves away. Even since Volume 1, I never thought of him as a major character since he doesn’t really show up much. However, he seemed to start appearing more often as Hikaru started to spend more time in the mainstream class. Until this volume I didn’t realize how close Hikaru and Kanata were, but the reality is that they are childhood friends (like Hikaru and Nobuaki, or Hikaru and Moe). It was really sad to see Kanata leave, and Hikaru took it pretty hard, but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him.

Although this volume didn’t feature too much of Hikaru, it did bring to light pertinent issues related to Hikaru, such as work after leaving school and abuse.

At the end of every volume so far there’s been a text preview for the next volume. This volume is different because it also includes some actual pages from the next volume. I think this works better to make you really want to read the next volume because the preview mentions graduating.

…

Hikaru’s almost finished elementary school!!!

It’s his last year! Are you excited? I’m excited!

Oh, Neville

2011-07-26T15:35:00.003-03:00

Watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in theatres on Sunday... it was fucking awesome!

But I'm not here to talk about the movie (yet), I'm here to talk about Neville Longbottom, The Boy Who Was Almost Harry Potter.

Yeah, I don't remember if this was explained in the movies, but in the book it said that the prophecy about Harry could have also been referring to Neville since he was also born at the end of July. But moving on.

When I watched the movie I was amazed by Neville. It's all in the books but it's a bit more obvious in the movies that Neville really grew up (probably because I saw his actor grow up as well).

Neville really did a lot of daring things in this movie. He stood up to evil teachers (and was beaten up for it), he practically leads a student resistance, he uses himself as live bait in an explosion trap, and the sword of Godric Griffindor appeared to him to help him kill Voldemort's snake. Speaking of Voldemort, Neville even stood up to him!

Neville's really grown since the first time he appeared. While I was watching the movie I could hardly believe that this was the same chubby little boy who was practically kidnapped by his broom and ended up breaking his wrist by falling from high on the castle.

I could hardly believe it... I wanna watch the first movie again now.

With the Light 3

2011-07-24T20:43:00.002-03:00

With the Light 3

A little effort goes a long way – that’s what Sachiko Azuma, her fellow parents, and the teachers learn as they struggle to work together to make life a little easier for the children in the Special Education class. With the help of innovative gadgets and the support of more people than meet the eye, Hikaru and Miyu become better able to communicate with the world around them. but when a teen idol classmate sends some mothers into a flashbulb frenzy that causes Hikaru to panic, other parents begin to question his presence alongside “normal” students in the classroom. And when Hikaru’s first school trip also leads to chaos, Sachiko begins to worry that Hikaru may be losing his hard-fought place in society. Will bad news from her husband Masato’s workplace shatter the delicate harmony the Azumas have worked so hard to achieve? (from the back of the book)

I’m starting to think the summaries on the books are trying too hard to create reader intrigue. A school trip that leads to chaos? Bad news shattering the delicate harmony? Flashbulb frenzy? I hate to disappoint people, but all of that are kind of exaggerations. Sometimes bad things happen to Hikaru and his family, but nothing so bad that I would call it ‘chaos’ or ‘harmony shattering’.

Hikaru is in the fifth grade now. He definitely come pretty far since the first volume. He can use helping technology to communicate, he reads kanji now, he’s interacting more with the people around him, and he’s becoming more and more independent.

Even though Aoki-sensei is no longer there, Hikaru’s time at school is still full of wonderful experiences because he’s there with his friends and other teachers who support him, including Gunji-sensei, who is really starting to come around although she still has a long way to go (at least she’s listening to the parents’ requests now… most of the time).

Technology is briefly touched on in this volume. Hikaru can use a VOCA, a machine that speaks pre-recorded messages when buttons are pressed, now and he uses it a few times here. The quarter hour watch, a timer, from the first volume was mentioned, and almost every adult character has a cell phone that sends pictures and text messages as well as calls.

Also in this volume: The Crayfish Experiment. That’s something that’s apparently been happening since Hikaru’s first year of school, but is probably only being mentioned now because Gunji-sensei refuses to do it when Hikaru first brings it up. Time to overcome obstacles! Gunji-sensei is grossed out by crayfish, so she doesn’t want to do it. That’s when some of Hikaru’s classmates and other teachers step up. Nishiwaki-sensei, Hikaru’s mainstream class teacher; Gori-sensei, who doesn’t seem to have his own class but is always there, and Wakabayashi-sensei work together with Gunji-sensei to make the experiment possible.

The experiment is also where the ‘flashbulb frenzy’ from the book’s summary comes in. Hikaru’s friend Kanata, his example for the Mouse March, is an idol now (he’s a singer or an actor, or something) and he’s pretty famous. When Hikaru goes to his mainstream class to join in on the presentation on the crayfish experiment there are parents there who are loud and wanting to take pictures of Kanata. All the noise they make bothers Hikaru and then about two or three camera flashes go off and Hikaru has to leave the room. Later on Sachiko overhears some parents saying mean remarks about Hikaru being included in the mainstream class.

After that scene Nishiwaki-sensei starts calling Aoki-sensei for advice about Hikaru. He learns some things that eventually help Hikaru to be able to stay in the mainstream classroom for longer periods of time without panicking or covering his ears.

Masato’s mother also shows up in this volume, and this is really the first time that we see her starting to favour Kanon over Hikaru. She visits Sachiko at home and talks to her about Kanon’s schooling. She basically says that Sachiko and Masato should enrol Kanon into a private school near her house and that she could take Kanon in and raise her. She insinuates that Sachiko cares more for Hikaru than she does for Kanon because of all the trouble Sachiko went through to find a good school for Hikaru. Masato soon puts a stop to that kind of talk, but I doubt we’ve seen the last of this attitude from Azuma-san (his mother).

Not much else out of the ordinary happens in the first half of the volume other than Hikaru and Kanon both get the chicken pox at two different times. Both instances present different problems. When Kanon is sick Sachiko has to stay home with her, so she can’t take Hikaru to and from school. From this she learns to rely more on outside support for help with Hikaru by getting involved with the Sunshine House. Not much is shown about Hikaru dealing with his chicken pox other than Hikaru not being happy about being sick. Dealing with the itchiness and not being able to leave the house was probably especially hard for him.

The second half of the volume was all about Hikaru’s school camping trip, which is my favourite part of Volume 3. This is a totally new experience for Hikaru because he’ll be gone for four days and three nights without his parents.

This is a big step for Hikaru. He’ll be going to a lot of new and different places in the space of only a few days with only his best friends and teachers to help him (he also gets his own personal support teacher). Hikaru has a great time on his trip, and it was a great opportunity for his teachers and support staff to learn new things about how to make life a little easier for him. Principal Kouda, however, learns nothing.

Aoki-sensei is also on this trip since his elementary school is also a part of the trip. He’s there with his new student, Tomoya-kun. He and Hikaru don’t really interact, but Hikaru does remember him.

Now for the ‘chaos’. On the first night at the hotel/resort thing everyone is staying at, Hikaru gets lost.

Well, he doesn’t really get lost; he just disappears for a bit. On a hiking trip earlier that day, everyone passed through a tunnel, which Hikaru enjoyed but had to leave before he was ready to. He wanted to go to the tunnel that night but couldn’t express it to anyone and ended up going to look for it himself. He wasn’t missing for very long and was found right next to the building. After that Nishiwaki-sensei and the support teacher sat down to try to figure out what happened (while Principal Kouda just yelled at them). That’s really all that happened surrounding the ‘chaos’.

Like I said, the second half of the volume was all about Hikaru’s trip, except for one little part where Masato got arrested.

Yeah. That was the ‘shattering harmony’ part. I’d hate to disappoint everyone, but Masato was only in police custody for a few hours late one night because he got drunk and got into a fight with another man. The reason for all of this was that Masato got a transfer because the higher ups at his workplace are trying to get him to quit without outright firing him. I think that only starts to really impact the story in the next volume.

So that’s Volume 3. Things happened, obstacles were overcome, and most of the characters grew as a result.

I don’t think I ever talked about the art in this series, so I’m gonna do that right now: the art in this series is pretty simple. The character designs are all quite cute, and Tobe-sensei did a good job in giving each character a different design. The characters all look different, even the background characters sometimes, and it’s easy to tell one from the other. There’s not much going on for backgrounds most of the time, but when they’re there they’re done well. There are also some patterns, mostly on the clothes, that are often reused.

Another thing is that Hikaru and his friends are babies at the start of this series and they age as the story goes on. This is done very well. The children all look their ages (the adults never really seem to age, but that’s not important). I point this out because a lot of the other manga I’ve read have some odd designs for children, usually making them tiny and chubby. That’s cute, but not very realistic. With the Light has some very realistic children (that goes for how they behave as well).

Next is Volume 4, where we’ll probably learn more about how Masato’s transfer affects the family.

DoraaAAAHH! (also, relatives)

2011-07-24T01:30:00.004-03:00

So I was babysitting my baby cousin and we were watching Dora the Explorer.

I'm really starting to greatly dislike Dora (and most of the other kids shows... and people say anime is weird). I know I'm not the target audience for Dora, but that show just annoys the hell out of me.

I suppose that it's an interesting concept: to watch a show that looks like a computer game being played. Of course, actually playing the game would be a lot more fun. But I watch my cousin watch it and she seems to be learning something from it, she sometimes answers Dora's questions so I guess that's worth something.

But that show just grates on my nerves.

And now for the obligatory arsehole complaint: the language.

Now, I have no problem with teaching children second languages (I am bilingual, myself, and have been since I was a baby, speaking two languages is awesome). Nope, my problem here is that the second language in question is Spanish.

There's nothing wrong with the Spanish language. In fact, I actually tried to learn it when I was younger (I've since switched to Japanese). But there really isn't any need to know Spanish in the area where I live. As far as I know, no one around here really speaks it (unless there are some people that do and I just don't know, totally possible). My family is French, Acadian to be more specific. So that means that my cousin is Acadian, so if she should learn any language other than English, it should be French.

Problem is that I don't think there are any shows that teach French, just Spanish Anyone is free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen any shows teaching French. The closest I can think of is Madeline, but from what little I can remember, that show just had French words spoken here and there, no French was directly being taught like in Dora.

I'm done now.

...

And now for relatives.

The older I get, the more I seem to really dislike most of the people on my mother's side of the family. My mom has three brothers, and they all have families and I have no complaints with them. They're awesome, nothing wrong there (except maybe with the middle's brother's family and how I can't really connect with them, but that's probably due to the fact that I don't really know them all that well, so, moving on). And I love my Nanny (Mom's mother) and my cousins from America, fucking awesome the whole lot of them. And I love my dad's side of the family (those that I've actually met anyway, love 'em all).

But a lot of my mother's cousins are assholes, or I just don't like them for whatever reason.

We just had some of her cousins stay with us for a week or so, her cousin and his two kids. Her cousin is an arsehole. Every time we were together in the same room he kept teasing me about my smiling problem (also known as The Smile That Keeps Happening at Innapropriate Times) that I can't control. It annoyed the fuck out of me, and even when I tell my mom about it, she just laughs it off and tells me that I'm overreacting.

They left on Friday, and now we have other cousins staying with us. A husband and wife pair I've known since I was very young. The husband is constantly teasing me, or just annoying me. Sometimes he's funny, most of the time he isn't. And the wife is just... odd. About a half-hour or so ago, she came in to see what I was doing on my laptop (I was downloading something), and then she just sat next to me on the couch and stared at my computer screen saying nothing for about two full minutes. It was awkward to say the least, and weird. And my mom knows that I'm annoyed and made uncomfortable by this, but, again, she just laughs and says that I'm overreacting. And she once told me that when I'm irritable about the husband and don't laugh, or whatever, at his jokes that I'm hurting his feelings.

*headdesk*

Y'know what actually, my mother's an asshole.

... and now I'm pissed. Especially because I'm being kicked out of my room because Mom's cousins sleep in it. I sleep in my brothers' room.

My brothers, by the way, have been sleeping in the living room for the past week or so until Friday (because of the other cousin and his kids). And yes, we have a pull-out couch bed thing. But this happens every single fucking time.

GIVE THOSE TWO THE FUCKING PULL-OUT BED, YOU FUCKWIT!!!

... okay... now I'm really pissed...

With the Light Volume 2

2011-07-20T00:08:00.001-03:00

With the Light 2

Sachiko and Masato Azuma have overcome numerous obstacles in dealing with their firstborn son Hikaru’s autism. Having saved their marriage from ending in ruins, the young couple has welcomed a healthy baby girl, Kanon, into their tight-knit family. But with the obvious differences between Hikaru’s and Kanon’s developmental abilities, it becomes apparent that social prejudices against Hikaru’s disability are never far away. As Hikaru moves into the fourth grade, Sachiko encounters a new student, Miyu, whose mother has completely given up on her daughter’s life and her own. With the help of Hikaru’s beloved teacher, Aoki-sensei, Sachiko aims to bring hope back to Miyu’s family. But when Aoki-sensei transfers to a different school and Hikaru’s special education class is thrown into upheaval by yet another tragedy, can Sachiko continue to hold on to her own hope for her son’s future? (from the back of the book)

A lot of things happened in this volume, and this volume only spans maybe less than two years of Hikaru’s life.

At the beginning of the volume, Hikaru is almost in the fourth grade and his little sister Kanon is two years old and in daycare, which is pretty much where we left off in Volume 1.

Hikaru is the same as ever. He’s about nine years old now and is pretty set in his every day routines and still continues to make strides in his development. Kanon is just adorable and is probably as spontaneous as her brother is not. She’s also pretty easy to deal with, as Sachiko points out at one point.

This series doesn’t really have much of a plot, it’s just a slice-of-life series about Hikaru’s life so there’s no long story per volume, just a lot of short arcs. There are two at the very beginning, and one is where the ‘Hikaru Newsletter’ is introduced. The Hikaru Newsletter is something that Sachiko does up on the computer to hand out at Hikaru’s school to help people better figure him out. This particular newsletter focuses on the fact that Hikaru is able to put together a puzzle flipped over (because he was looking at the shape of the pieces and not the picture) and challenging the readers to try to do the same.

The second arc includes Kanon and some Hina dolls (some kind of Japanese doll set). Some of the mothers of Kanon’s daycare buddies are invited to a Hina doll party and Sachiko is invited and has to take Hikaru along with her. Hikaru is pretty well-behaved for the most part; while he occasionally gets into things Sachiko is able to divert his attention with no problems. Everything is proceeding smoothly until Hikaru wets his pants because he wasn’t able to make it to the bathroom in time. This shocks the other mothers there and they make some pretty mean remarks. One of them even insinuates that the reason Kanon was born was so that she could take care of Hikaru when Sachiko and Masato eventually die.

And that was chapter one.

Chapter two starts with Hikaru entering the fourth grade and some clunky foreshadowing about not wanting Aoki-sensei to transfer schools.

There’s a new student in the Special Education class this year: Miyu Honda, who is in first grade and is has autism. Like Hikaru, Miyu has low functioning autism. But unlike Hikaru, Miyu’s never received any kind of therapy, so her development is way behind (she isn’t even potty trained). Miyu’s mother, Honda-san, is young and headstrong and has never had any good experiences with schools, so she’s practically given up on Miyu’s education at this point. We don’t actually see too much of Miyu and Honda-san unless Sachiko and/or Hikaru are around at the same time. Miyu is probably what Hikaru would’ve been if Sachiko had never been to the welfare facility. Under Aoki-sensei’s guidance, Miyu flourishes, but all that mostly happens in the background of Hikaru’s story arcs.

Speaking of Hikaru, he’s become quite the gardener. It wasn’t mentioned in the first volume, but Aoki-sensei has been taking the Special Ed students out to work in the school garden every spring and fall. Hikaru has been working in the garden for almost four years now and he’s learned to pull weeds, water plants, and harvest them. He can even tell which vegetables are which just by looking at the leaves. All of this gives Aoki-sensei an idea that opens up to another story arc.

Wakabayashi-sensei is teaching the Buddy System class this year. The Buddy System is when another student (usually from a specific class) volunteers to hang out with the Special Ed students. Daisuke Ishida becomes Hikaru’s buddy for The Tomato Project. His job to go out to the garden every day at recess with Hikaru so Hikaru can water the tomato plants and take a picture of them. This is to teach him the passage of time.

The Tomato Projects gets off to a rough start but everyone eventually gets themselves sorted out and Hikaru makes a new friend in Ishida. There’s also another breakthrough in Hikaru’s development: he calls Ishida, someone he’s only known a few months, by name. (Wakabayashi-sensei is so jealous, haha.)

After The Tomato Project is over, there’s some kind of school recital where the Special Ed class, along with Ishida, makes a presentation about it. This is when Ishida’s character gets some development. Before he met Hikaru, Ishida was a soft-spoken boy who got teased a lot but, for whatever reason, couldn’t do anything about it. During the recital, someone makes fun of Hikaru and Ishida gets angry and calls the kid out.

Speaking of the kid making fun of Hikaru, his name is Oki-kun, and he’s in Moe’s class. He’s also a brat. He’s been abandoned by his mother and neglected by his father. But he turns out to have a kind heart, which he proves in a part of the volume I like to call ‘Hikaru’s Adventure’.

Hikaru’s always had a tendency to wander off. He walks home from school on his own now, so it was probably only a matter of time before he managed to get himself lost. Apparently, he’s been going to Oki-kun’s home recently, and this is where his adventure begins. He and Oki-kun are chased out of the house and, one bus ride and one train ride later; end up in Hachioji (which is about two hours away from home). This is all very emotional because when the readers aren’t with Hikaru and Oki-kun, we’re with Sachiko, who is beside herself with worry and fear. She blames herself for Hikaru getting lost because she allowed him to walk around on his own. It Keiko Tobe is good at anything, it’s portraying emotion. I was scared for Hikaru while reading this, and I knew that he was fine the whole time.

The second half of the volume is when a lot of changes happen.

Everything begins when Aoki-sensei and Wakabayashi-sensei get married, which comes straight out of nowhere. Dead serious, not even a hint of romance between those two until now. As nice as all that was and as much as I liked it, I think that the only reason it came up was because there needed to be a reason for Aoki-sensei to be transferred out. Which is the next major thing that happens.

Sachiko and Honda-san find the transfer hard to accept. Sachiko knows that Aoki-sensei is the main reason why Hikaru has been able to come as far as he has, and to Honda-san Aoki-sensei is the first person other than her to see Miyu as an actual human being with potential and feelings. They try to fight the transfer, but they can’t really change anything and Aoki-sensei moves on to another school.

It really isn’t the end of the world just because Aoki-sensei is gone. Principal Yoshizawa had everything sorted out so that Shichigatsu Elementary (Hikaru’s school) would continue to be a safe and welcome learning environment for all its students, including those with special needs. Then a tragedy happens and all that planning goes down the tubes.

Now the school goes through some major changes. First there’s a new principal, Principal Kouda, a man who cares more about image than about creating a loving environment for all of his students. Second there’s a new Special Ed teacher, Gunji-sensei, who is looking for a free ride for her last year before retirement and has no patience for Hikaru and Miyu and their needs. Gunji-sensei is also the teacher who accidentally locked Hikaru into a storage shed in his first year, so Sachiko is pretty worried about this.

This brings up a totally new set of problems that Hikaru and Miyu have a hard time overcoming. Right off the bat, Hikaru has the first big tantrum he’s had since he started school, and Miyu starts wetting her pants again. Both children are practically regressing while under Gunji-sensei’s care, and neither she nor Principal Kouda will do anything about it.

Not without a fight at least.

Hikaru is still continuing to grow and develop in this volume, and he’s making great strides into expanding his world even more. He’s meeting new people and learning more about the world he lives in and how to navigate it.

Like the first volume, Volume 2 doesn’t hold back with the emotional punches. Every up and down in the Azuma family’s journey is felt by the readers as well as the characters because of the way it’s done up in the manga. It also helps that the characters are easy to get attached to, especially the children because we get to see them as they’re growing up, so we genuinely care for them.

Mark your calenders, everyone

2011-07-18T18:44:00.002-03:00

With the Light volume 8 is coming out in September (the 20th, according to the Chapters website).

This is the final volume of the With the Light series and the end of our peek into Hikaru's life.

I'm sad it's ending, but at the same time I can't wait.

With the Light Volume 1

2011-07-12T14:46:00.001-03:00

With the Light 1

To new mother Sachiko Azuma, her baby boy is the light of her life. Accordingly, she names him Hikaru, Japanese for “to be bright.” Eager to raise her son, Sachiko gradually begins to notice that Hikaru seems a bit different from other children. He is reluctant to be held or hugged, and his growth and development appear slow. Sachiko’s suspicions are confirmed when it is suggested that Hikaru, at a year-and-a-half, may be deaf. A specialist, however, reaches a different diagnosis: autism. (from back of the book)

With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child is the story of Azuma Hikaru and his struggles and triumphs while living with autism, told through the eyes of his mother, Sachiko.

This volumes starts with Hikaru’s birth, and his parents, Sachiko and Masato, discussing his potentially bright future. After that we see Masato off to work while Sachiko stays home to care for Hikaru; and that’s when we first see signs that something is amiss. It’s time for Hikaru’s feeding, but when Sachiko holds him to give him a bottle Hikaru cries and tries to get away from her, only taking the bottle while he is laying in his crib with no one touching him.

Other things come up that worry Sachiko. In addition to not liking to be held Hikaru doesn’t sleep at night, nor does he talk or pay much attention to anyone. At eighteen months old, Hikaru visits a doctor for a check-up and the doctor diagnosis him as being deaf (something that Sachiko knows is not true because Hikaru does react to sounds). A visit to Hikaru’s regular paediatrician is when the subject of autism first comes up.

This is where the story really takes off.

Sachiko has known that Hikaru had problems ever since he was a baby, but having her suspicions confirmed doesn’t really make things any easier. Sachiko is devastated over this news, especially when she learns that there is no cure for autism. She lives a pretty fair distance from her parents, but is lacking in support from her husband and her mother-in-law, who is very judgemental and eventually accuses Sachiko of causing Hikaru’s autism (though we all know that that isn’t the case).

Sachiko does find support at her local welfare centre in the form of caring psychologists, and a new friend named Oyamada-san, who goes to the centre with her autistic son Hiroaki. Although Sachiko is learning new things at the centre and Hikaru is doing well, things are not improving at home and Sachiko ends up leaving her husband and moving back in with her parents. She is about to divorce Masato when he collapses at work and is hospitalized for exhaustion.

The upside to this sudden dark turn is that Masato does a complete turn around and vows to become the best father he can be to Hikaru. Sachiko and Masato now work together and have doubled their efforts to try to communicate with their son. They start talking with him using pictures and written words and are rewarded for their hard work when Hikaru finally calls Sachiko ‘Mommy’ at the age of three.

Hikaru is enrolled in daycare at the age of four and his world expands even more. He makes two new best friends: the kind and caring Moe and the loud and friendly Nobuaki. Through his interactions with these two Hikaru learns more basic interactions, even learning to apologize. Sachiko also makes new friends there, Hikaru’s teacher Yumi-sensei and a few of the mothers of the children, including Nobuaki and Moe’s mothers.

At the end of the year, Hikaru graduates daycare and Sachiko declares that one day Hikaru will grow up to become a cheerful working adult

After daycare come two big changes: Hikaru starts elementary school, and Sachiko and Masato find out that there will soon be a new addition to the family. It’s a struggle to get Hikaru into the school Sachiko wants for him (the same school as Nobuaki and Moe), but he does get in. There he meets Principal Yoshizawa, Aoki-sensei and Wakabayashi-sensei, who all do their best in ensuring that Hikaru can become all he can be.

As I keep saying, I love this series. It’s just so heart-warming. It’s impossible to read this series and not become attached to the characters. Every time something good happens to these people it’s just great, and when something bad happens to them you just wish everything would work itself out and that good things would start happening again.

This series is also very realistic, giving a very real portrayal of a family living with autism. It’s not a series full of always happy moments, sometimes there are bad things that also happen. There are various ups and downs throughout even this volume. Hikaru’s diagnosis, for one thing; no matter what, no one wants to hear that their child has an incurable disability). Sachiko also gets pretty depressed near the beginning of the book, and her marriage suffers because of it.

Hikaru himself also gets into his fair share of trouble. He is living in a world that he doesn’t fully understand with people he can barely communicate with. He gets anxious a lot and this causes him to act out. He also has no sense of danger, which leads him to do odd and dangerous things. In daycare he climbed up a tree and then up an ad building, followed by Moe, and had to be rescued by firemen. He got separated from his mother on his first day of school and ended up walking in the middle of the street in heavy traffic trying to get to it. Also during his first year of school, he got accidently locked inside a storage shed during a heat wave and got hurt, leading to serious injuries and a traumatizing experience in a hospital.

Even though there are bad things that happen, there are good things that happen also. Hikaru learning to apologize was a big step for him, and I damn near started cheering when he was accepted into elementary school. He manages to finish a whole race for the first time during a school field day and I was so happy I nearly cried. This series is very good with its highly emotional moments.

That’s what this series does. You get so attached to these characters that you want them to do well and you want good things to happen to them. This volume is 500 pages long, that’s a little over double the size of most other manga volumes, so there’s a lot of stuff going on. In this one volume Hikaru goes from a newborn baby to a seven-year-old boy with a baby sister of his own (Kanon). When you finish the volume and flip back to the beginning, you almost can’t believe how far Hikaru and his family have come through their journey.

Along with being entertaining, this series is also fairly educational. Tobe Keiko, the mangaka, did a lot of research to put this series together so there are a lot of things to learn here. There is plenty of information about autism, including online resources for things like teaching tools and technology. It’s very informative. On the downside of that, the series can get a bit preachy at times, with a lot of conversations sounding like autism PSAs, but that isn’t really that big an issue.

What really surprised me while I was reading this volume was that it seems that not a lot of characters knew about autism. Sachiko herself had never even heard of it before Hikaru was diagnosed, neither had Masato or his mother. The scene where Hikaru has to go to the hospital after his accident in the storage shed was very jarring because the doctors didn’t seem to know anything about autism either. Hikaru was panicking and tantruming and the doctor and nurses kept getting angry with him, even though Aoki-sensei was there trying to explain things. The doctor even went so far as thinking that Hikaru was being abused by his parents based on his behaviour.

Things like that in this series were real eye openers for me because it was just another aspect of Hikaru’s struggles that I had never even considered. I knew of autism ever since I was fairly young, so I assumed that it was a big enough thing that everyone else knew about it too.

So that’s another reason why I think this series is so great: it presents information about autism in a different format and makes it available to a bigger audience (well, I’m assuming that’s what happened with it in Japan, anyway).

This volume doesn’t even end with a cliff-hanger, but it still makes you want to continue reading it just to see Hikaru and his family continue to grow.

OMFG YES PLZ

2011-07-10T22:21:00.002-03:00

Has anyone read/seen the latest chapter of The Tyrant Falls In Love?

Anyone who hasn't has to get on that, like, right now! Go!

As far as I know, it hasn't been scanlated yet, but there are summaries and RAWs out there if you look hard enough.

It is an awesome chapter, probably one of the best ever. It's definitly the one everyone was waiting for. It's just so sweet and lovely and OMGFINALLY!

Fucking awesome.

According to Takanaga-sensei, this is the last chapter of the main story... and it ends on a cliff-hanger (... yeah, thanks, Sensei). But this chapter is supposed to be followed by an epilogue chapter (coming out in Japan on October 7th) and some extras (fucking awesome).

So I for one can't wait until October, or until the scanlation comes out. But I've read a summary and seen the RAWs and they are awesome and pretty much everything I was looking for in an ending for this series.

I wish the series wasn't ending, but there really isn't much else that can be done with the main story that wouldn't ruin it. Extra chapters are a good idea because they can just be contained one-shots about the characters without major plot lines.

But yeah, loved this chapter, can't complain, everyone who is a fan should definitly read it (and even those who aren't fans should read it too 'cause it's just that awesome).

Dragon Ball Volume 1

2011-07-09T14:33:00.006-03:00

The Monkey King

Before there was Dragon Ball Z, there was Akira Toriyama's action epic Dragon Ball, starring the younger version of Son Goku and all the other Dragon Ball Z heroes! Meet a naive young monkey-tailed boy named Goku, whose quiet life changes when he meets Bulma, a girl who is on a quest to collect seven "Dragon Balls." If she gathers them all, an incredibly powerful dragon will appear and grant her one wish. But the precious orbs are scattered all over the world, and Bulma needs Goku's help (and his super strength)! With a magic staff for a weapon and a flying cloud for a ride, Goku sets out on the adventure of a lifetime... (from the back of the book)

Here is the first volume of Akira Toriyama's epic Dragon Ball series.

In this volume, Goku and Bulma start on their quest to search for the Dragon Balls. The Dragon Balls are seven magical balls (that appear to be made of glass) that, when all gathered together in the same place, summon a magical dragon that will grant the collector one wish. Bulma wants to gather the balls to wish for either a lifetime supply of strawberries or a cute boy, Goku just wants to see the dragon.

Their quest takes them from the forest, to the desert, and through small villages. Each new location brings about new friends and shenanigans, mostly involving humour that really lets the series ear its 'T' rating (nudity and sex jokes, yo). (Incidentally, the 'dragon's balls' joke only comes up twice this whole volume.)

I laugh out loud every time I read this volume. The first time I read it I immediately became attached to the characters. I love the characters from this series, they're so colourful and hilarious... not to mention strange. I first met these characters in the Dragon Ball Z TV series when I was a kid, so it was pretty interesting for me to see where they had all come from.

First there's Goku. He's a young boy who lives alone in the forest... he also has a tail, a monkey tail to be specific. He's also got super strength and seems to be a complete idiot. He is in possession of the four-star Dragon Ball (the ball with four stars on it), which he seems to think is his recently deceased grandfather; he talks to it like it is anyway. He's a very carefree and happy boy and pretty much just does what he wants. He also knows martial arts, having been taught by his grandfather before his death.

Bulma is the second character we meet. She's a 16-year-old genius from the city who is searching for the Dragon Balls during summer vacation. She built a radar to search for the balls and she manages to get Goku to join her on her search... after a weird misunderstanding where Bulma tries to shoot Goku in the head, and where the readers find out that Goku is pretty much indestructible.

Other characters that appear in this volume are Turtle, the sea turtle; Master Roshi, your friendly neighbourhood perverted turtle hermit; Oolong, a perverted and cowardly shape-shifting pig; Yamcha, a desert bandit who's afraid of girls (including Bulma); and Pu'ar, Yamcha's floating shape-shifting cat friend.

It's really the characters that make this story what it is. The story (so far, in this volume) is just your basic 'search for magical items' story. But the characters in this story are far too silly to go on a serious adventure. Bulma is a teenage girl searching for magical artifacts while on vacation from school, Goku just stumbles along behind her accidentally offending and surprising everyone he comes across, Oolong is a complete coward and is only staying with Bulma and Goku under threat of bodily harm should he leave (and he's tried to run), and Yamcha couldn't be sabotaging himself more if he tried. It's great.

The art is pretty simple. The children are short and chubby, the women are tall and thin (except for nameless background characters), and the men are usually pretty muscle-y (except for nameless background characters... and Master Roshi, who is old... very old...). A lot of the characters' eyes are pretty big, but not overly so, and the over exaggerated facial expressions are awesome and used to great humorous effect.

Dragon Ball is an action series and there are a lot of fights, which are drawn very well. Every attack has its own name and every character has their own signature move. The fight sequences read pretty quickly and are very entertaining, especially with the characters' personalities shining through everything.

Along with being an action series, it's also a fantasy/sci-fi type series. It has dinosaurs, futuristic technology, talking animals, flying clouds, and of course, the Dragon Balls.

This was an awesome first volume with an engaging story line, lovable characters, and genuinely hilarious humour. There's even somewhat of a cliff-hanger at the end, which promises that this hilarious adventure will continue.

Today's Log

2011-07-06T23:59:00.002-03:00

-Went to the beach.

-Took some nice pictures.

-Was mostly bored.

-Got home.

-Got sunburned all to fuck.

-Officially hate sunscreen (because I did put some on).

-Officially love Aloe Gel (without it I can't bend my knees without pain).

Paranoid and Playing Tennis

2011-06-26T21:29:00.002-03:00

Or: Why I shouldn't be playing tennis in the evening in the fog.

Just got back from playing tennis with my brothers and their friend Matthew.

Had an awesome time.

I haven't played tennis in a while... forgot how fun it was. Anyway, bottom line is, I still suck at it. But that's okay, because so do my brothers.

Tennis is like the only sport I actually play because it's probably one of the only sports where I actually get to do anything (I suck at sports).

So the tennis court closest to where I live is set on the very edge of town and is pretty much surrounded by woods, an old abandonned playground, and some empty fields and buildings. So it's a pretty creepy place in the fog when it's starting to get dark, which I didn't remember until it started to get dark.

Seriously, at one point I looked around and went: "this is a scene for a horror movie."

And then a car, or a dirtbike or something to that effect, went by somewhere on the other side of the trees and it sounded like a growling noise, so then I started looking around waiting for bears or coyotes to come out of the fog.

Next time I'm playing tennis there it's going to be during the day, with sun and no fog (and probably a shit ton of mosquitos... but that's what bugspray is for).

But, yeah, I had fun.

My Love/Hate Relationship With InuYasha

2011-06-23T22:16:00.003-03:00

I was in the seventh grade the first time I saw InuYasha.

It was New Years Eve 2003 and I was staying up in hopes of watching the Dragonball Z movie marathon I usually watched on YTV on New Years Eve (which is what YTV showed when the year before that, and probably the year before that as well. I very clearly remember that I first saw The History of Trunks and was almost traumatized by it, but that's a story for another day).

I don't remember if there were actually any Dragonball Z movies playing that night, but what I do remember is seeing the new anime line-up that YTV was starting with. I'm pretty sure it was the Friday night Bionix line-up, but I can't really remember. That night, I remember seeing Gundam Seed, Witch Hunter Robin, InuYasha, and probably some others. But InuYasha was the first one in the line-up and I was immediately hooked.

I was 12 at the time, and the only anime I had seen before that was pretty much directed at kids. Things like Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, Escaflowne (which isn't really a kids show, but was dubbed as one, and it played in the afternoon with the other kids shows), Digimon, Pokémon, Shaman King, and so on. So this was really the first anime I'd seen that had cursing, bloody violence, and mature themes, it even has a viewer's discretion warning before the show started. And it was anime! Awesome!

So I got really into the show. So did a few friends of mine. We talked about it constantly, and were always looking at pictures of it online and listening to the music. We discovered the manga near the end of seventh grade, but we didn't get into that as much as we did the show.

And now here's where I ruin the reminiscing: I was not/am not/will never be obsessed with InuYasha.

When I think about what went on when I first got into the show, I can't really remember anything I did that could lead other people to believe that I was obsessed with the show. I watched the TV show (but it was far from the only show I watched), I saved pictures of it off the Internet (as I did with other pictures non-InuYasha related), I downloaded and listened to the music (as I did with a lot of other music, mostly country), and I talked about it with my other friends who watched the show (it wasn't the only thing we talked about). All this is normal behaviour, we had just discovered something brand-new and exciting and that was how we were going about it.

Now, I have a habit of going through these 'phases' where I get really into things for a period of time. It could be anything from Harry Potter, to Artemis Fowl, to scanning old pictures, to With the Light, to Tyrant, to drawing, to writing, to watching old movies, anything. I even get into these moods where I just want to organize and classify things. I suppose I'm a bit odd like that. And I suspect that this is what went on with InuYasha: I got really into it and then my interest died down a bit and I focused on other things.

And people implying that I was/am obsessed with InuYasha has become a sore spot for me now, just because it doesn't even make sense. The only person whose actually accused be of being obsessed with it is my 'cousin' (surprise, surprise), but other people must be thinking it because I remember it always coming up. Or maybe I'm just paranoid, who knows.

Not a lot of people I knew were interested in anime when I was growing up, and when InuYasha came out it was on the heels of Pokémon and Digimon and all those kinds of anime that were directed at kids. So to the people I grew up with, anime was probably the same as a kid's cartoon (even though anyone whose watched different kinds of anime will tell you that that's not always the case). So I guess everyone thought that InuYasha was just a stupid kid show. Either way, it seemed to me that almost everyone greatly disliked InuYasha.

I really don't know why. I know that anime is not for everyone, and I know that not everyone has to like the same things I do, but I just felt really personally attacked by the people (usually my peers) who didn't like InuYasha... probably because they just seemed to use it to insult me.

And I'm not saying that InuYasha is an awesome series and that everyone should like it. I'm a fan of it and I can list off many flaws about the series (like Kagome's dub voice actress... it almost hurts to listen to). What I am saying is that it's not right to look down on people for liking it.

I don't even know why people chose this series to start in on me for. I've been way into things both before and after InuYasha, and some probably closer to 'obsession'. Seriously, I grew up with Pokémon and owned a toy Pokédex, two of the guidebooks, the trading cards, some videos, the chapter books, the games, random toys, and I watched it nearly every time it was on. But no one says 'boo' about that. And that was just one major section of my childhood.

InuYasha has almost become like an insult to me now, or a source of embarrassment. And that sucks because I do like the series, I enjoy watching the show/movies and reading the manga. Do I think it's the best thing in the world ever? Of course not, but I do like it... and I'm almost afraid to admit it. I'm afraid to even mention it in the presence of other people. It's ridiculous.

It's like I can feel people starting to look down on me at my mention of it.

I can't even say that I watched an episode of it without following it right up with 'you know, since I haven't watched it in a long time'. And that makes me ashamed because it's like the bullies won.

I'm less 'obsessed' with the actual series, and more obsessed with proving that I'm not obsessed.

The Difference Between a Carnation, a Croissant, and a Corsage

2011-06-20T13:19:00.003-03:00

Here's a short story from the time when I was fundraising for a school trip to Europe (back in 2006-2007):

Me, Meaghan and Samantha were selling tickets at Superstore, we had a little table set up near the entrence doors. Our friend Jake was also there, for whatever reason (I don't think he was selling tickets with us at the time, he was just at the store).

So we had been there for a while, and we figured that it must have been prom night or something because there were a bunch of teenagers coming in dressed in tuxes and fancy dresses (so this might have taken place around June 2006).

The teenagers were there buying corsages for the prom, something we didn't really catch onto until we saw people leaving with them. Then we started talking about how it must have been prom night at the local high school, or something.

Of course, none of us could remember the word 'corsage'. So we started talking about 'those things' and trying to figure out what the word was.

'Carnation' was my guess, and that's what we were leaning to when a teenage boy wearing a tux came out and decided to buy some tickets from us. He had a corsage with him and put it on the table to fill out his tickets. Somewhere around this time is when Jake came out with his suggestion: croissant. We all argued back and forth about it until the teenage boy told us it was called a corsage.

We all had a laugh about it and thanked the boy for buying tickets.

Then we told him that we hoped his girlfriend would like the corsage, and he told us that he hoped the same thing.

And the drama continues

2011-06-18T23:16:00.003-03:00

Okay, so, last week I watched the Secret Life episode where Ben and Adrian's baby died, and I wrote a post about what I did and didn't like about it.

Now I'm going to talk about this week's episode (... yeah, I know I'm late with it).

I saw the preview for this episode and from what I saw I thought that we were going to go right back into the frustrating relationship drama and everyone talking about nothing but sex. While watching the show, I was pleasently surprised to find that I was wrong about what to expect (for the most part) and found that this episode was pretty well written.

We first start out with Amy and Ricky. Apparently Amy slept over at Ricky's apartment. I just skipped through that because I don't care.

Then we turn to Ben and Adrian in their apartment, where we witness some stellar acting. At some point Adrian tells Ben that their baby would've been "eight weeks old today", meaning that about two months have gone by since last week's episode. Ben is about to leave for school, and Adrian is... not.

Both of them are still mourning the loss of their baby and Adrian seems to be taking it worse than Ben. It almost looks like Adrian hasn't been leaving the condo much in the past two months. She hasn't really been communicating with anyone (except for maybe a few visits with a therapist and her parents), and seems to mostly talk to people through text messaging. Adrian also delivers a pretty angry speech about how she's feeling. It was very well acted and kind of scared me.

Ben goes to school by himself and we eventually see that he may not be coping as well as everyone thinks. He actually snaps at both Ricky and Amy I think twice during the episode. Ricky and Amy have some moments, and Amy goes over to the condo to talk to Adrian, and from that we learned that Adrian named her baby Mercy.

And some other stuff went on, but I don't remember most of it.

Anyway, I did like (most of) this episode. For one thing, sex was only mentioned once (that I can remember), and it was actually relavent to the conversation (Tom was talking to Kathleen about his girlfriend). And the episode didn't jump all over to everyone harping about sex, it mostly stayed with Adrian, Amy, Ricky and Ben. There were some scenes with Kathleen and Tom, and I think there was a scene with Ashley, but that was just to establish that she was going to be leaving for her cross-country trip soon (she's basically leaving the show).

I liked the overall tone of this episode. We saw Ben and Adrian trying to cope with their baby's death (without major fanfare), and those scenes were well-done. I think everyone thought that Adrian would take things a bit better than Ben, since Ben is kinf of a wimp and was always sheltered and Adrian's a very strong woman. But it was a surprise to see that Ben seems to be having an easier time trying to deal with everything that happened while Adrian is basically shutting down.

This episode proves that the writers of this show aren't all completely incompetent, and that the show will still work even without all the sex talk and without the annoying characters (like Madison and Lauren... especially Madison and Lauren... lets just continually have less of Madison and Lauren). There were some mentions of relationship drama, but it was kept to minimum. It was mostly talk of Ricky getting back with Adrian because her and Ben's relationship was just based around them having a baby (which makes sense, nearly everyone could see something like that coming up). But that's something that's really starting to get on my nerves. Amy, Adrian, Ben and Ricky all seem to be stuck in this weird relationship loop thing, I'm starting to wish that they'd all just completely separate from each other and just find four new unrelated people to go out with.

But I do like the direction this show seems to be going in.

And then I saw the previews for next week.

From what I could see, it looked like Ricky fucked up somewhere and Amy's gonna be mad at him (oh, puss puss). Hopefully I'm misinterpreting it (again), because I think plot lines about Ricky sleeping around and Amy being pissed at him over it are pretty tired out at this point. Unless he gets an STD, or gets some other girl pregnant, or has some kind of breakdown over it... it's starting to get annoying.

... actually, having a child fathered by Ricky from pre-Amy times showing up would be pretty awesome. That's what should happen after the dead baby plot has wrapped up.

grar, cliffhangers!

2011-06-14T23:51:00.004-03:00

Okay, I was gonna talk about this week's episode of Secret Life, but then the latest chapter of Tyrant came out and I like that better so here we go:

This month's chapter of Tyrant starts off right where last month's chapter left off. For the moment, Sempai has come to accept that, yes, he wants Morinaga around and the feelings he has for him probably go far beyond that of 'just friends'. He tells Morinaga that he wants him to stay with him, which is probably the closest thing to an 'I love you' that Morinaga's gonna get from Sempai at the moment. And yes, this is a big development.

After this, Sempai passes out. It turns out that he hasn't really been eating or sleeping properly while he and Morinaga were fighting/separated.

It's only hunger and exhaustion though, so it's fixed pretty easily.

Now Morinaga and Sempai are back together in their apartment. It's going pretty well, all things considering, except that Sempai is now being pretty overly cautious and very aware of Morinaga's presence, to the point where it's almost like they're angry at each other or avoiding each other (which they aren't).

This all comes to a head near the end of the chapter where Sempai gathers the nerve to try to ask Morinaga why he hasn't tried anything (sexual) yet. He doesn't actually ask, his shyness kinda gets in the way, but Morinaga does realize what's going on.

He tells Sempai that he doesn't want to drive him away again, so they're gonna go at Sempai's pace. So he leaves the choice up to Sempai: what does he want to do?

This series isn't really big on seriousness, there're pretty serious undertones throughout the whole story, but nothing as big as this arc, or as long, as happened until now. This particular arc (which started at the beginning of volume 7) has been very low on humour and sexual content, but still keeps our interest by throwing new and important things our way.

Along with this being Morinaga and Sempai's first major, serious fight... ever, this arc brings in Masaki, Morinaga's first lover. Sempai gets jealous about everything and all his feelings come up to the surface, but he can't deal with them so he lashes out instead, telling Morinaga that their relationship has been a farce all this time.

This is the point where everyone finally realizes that something needs to change in this relationship. Sempai has to come to terms with these new and strange feelings, and Morinaga has to realize how much this is affecting Sempai and how.

But it's all come down to this point (this chapter is apparently the second-last chapter in this arc, so we'll have the conclusion next month). Morinaga is now trying harder than ever to consider Sempai's feelings, and Sempai now has to make a desicion and confront his feelings towards Morinaga, their relationship, and how his though process has changed (remember, he was pretty anti-homosexual in the beginning of the series... that and he has his shyness and mountain of pride to deal with).

So what will he do now?

... maybe with a different show

2011-06-07T13:57:00.002-03:00

So, I just saw the latest episode of The Secret Life of the American Teenager (or, as I like to call it, Why Am I Even Still Watching This? I Barely Like Anything About It!), and it was a doozy.

Ben and Adrian, who have been expecting a baby for the whole season, and who have just gotten married, have just had a stillborn baby girl. At 16/17 years old. Ouch doesn't even begin to cover it.

This was a sad, serious episode and the dramatic parts were very well done and very heartbreaking. It was sad to see everyone's reactions to this tragedy, especially Ben and Adrian, whose actors did very good jobs at portraying grief.

... and now here're my complaints.

First of all, all this drama and good acting (and watchable TV) happened at the end of the episode. Like the last couple of minutes were devoted specifically to deal with this.

This episode, Episode 26, is supposed to directly follow the events of last week's episode, Episode 25. It picks up directly where 25 left off, instead of a week later. At the end of 26, Adrian and Ben are in bed when Adrian says that she feels that something isn't right, and when we see them in 26 it's the next morning and the two are headed to the hospital.

So there's my first problem really: Episode 26 takes place over the course of the day where Adrian and Ben have their baby, and we see very little of all this. Actually, we see none of this. During the episode, we see small snips of what's going on at the hospital smushed in between scenes of the other characters of the show being annoying. There's also a big gap there because we go from seeing Ben and Adrian being admitted in the hospital, then something else happened with other people (I don't care or remember what) and then the next time we see them, Ben is standing in the hospital hallway looking traumatized and the audience knows that something bad has happened. This is the point where Ben and Adrian know that the baby is dead, but, and I'm assuming here, before the baby is actually out. Then someone else does something, and then we're back with Adrian and Ben, but Adrian is in the hospital bed and visibly no longer pregnant and they hold each other and cry. So we pretty much know what happened, but everything is now over. And then the next time we see them is at the end of the episode where everyone shows up to comfort them and all that.

I saw the preview for this show last week and I thought that the show was gonna be all about Adrian and Ben and their loss (since that's really all that was shown in the previews). I was wrong. I mean, I'm pretty sure that the episode where John was born all took place in the hospital (uh... as far as I can remember, I haven't seen it in a while), and that whole episode was dedicated to that, for the most part. So it wouldn't be much of a stretch to expect the same for this baby, especially since this episode was more emotionally charged.

I'm not saying that they should've shown the birth, or Ben and Adrian holding a dead baby (it is a show for teens on a family channel after all), but they could've shown a little more. Maybe them first hearing the news firsthand, maybe Ben wandering aimlessly around the hospital, maybe 'what if' daydreams, maybe Ben wandering into the nursery area thing, anything really. I mean, they were at the hospital for the whole day, and they only called their parents later on, like in the afternoon or something.

So I didn't like it that we didn't spend much time with Adrian and Ben. Instead, we got to hear about Tom's new girlfriend, Madison and Jack harping about sex, Lauren being annoying, Ricky and Amy doing... something, and everyone else but Ben and Adrian. At least there was a scene early on with Alice and Henry where they were talking about things having to do with Ben and Adrian (weird foreshadowing if you ask me). But I don't care about all that, I often don't but now less than ever. What I care about this episode is what's going on with Adrian and Ben. We know that something is wrong, and it's something really serious and life-changing and not good.

And my other problem: why the dead baby? Why did that baby have to die? Why Ben and Adrian's baby? Why did something like this need to happen to them at this time? I know that miscarriages and stillbirths happen, and I know that this show can't have the same outcome happen for every pregnancy in the show (somehow I'm convinced that this can't be the last pregnancy in the show), but what were the writers going for here? I'm not against having this kind of thing happen, but I have to wonder why it happened.

It could be an interesting development. The real reason why Adrian and Ben got married was because of the baby, but what are they gonna do now that the baby is gone? How will their relationship change, and how will they grow and change as people? What will they do now? Will we even find out?

I mean, the most of what I take from this show when I watch it (which is not that often because it grates on my nerves) is that everyone is always talking about sex. It's always who's having sex with who, when someone's having sex, will someone or won't someone have sex with so-and-so... GRAH!

And I've read comments from other people on the Internet saying that a happy ending for Ben and Adrian would be boring, or that it wouldn't be good plot lines to have Ben and Adrian's pregnancy end the same as Amy and Ricky's, and they do have good points. But, 1) happy endings aren't boring, 2) just because Ben and Adrian are married with a baby doesn't automatically lead to a happy ending, and 3) Ben and Adrian's situation is not the same as Ricky and Amy's situation.

Let's just say that the baby had lived, we would've gotten a happy episode, but that doesn't mean that Ben and Adrian's lives would be all sunshine and roses. Amy managed to have a baby and juggle motherhood, school and work and yeah, that is boring, but I think that's only because we don't see any of that. We see Amy at school complaining about it, or Amy at home complaining about it. But we don't see her taking care of John, or at work (I keep forgetting that she even has a job... she does, right?), or anything. Every so often she'll mention it, but all we really see of her is her complaining about Ricky, talking about sex, her in the halls at school, and not much else. Ben and Adrian having a baby would be a different scenario since they're married and living together. It would be a happy ending, but with different issues. There could be Ben and Adrian arguing about who's taking care of the baby too much or not enough, them juggling parenthood, work and school (because we actually see Ben at work), can they really handle this or are they just playing house? So they could have their 'happy ending'.

But the baby didn't make it, so we have to work with that. I'm not a fan of this plot twist, I'm not a fan of dead babies (no matter how much I hate the show), but I do like the way the reveal to the rest of the cast was handled here (except for that one line Leo had, he's all like "but Ben and Adrian will never be the same again"... thank you, Captain Obvious). It's an unbelievably sad and life changing event, and it has to be done in certain ways, especially in a show aimed at young viewers. Anyway, I already talked about the content of the episode so, moving on.

Where do we go from here? Well, this could go many ways. Ben and Adrian have to recover from this loss, both emotionally and physically. Adrian has to get over that she is no longer pregnant, but neither does she have a baby to care for. Both were pretty excited about being parents, but that's pretty much shot for the time being. So now they're both living together, married, in a condo where there was probably a nursery set up and everything. How will they deal with the loss, with each other, and with everyone else? What are they going to do now? Will they both move back in with their parents, will they stay in their condo, will they divorce, will this help to strengthen their relationship, will they draw away from each other, will they come together to help each other deal? Where will they go from here?

Well, this is Secret Life, and from the previews for next week's show it looks (to me) like everything is going to cause more relationship drama between Amy, Adrian, Ricky and Ben.

Oh, fuck me.

Do we have to go into that right away, or at all? Can't this show steer away from dating and sex for a bit to deal with this blow? We saw all the characters crying and sad because of the death of the baby, now we have to see them deal with it all in their everyday lives. The news still has to circulate, people have to know, and Adrian and Ben have to deal (preferably with no big fanfare), and so do their families.

... I probably shouldn't find this as funny as I do

2011-06-03T14:47:00.008-03:00

"Onani means masturbation. And that's what this guy is good at. Every day after school, he sneaks into the mostly unused girls bathroom on the 3rd floor, and masturbates. Until one day when he's caught..."

This is part of the summary that mangatraders.com has for Ise Katsura's Onani Master Kurosawa.

This was one of mangatraders' series of the week for the week of May 15th (along with Aogiri Natsu's Flat), so I found this on the front page. I read the summary and was compelled to actually read the series just to answer all the questions now bouncing around in my head (some of which were: "wtf?" "how?" and "why?").

Well, I read it, all four volumes, and spent most of that time either laughing or disturbed.

Before I start explaining the story, I'll mention the first thing that someone reading this series will notice: it's not inked. The whole series looks as if it was sent to the publisher just drawn and shaded in pencil, and that's probably what happened. That doesn't mean it doesn't look good, the drawings are well done and if it were inked it would look like any other manga. The reason for this, I think, is that Kurosawa is a doujinshi (self-published work).

Anyway, moving on. Spoilers ahead.

So the story moves along right from the first page where we find our main character, Kurosawa Kakeru age 14, masturbating in the girl's bathroom on the 3rd floor. Despite the title and summary, this really isn't the main focus of the story (there's a plot? ...sort of, it's more a slice-of-life manga than anything else), but it is a big part.

We go on to learn that this is a daily occurence for Kurosawa. Every day after school he waits in the library until he's sure that the school's practically empty so that he can hide out in the 3rd floor girls' bathroom and have at it. This has apparently been going on for about a year now. He eventually gets caught in the bathroom, of course (even if the summary hadn't said it everyone would've seen it coming), by a female classmate named Kitahara Aya.

Kitahara is being bullied by some other girls in her class, and has been for a while. Two of her bullies are in class with her (I forget their names) and are constantly forcing her to embarrass herself in public. Feeling sorry for her, I guess, Kurosawa decides to get back at the two girls by stealing their uniforms and ejaculating on them before returning them to their rightful owners (all this is done in secret, naturally). No one figures out it's him that did it and the two girls tone down the bullying a bit.

But Kitahara eventually realises what Kurosawa did and purposefully confronts him in the bathroom. She knows what he's doing in there, but she could care less about that. Surprisingly, she hasn't come to tell on him, she's come to ask for his help. She wants Kurosawa to use his 'special method' and get revenge on some other girls that have been mean to her. And if he doesn't go along with it, she'll tell everybody what he's up to.

And there is main focus of Onani Master Kurosawa: revenge. The story also serves to tell the readers how the two main characters are arseholes.

(Kitahara and Kurosawa)

We'll start with Kurosawa. Now, he's not really a bad guy, at all. He's kind of shy and a loner, and he's only got one friend in class: Nagatsuka, the class' king otaku. And that's how Kurosawa looks to the average observer. But readers of the manga are basically inside his head, since the manga is told from his point of view, and we know that he's kind of a jerk. He's kind of arrogant, he thinks he's above everyone else, and he doesn't really seem to like anyone. Except for girls, he likes girls a lot. Also, his fantasies during his bathroom time are slightly disturbing as they involve whatever girl he's after that day and him in very rape-ish situations. They also suggest that he doesn't really respect women, especially since he refers to the girls around him as 'lessons' or 'meals'... our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Kitahara also has two different faces, depending on where you're looking from. She's even more shy than Kurosawa. She really has no friends and seems scared of everyone around her, which is probably because she's constantly being bullied and made fun of by almost everyone. She's also very small and wears huge glasses, so she has that cute and innocent look. And then she gets close to Kurosawa and he (and us readers) find out that she's kind of scary. And vengeful. And bitter. Throughout the story, she basically wants Kurosawa to perform these gross acts of revenge on other girls who've done anything from outright bully her, to just laugh at her in the background. At points she's so hell bent on getting these things done that she even starts to scare Kurosawa, especially when she targets the girl that Kurosawa develops a crush on.

Yeah, Kurosawa gets a crush on a girl, and that series of events takes Kurosawa from being just a teenager with an odd passtime (seriously, do it at home), to a teenager in love, to a jerk.

At some point in the series, Kurosawa can't make it to his bathroom right away and spends more time in the library, that's where he first starts to get to know his classmate Takigawa Magisteru. They get to talking and the more they hang out the more Kurosawa realizes how much he likes this girl. He even starts looking forward to his time in the library (as opposed to just waiting for it to be over so he could move on to the bathroom), and he goes so far as to hope to meet Takigawa outside of school. It even gets to the point where fantasizing about her as he masturbates makes him physically ill, as in he actually vomits (an interesting insight as to how he actually views his bathroom activities).

During this time, Kurosawa becomes more likable, and I started rooting for him. On the flip side is Kitahara, who becomes more unlikable and pessimistic and even predicts that Kurosawa's happiness won't last.

It doesn't, of course, as Kurosawa comes to class one day and comes face to face with the fact that the girl he's in love with is now dating his only friend (Nagatsuka, mentioned above). There's a full page dedicated to Kurosawa's reaction, and it almost hurt me. The expression on his face and the knowledge of what was about to go on inside his head actually made me go 'ouch'. And that's probably the last time I ever sympathized with him, because then he just goes into full on asshole mode.

In retaliation, he agrees to Kitahara's revenge plan on Takigawa and makes a mess of Takigawa's school bag. Takigawa becomes traumatized by this, and the series ends with our two mains continuing on their revenge spree.

(One of Kurosawa's fantasies)

So yeah, this really is a pretty unusual story, but it's a pretty good read. The art is nice, the story moves along fairly quickly, it is fairly interesting. Also, the masturbation scenes and fantasies aren't too explicit, not much is really shown, although it's pretty obvious what's going on.

And now to explain the humour in the whole deal because I don't think I said anything yet that could be considered as funny. Well, the story doesn't really have a lot of humour in it, at least from my point of view. Nope, the really funny part of this manga only comes up if you've watch/read/are familiar with/are a fan of Death Note.

(This is Kurosawa. You can't not see the resemblence here if you tried.)

Kurosawa Kakeru is Yagami Light. There are differences (mostly because I'm pretty sure that Kurosawa has a functional soul), but they're so alike it's not even fit. Their thought patterns are similar, and they even look alike. Also, the stories are kind of the same. Light kills criminals with a notebook, Kurosawa... masturbate-revenges people... it's the same idea, trust me.

There's such an association there that one of the names people call this series is Fap Note. Also, the scanlation team that worked on this manga made their credit page look like the rules page from the Death Note.

I even realized this before I saw the credit page. I was reading it and I said to myself that Kurosawa is an awful lot like Light. And that's where most of the humour comes from, I find. Because I spent most of this time imagining Light in place of Kurosawa, which made things that much more funny.

So yeah, that's Onani Master Kurosawa. It's a pretty interesting little series, and it has a lot of laughs if you're a Death Note fan. It's also more of a character study than a story. There really isn't a set plot, but it's pretty fun to watch the characters react and change to what's going on around them (even if our two mains aren't always very likable). It hasn't been liscenced in English, but it is available to read online. It also got some pretty good reviews on mangaupdates.com.

i am so bored

2011-05-26T19:29:00.003-03:00

Here, have a French With the Light panel.

... just because.

8 volumes and 9 chapters later...

2011-05-15T16:36:00.003-03:00

FUCKING YES!!!

Chapter 9 of volume 8!

Write it down, people!

File 752

2011-05-11T20:04:00.001-03:00

...after 752 chapters, I'm counting this as a legit love confession.

...

FINALLY!

Memoirs of a Girl Guide Part 2: The Country's Capitol

2011-04-11T10:14:00.004-03:00

In the summer of 2005, my Pathfinders group took a trip to Ottawa because Edmonton was too far away (true story).

The ones that went on the trip were me, six other girls (Ch, Ja, Je, All, Al, and K), and our leaders (E and M). We were there for about five days, I think.

I can't really remember much about the trip, or the order things happened in, it happened almost six years ago and wasn't really that memorable.

Anyway, we all left from the Halifax airport and arrived in Ottawa a few hours later. Then we took a bus thing to our hotel, which was about 30 stories. I loved that hotel. It was huge, the rooms were huge, and there was a little grocery store in the lobby where we could buy snacks and stuff. That and it was pretty amusing to have a grocery store in a hotel lobby.

The group of us divided into two rooms: I got a room with Je and K (who were good friends of mine... at the start of the trip) and E (with whom I share a mutual dislike). The others were in the other room, which I think was across the hall from ours. I didn't like the girls in the other room, two of them I outright hated, and the other two I just didn't like. M is All's mother, and I didn't like her for whatever reason, although she was a nice woman, I suppose.

I'm not sure when during the trip that things started going downhill for me. Things started out well enough though. I was getting along with the girls in my room, I was pretty good friend of mine after all, and I was having as little contact as I could with E, M, and the other girls.

It was little things that kept building up. Comments and remarks made by everyone there, a feeling of isolation, and the feeling that the others didn't really like me and didn't want me there.

Sometimes in our room, Je or K, or both at once, would remark on how I didn't really act my age, or dress 'fashionable' like other teenage girls tended to do. They also made mention of the fact that I didn't wear make-up. What magazines I did or didn't read may have come up, I can remember something being said about magazines, but I don't quite remember what.

I had been told all those kinds of things before, that I never acted like other girls my age (I had been bullied for quite a while prior to the trip, so it's not like I'd never heard this said to me before), but Je and K had never said those things to me, and Ja had been a lot like me until maybe that year.

There was even a jab at my maturity. Oh, the fun. /sarcasm

There are a few specific times that stand out in my mind that made the trip miserable for me. This stuff happened while the other, minor stuff went on in the background that set the mood for me and slowly started chipping away at my self-esteem. I don't know what particular order they were in, though.

There were those nights in the room when Je and K would make fun of me for my clothing, lack of make-up, whatever else they wanted to.

There was that fancy dinner thing we had in the hotel where someone told a joke and we were all laughing and I hit the table with my fist or whatever (kind of like a knee slapping thing, except with a table). I guess I hit the table too hard, or something, because everyone got mad at me after that. As far as I know, I hadn't hit the table hard enough to warrant the reaction I got. I could've easily brushed that off as nothing more than a new source of embarrassment, but not long after that K knocked over a full glass of water. The others got up and helped her wipe it up and told her to stop apologizing and all that. For some reason, I got the idea that if it had been me that had spilled a glass of water I would've gotten yelled at, muchly.

Another thing was that we were at a museam in Québec and we were going to watch a movie in the Imax theatre there. We had two options: Nascar, and Mysteries of the Nile. My choice was Nascar, because race cars, and they would give us steering wheels if we sat in the right seats. Everyone else voted for Mysteries of the Nile... yey. We did go to see Mysteries of the Nile, which usually wouldn't have been more than an annoyance to me because I was outvoted, but it was the way it happened. I felt like I was being scolded for wanting to see Nascar, like I was doing something wrong for wanting to see that instead of some people rafting down the Nile River.

After the movie was over, everyone was agreed on the opinion that it sucked. An 'I told you so' from me wouldn't have gone over well, so I kept my mouth shut.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but that trip really did a number on my self-esteem. I can't remember every little thing that happened that hurt me, but I remember the overall feeling. Sure, I did have fun while I was there. I can clearly remember some moments that were genuinely enjoyable. But what stands out the most is the negative parts, the parts that totally ruined the experience.

Really, probably the only thing that kept me from being totally depressed was that my cousins from America had arrived while I was gone and they were waiting for me when I got back. (As a side note, that was also the summer I got my first digital camera... many laughs were had then.)

When people ask me if I enjoyed my trip to Ottawa, I have to say no, because I didn't really enjoy it. The treatment I received there at the hands of people I thought were my friends really threw me. And I didn't realize how much of an impact the trip had on me until I took a school trip to Europe in 2007 and actually asked my mother before I left "What if it's like it was in Ottawa?". (Thankfully, the Europe trip was nothing like Ottawa, except for an hour or two one night when old insecurities came back to haunt me. Other than that I was totally fine.)

I took five disposable cameras worth of pictures while I was in Ottawa and I don't even so much as look at them if I can help it. They're all hidden away in my house somewhere and I never even bother to check if they've been thrown out or not. Some people have said that I was lucky for the opportunity to even go to Ottawa.

I suppose I was, but I was unlucky enough to end up going with my Pathfinder group.

Way, hey, hey

2011-04-03T21:48:00.005-03:00

I officially hate funerals.

Nathan's was the second funeral I've ever attended and I'm pretty sure I'm done with them for good. There's gotta be a better way to mourn someones loss/celebrate someones life. Something that isn't as depressing.

The eulogy was nice, though.

Also, the reflection song was Ordinary Day by Great Big Sea, which is an unusual choice, but it makes sense in this case. To me anyway. I heard Jordan talking a lot in high school about how he loved Great Big Sea and I figured Nathan liked them as well. A nice song for a send off, I think.

I cried during the funeral. And I also managed to be a total antisocial asshole and not talk to either Jordan or his family (or anyone really). I really didn't know how to go about doing that or even what to say.

Oh well, it was a huge turn-out, so Nathan's family had more than enough support to help them through all this.

I Have a Soul: Remix

2011-04-01T20:18:00.003-03:00

Official Bad Idea of the day:

Going on the funeral home site and being curious enough to look through the pictures of Nathan they have there.

This would, of course, be the part where I finally start crying about all this. Good move to do it while the house is full of people (my parents, their friends, my brothers, their friends). /sarcasm

Probably a very good thing that I didn't go upstairs yesterday. I don't think anyone would've appreciated me making a blubbering arse of myself in the back of the room, especially when most of the kids don't even know me.

I can just tell that Sunday's funeral is going to be fun. /extreme sarcasm

He's not coming back this time

2011-04-01T17:36:00.003-03:00

Me, Meaghan, Kasy and a few other kids were talking with Nathan a few years ago, back when he was in the seventh grade, and I was in tenth (roughly).

He was telling us about how his leg was hurting really badly and how he was going to go to the doctor's to have it checked out. Something about him maybe pulling something. Then someone (I think it was either Kasy or Tyson) kicked him in good fun and we all had a laugh.

Soon after, he was diagnosed with bone cancer... at 12 years old.

Ha. Ha.

Nathan is one of my brothers' friends. He's also the younger brother of one of my former classmates, Jordan. I consider both of them friends on some level. So I know him well enough.

In the years since his diagnosis, Nathan's been in and out of the hospital and school, he's broken bones, replaced bones, and even been in remission once. Through all this he's attended several Relay For Life events, hosted movie nights/sleepoevers at his house, and kept up contact with all his friends from school. Every time I saw him he was always in good spirits and smiling and having fun (from what I could see).

The last time I saw him was a brief glance I got a few weeks ago. He was on his way to one of the staircases at school (where I'm currently doing workplacement). I recognized him right away, even without getting a good look at him, because he was the only one wandering around with a cane. I don't really remember if he had his hair back at the time, or if he was wearing a hat or not. I hadn't heard anything about him in a while, so I took it to mean that he was doing well.

Last week, my brothers told me that Nathan wasn't doing too good. I had heard things like this before, and he has cancer anyway, so I didn't think much of it. That is, until my father mentioned in passing that he didn't think that Nathan was gonna come out of it this time.

Ever since that moment, I became hyperaware of mentions of Nathan. Every time my mother would ask the boys if they had heard anything, when they passed around another card at school, any mention of his name really. I didn't hear much information from anyone that I didn't really already know. But it was the general consensus that this was it. Everyone was playing the waiting game now, and there would be no winners.

My brother Daylan told me Wednesday night that Nathan had died.

Yesterday I went to the school for work placement, where I was scheduled to be upstairs with the high school. I got there and the teachers were having a meeting. I suddenly got scared. I didn't want to go upstairs. I was scared to face whatever was up there. The teachers' meeting ended and I saw some of them leaving the staff room. Most of them had red eyes, they had obviously been crying. Some students, including some of Nathan's classmates, passed by. Some of them had red eyes.

I almost turned around to go home. I eventually told myself to man up and went upstairs. But it was weird upstairs. It was like it was two years ago with Mme Jolene, but on a whole other level. Mme Jolene was an adult, a teacher, and while it was a shock to us when she died, it was somehow different than now. But Nathan was only 16, about to turn 17 in a month or two. He was a student, he was one of us, he was our age. Mme Jolene's death hit us hard, but this hit us just a bit closer to home.

I couldn't stay upstairs. The hallway was completely silent, and I didn't see a soul in it bt the few teachers that were gathered around one of the classrooms (Nathan's younger sister's class, I think). There was a weird atmosphere, it wasn't normal. It was to the point where someone like me, who usually can't pick up on these things, felt it. I couldn't stay there.

I escaped downstairs to the kindergarten class. So did another girl later on in the day. I think everyone was feeling Nathan's loss. Only two years had passed since Mme Jolene's death, and here we were again.

Same grief, same loss, same disease, same school.

I didn't see much of Nathan's class yesterday, my brothers had stayed home and I'd stayed away from upstairs, so I don't really know how they're handling this. Nathan's sister was in school today, I saw. She seems to be handling things well as far as I can see.

My heart goes out to the family. I don't know them all very well, but I know them well enough to know that I like them. They're good people, and they don't deserve this. But I know that they're strong, and they will recover from this, eventually.

Rest in peace, Nathan.

Practically read my mind there

2011-03-22T21:42:00.001-03:00

...

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant.

Shoulda confirmed this earlier

2011-03-01T17:52:00.002-04:00

I never wanted to buy VizBig edition manga. I would see them in the bookstore and think that I did not want those things on my bookshelf.

And that was the only reason that I didn't want to buy them: that they wouldn't fit well on my bookshelf. I thought that they were too big. I bought a copy of A Drunken Dream (published by Fantagraphics Books) and it's huge! It's not thick, but it's tall and wide. I think it's about the same size as a standard sheet of white paper. So that's... 8.5 by 11, I think.

Anyway, it doesn't fit well on my shelf. If I put it in the row with my other manga the doors on the bookshelf won't close, so I just put it across the top of my other books. And that annoys the hell outta me. And I wasn't sure exactly what size the VizBigs were compared to everything else on my shelf, so I didn't want to buy them.

But, I ended up buying the first Rurouni Kenshin VizBig edition anyway. In the end, there were more reasons for buying it than there were against buying it (one of them being that it would be cheaper in the long run) and I already had one weirdly stacked book so, why not?

It came in today, and it fits fine on the shelf, thank fuck.

It's actually about the same size as my copy of Little Butterfly Omnibus, which also fits on the shelf just fine.

So now I'm thinking of buying VizBig editions when I can. Although I think the only other series I buy that has VizBigs is InuYasha.

I Want

2011-02-13T12:22:00.006-04:00

Y'know what I'd like right now?

A new chapter of Ai-Esu, or Hourou Musuko, or Tyrant. Any one would do, really.

Or, wait. Y'know what would be even better right now? If With the Light 8 were released earlier than September, YEN PRESS.

Putting that aside, I'd also like an explanation for this line, said to me by one of my mother's friends:

"Well, [daughter's name] likes anime too, and she's into clothes."

Seriously, what does one have to do with the other? Is this some new thing that no one told me about? Are anime fans not allowed to have any other interest besides anime? I mean, sure, I don't care about my clothes. As long as I'm wearing some and they match and fit I really couldn't care less about them. But that has nothing to do with my interest in anime and manga.

I was really too surprised at that statement to say anything at the time. It was like that time I heard this:

"There are different types?"

Now, that one might be confusing out of context, so I will explain. We (me, my friend, my mother, and my mother's friend and her niece) were on our way home from Animinitime, the anime convention we attended back in April. (Fun fact: the friend of my mother's that came with us is the sister of the woman who told me the statement above about liking anime and clothes. Also, her daughter is the niece that came with us.)

We stopped at Dairy Queen to eat, and... I don't really remember how it came about, but we were suddenly on the topic of Vampire Knight, a manga that the niece liked and cosplayed as. I was talking to my mother's friend and I told her that I'd never read Vampire Knight because I wasn't into that kind of manga. And by 'that kind of manga' I meant shojou vampire romance. Then she just looked at me and asked my that question above.

She just sounded so surprised that I couldn't say anything other than "... well, yeah."

I mean it just baffled me. Of course there are different types of manga! What, are there really people out there who think that all manga are the same? For me, that's the same as thinking that all books are the same, ot that all movies and TV shows are the same.

I mean... man what a stupid question!

Onward!

2011-02-10T16:55:00.002-04:00

So I'm gonna be a tutor. I'm gonna be tutoring in reading starting on Monday. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

I've been watching Yu Yu Hakusho for the past few days (snow days ftw). It's pretty funny. I dunno why I didn't start watching the show before. It's a lot like Dragonball Z in the way that it's mostly about fighting.

I also watched a few episodes of Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler) the other day. It's a fairly amusing show. It's serious, but it has a lot of comic relief moments that are genuinly funny. It also gets points for having a plot involving Jack the Ripper as early as the 4th episode. They started talking about the case and I guessed right away what they were talking about before they mentioned it.

I quite like the show, even though I'm only 4 episodes in. I didn't know if i would like it or not because all I'd heard about it was that it was funny but it was mostly yaoi fanservice (which would be fine with me if Ciel weren't, like, 12), but I like it.

Although if Sebastian says that he's 'one hell of a butler' one more time I'm gonna scream.

On a completely unrelated note: I don't know who's idea it was to try to beat the current world record for making the most snow angels in many schools at the same time (the current record is 15 851 done by over 60 schools in Ontario), but it's a stupid idea, especially when you drag elementary school students into it. Seriously, everyone was frozen by the time we got to go back inside and the kids were soaking wet and cold.

I hate winter.

It's vertically challenged!

2011-01-31T12:51:00.002-04:00

So I was talking to my teacher Bob, and I was looking up into his face to talk to him and I realized something:

Bob is really tall.

Either that or I'm just very short. It's probably that I'm short. This reminds me of the time in the ninth grade when I was walking down the hall with my friend Travis. We were almost to class when he looked down at me and went "You're short." I just looked at him like "Really?"

It was funny at the time because he told me that like it was something that he had just realized, even though he's been taller than me since kindergarten.

Boxes and Boxes

2011-01-29T19:56:00.002-04:00

My mother is on this renovation kick and is in the process of ridding our house of all its carpeting. She already did the living room, spare room and downstairs hallway sometime during the summer (I think, somewhere around that time), and got the rec room the other day. She is now in the process of having the upstairs done. My brothers' room is done and the carpet in the hallway is gone, now my room is being worked on.

So we had to take everything out of my room. The walls are also being painted so I had to take everything off the walls too. My walls look so bare without all the pictures and posters on it, it bothers me muchly.

So tonight I had to cart everything out of my room. I emptied the contents of my closet into a few milk crates and my brothers moved those to the living room. Then I cleaned off everything from the tops of the bureaus. Everything's piled in the living room (along with my bed). I have a lot of stuff. My two bureaus and my bookcase were also moved out into the upstairs bathroom and my parents' bedroom.

Actually when I woke up this morning my brothers' bureau and a bunch of pillows in the bathroom almost right in front of the toilet. That was kind of awkward. The bathtub is now inaccessible.

We had to empty out my bookcase before we moved it too and we didn't have any more boxes to put the books in, so we had to pile them up on one of the shelves in the hall closet. The shelf is now sagging in the middle under all the weight. It's actually quite funny. I have a lot of books.

My room looks really weird without the carpet and doors. There's an echo in it now too. Twice my brothers have shown up with weird stuff they found under the carpet or behind the baseboards. So far they've found a piece of a children's puzzle and a little cardboard Barbie picture.

Now I just have to pick out a colour to paint the room. According to my dad we're painting the whole room one colour and the ceiling's gonna be white. I don't get a choice in the matter, all I get to choose is the colour (which is gonna be some shade of blue).

Memoirs of a Girl Guide

2011-01-19T09:24:00.002-04:00

Apparently it's around the time for the Girl Scouts/Guides/whatever to go around selling cookies. But I could be wrong, I don't really care either way. But I was on STFU, Parents and there's a new post up about a mother posting on Facebook that her daughter is selling cookies and another woman is making a big deal about the mother posting it on Facebook, or something... I dunno (here).

I was reading some of them comments and there were people on both sides of the argument. Some thought that parents should leave the cookie selling solely to their daughters, and there were others that said that there was nothing wrong with parents letting other people know that there were cookies available.

I personally don't care either way. Selling cookies is apparently supposed to teach Girl Guides/Scouts lessons or something, I don't know how accurate that is because I sold cookies for years when I was in Girl Guides and the only thing I learned was that I hate fundraising.

Some of the commentors on that post shared some of their experiences with selling cookies during their childhood, and I'm going to put mine here simply because I can (it also may or may not have anything to do with the homework I'm procrastinating on right now).

I was in Girl Scouts from Sparks up to when I quit before my last year of Pathfinders (so that's from about age 5/6 to my early teens), so that's a lot of cookie selling and fundraising in general.

Let me just begin by saying that I did enjoy a lot of my time in Girl Scouts... when I was younger. But as I got older I had to deal with a troop leader who I did not like and who did not like me, and other girls who I wasn't really close to. I had maybe one or two close friends by the time I reached Pathfinders, but to get to that point I had to last through cliques, bullies, other girls who were nice but who I didn't really spend a lot of time with, and girls I disliked from school. I didn't always get along with the others in my group, probably because as I got older I began losing interest in the whole Girl Guide deal. I mean, we went camping once, and that experience was ruined for me because I had a cold the whole time and I was stuck on an island with a bunch of women/girls I hated/didn't like. The camping aspect was fun, but I could've done without the company and the cold. (Seriously, my brothers were in Beavers (Boy Scouts) and they went camping and they had loads more fun. Probably because their activities were more entertaining and their group wasn't made up of annoying teenage girls and two dumb leaders.)

We went to Ottawa once too, which was pretty fun, but mostly what happened on that trip was that my self-esteem died a painful death and I ultimately did not have a good time. (The Canada Day fireworks were awesome as all hell though, and we got to see Kalan Porter sing live back when he was popular.)

But yeah, cookies. The way we sold cookies in my area was that us girls were each given a certain amount of boxes of cookies and sent out to sell them door-to-door. Sometimes girls grouped together to sell cookies, or maybe that was required, I don't really remember. But I was usually paired up with my 'cousin'/bully/'friend'/whatever because we were close friends when we were kids (because I was a stupid child) and because our mothers were close friends. The way we sold cookies was that either my mother or her mother would drive us in a vehicle from house to house and me and my 'cousin'/etc would get out and go up to the door to try and make a sale. Sometimes my mother would come up with us, other times she'd stay in the car, but we mostly made the sales ourselves.

I don't remember there being any kind of competition about who sold the most boxes, and I'm pretty sure there were no prizes at the end. We didn't really get anything out of it unless the money was going specifically for a prearranged trip (I think we went on a total of about 3 or 4 of those, including Ottawa).

My father never took boxes of cookies to work to sell and we didn't use order forms so there was none of that to fool around with. But the whole thing was basically the girls selling the cookies with some help from the parents. As we got older, we were able to just go around from door to door for a certain number of houses and get in the car at the end of the street, or something (I live in a small town).

Ultimately, selling cookies didn't teach me anything, except that I hate fundraising. And that's mostly because we always went out during the morning in shitty weather lugging around boxes of cookies that probably weighed half as much as we did. As I got older, I dreaded cookie selling time, I was also getting fed up with Girl Scouts in general, and that was a combination of uninteresting (to me) activities and not liking the people i was with.

I had to make a poncho out of a fleece blanket two years in a row, and I fucking hated it. I mean, the first poncho wasn't that bad, I like making crafts and it was kind of fun, but it got annoying fast. Then the year after that, the troop leader had us make another one. I told her that we had already done one last year (she should know, she was fucking there!) and that I was not interested in making another one, especially since I didn't even use the first one. But she forced me to make it, so now I have two ponchos made from fleece blankets and I don't use either of them. I'm pretty sure I just stuck them in the closet on the day they were made and haven't looked for them since. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they've been eaten by moths, or something.

Thinking back on it, I don't have many good memories of my Girl Guides experience, especially from the later years. I'm sure it's good for a lot of people, but it just was not for me. I would've quit a lot sooner (probably in Guides instead of Pathfinders) if my mother had let me. But she was all like "You should stay for your Canadian Cord because it'll look good on your resume and [the other girls] are going to get it and blah blah blah". That's really the only reason that she didn't let me quit, never mind that I was bored stiff the whole time, never mind that the leader was a bitch and we didn't like each other, never mind that I hated most of the other girls and the ones I didn't hate proved to be pretty shoddy friends later on, apparently the Canadian Cord would've been worth all that.

Well, I quit before my final year so I never got my Canadian Cord. I'm not even sure what the hell that is anyway. I think it's some kind of award that the Governor General (or someone high up in the government) presents to you and there's a ceremony and all that. Big fucking deal, I don't have patience for all that. And then my mom finally got tired of my complaining and let me quit.

Fun Facts for my Mother

2011-01-06T21:16:00.003-04:00

#1: Y'know what, Mom? No one in this house drinks beer. In fact, out of the five people living here, you're the only one that drinks alcohol period (excluding beer). The only people that drink beer in this house are your friends who come visit. Know what else? Beer is expensive. So before you start complaining about me 'wasting' money on books (which, although they start with the same letter, is completely different from beer), howzabout you stop buying beer, eh? I do not waste money on books, I buy books and then I read them (sometimes even more than once). You, on the other hand, waste money buying beer that you don't even drink! How about making your friends bring their own goddamn beer over before buying it yourself and then complaining about how we're always tight on cash.

#2: On another note, Mom, I don't like most of your friends. Oh some of them are alright, and I'm quite fond of them, but the others get on my last nerve. And never mind asking me why I don't like them, I just don't. There's no law that says that I have to wait for them to do something to me for me not to like them. Well, actually Louie and Dave already got the jump on that, so they can go fuck off, and I will tell that to them the next time they annoy me. You can tell them that even though I'm not as old as they are, they have no right to make me feel like I'm a fucking toddler. Or wait, know what? I'll tell them. Yup, I'll save you the trouble of doing it since you seem to find it all so amusing. Har har.

#3: And since we're on the subject of friends, leave mine alone. I'm well aware that you dislike my friends, the few of them that there are, you tell me that a lot... and you have for years. It's true that I don't like most of your friends, but I don't bring it up at random and tell you to hang out with other people. And you know the other people you always kept telling me to hang out with? I think that most of them are assholes, I'm of the opinion that they aren't very nice people. I grew up with these people in school, I know how they are, and I don't like them. I did manage to make a few friends in school, and I liked them, although you didn't. So what if they smoked, drank, cursed a lot and had (GASP!) sex? I didn't do those things and they never tried to get me to do those things, frankly it never really came up.

#4: You know my 'cousin' right? I'm sure you do. You probably hate her just as much as I do. She bullied me for the longest time when we were growing up, she bullies her parents, she was (and still is really) a tremendous bitch, and pretty much my complete and total opposite. You agree on all these points. So why, when I get angry, do you insist on telling me that I am exactly like her?! Do you think that amuses me or something? Do you think I enjoy it? No I don't fucking enjoy it! I'm human, Mom! And, even as emotionally crippled as I am, I get angry! You know what happens when I get angry? I become irritable to the people around me and I shout and I vent and I curse at people! That does that somehow sound strange to you? Because it sounds pretty normal to me. Sure, call me an asshole or whatever, but don't tell me that I act like her for fuck sakes! I do not act like her, I can't even pretend to act like her (and I've tried, can't do it)! You even tell me that I act like her when I'm just being disagreeable! I mean, good God woman! What, am I not allowed to express any emotion other than happiness, or something? Why? My brothers get to. They get to get angry and shout and yell and all that fanfare and they never hear "You're acting exactly like ['cousin']". And they do it more often than I do and they do mostly the same things as I do (with the exception of the arm flapping). What, do they get special passes just because they're younger or something? It's only a three year age gap!

#5: I like manga. Big fucking deal. I really don't see why this is such a problem for you, or such a shock. I've loved reading since I was 4, and I read a lot of Archie comics growing up, and I watched Dragonball Z almost religiously since I was about 3 until I was about 12. Sure, most of the manga topics are more mature than what you'd find in an Archie comic, but you can't tell me that you thought all the novels I've read over the years were full of bright, smiley, happy people. I read Goosebumps and Fear Street growing up after all, and they certainly contain questionable content for young children. I mean, I own a giant book about Jack the Ripper, which details a very messed up chain of events, and you get worried about what I'm 'picking up' in manga, like I'm some kind of impressionable kindergartner. And don't keep asking me why I like manga, I like manga because I like to read. Remember, all it is (to me anyway) is just another kind of book. The only reason you really seem to question it is because it's from Japan, since you've never questioned my Archies or my Artemis Fowl graphic novels.

#6: Stop saying that everything related to Japan is all about InuYasha, or no wait, InuWasha. It's gotten to the point where InuYasha has become an insult to me. My Taiwanese music plays in the car, it's 'InuWasha' music, even though it's not even from the same country. I don't want to go to church so you (and Dad) tell me to pretend that the priest is speaking in 'InuWasha' language, which makes no fucking sense. I watch anime in the living room, you ask me if I'm watching my 'InuWasha' again. What the fuck is it with InuYasha that's so bad?! Even some of the kids at school did this, pronouncing it the same exact way too (because the letter Y makes the W sound now, I guess)! Just, why? I know I got really into it when I first heard about it when I was 12/13, but come on! I wasn't obsessed with it (no matter what my 'cousin' keeps saying)! It was the first anime I discovered that was directed to teenagers, why wouldn't I be excited? But now I'm ashamed to even say I like it! It's become something that I think I shouldn't be doing! And that's just pathetic because it's a good series and I do like it! But I'm practically afraid to even look at something InuYasha related for fear of being insulted about it! That doesn't even make sense! Out of the dozens of manga series I read, everyone has to focus on that one series and start up with every time I even mention something loosely related to it.

Noise Makers Ahoy!

2011-01-01T03:32:00.002-04:00

My first post of 2011, at 3:30am... you know, because.

We just got a new computer tower for our desktop computer, so we now have Windows 7 in the house. Should be interesting to see what goes on there. Oh! And we can get the wallpaper on it to change pictures every 30 seconds! Me and my brothers were very entertained by that. Our father was considerably less impressed, mostly because we were wasting time with that instead of setting up his email on Outlook. But that's what he gets for making me do it instead of learning how to do it himself.

While we had the other tower unhooked, I brought our old Windows 98 computer (the 98 Brick) up from the basement so that I could get some stuff off of it and be done with it for good. I finally did manage to get my flash drives to work on it (after about an hour of trying to figure out how... God bless Google). I got a bunch of pictures and old files and 3 or so gigs of music and stand up comedy.

I count that as my final major accomplishment of 2010, since I've been trying for years to get things off that computer. I'm quite proud of myself actually.

So it's 2011 now. Wow. I'll be finished college this year, and hopefully I'll be able to get a full-time job this year too.

Another thing to look forward to is the release of the final volume of With the Light (yes, I'm still on that). I'm hoping for closure with this series. I want a more concrete ending this time around. I mentioned this when I did my autism/WTL project for my class and my teacher asked me why I didn't just imagine an ending on my own. I told him that I did, and it was that Hikaru grew up to be a happy, cheerful working adult and that he was still surrounded by his family and friends (except Masato's mother, unless she changes her tune). But it's one thing to imagine something in your head, and quite another to actually see it. Even though Hikaru is a fictional character, I really want to see a happy ending for him with my own eyes.

Also, I finally discovered the name of that fat kid with glasses, I'm pretty sure it's Gozaru-kun. I somehow missed it the first dozen times I'd read the series, but I got it now. Now I know his name, but I'll probably always call him 'the fat kid with glasses'... even though I think he only actually has glasses near the end of the series.

my mother on the phone

2010-12-30T15:10:00.002-04:00

Just overheard my mother talking on the phone with my aunt:

Mom: ...oh, so you're in [my town]... oh, so you're at my house
Me: Wait... what?

Oh the relaxation

2010-12-26T19:42:00.003-04:00

My first semester of college is over (uh... on the 15th... heh heh) and I am enjoying my time off very, very, very, very much. Here're a few things that went on since I last posted, uh, whenever.

I officially passed my Online Service Learning course with a 74%, which is higher than I was expecting. Seriously, that course was just... balls. It was my first time doing an online course, which wasn't the hard part since I am a computer whiz. The hardest part was dealing with the teacher, who is permantly labelled 'doorknob' in my mind. She would barely answer emails to anyone, and when she did I'd had to read them more than once because I was barely able to understand what she was saying. And then I had to have my assignments modified because I was in a different part of the course and that was just a nightmare. But I passed, and I don't have to deal with this anymore.
I also had an Applied Learning course which was completely self-directed, I just had to check in with faculty to prove to her that I was actually doing something. I did a PowerPoint presentation on autism using the With the Light series as a case study. And as stupid an idea that it might sound to most people to use a manga for a college project, my teachers and class thoroughly enjoyed it and said that it was very interesting. I also got a 92%. I am happy. And now I am wondering why I wasn't allowed to do book reports on manga when I was in high school.
Christmas was awesome this year. Christmas Eve at Nanny's house was a little slow because nothing much was going on. The adults mostly stayed in the kitchen and the kids (just me and my brothers this year) just stayed in the living room. That's the problem I've found about Nanny's house, the adults don't really interact with the kids much at all. At Mémé's house on the other hand, everyone is mixed together in the living room. It's much more lively there too, everyone is joking around with everyone, even the kids.
Then Santa came! He was my younger cousin this year, and he played a funny Santa. He was funny because it was my cousin and he's a funny guy, and it was funny because he spent a lot of time joking around with our older cousin. Oh was it ever funny. I laughed like a maniac.
I got Jodi Picoult's book House Rules as a gift from my brothers Christmas morning and finished reading it that night. Awesome book. For a while there, I thought the ending was gonna piss me off, but it turned out alright in the end. And now I have no one to discuss the book with. *grumble*

With the Light Drama

2010-11-25T19:12:00.005-04:00

(This is something I wrote up about the With the Light drama and how it differs from the manga. I wrote this during the summer, before I read volume 7 or heard about volume 8. It's a bit long and probably doesn't make too much sense, but here y'are anyway.)

Since I posted something about the With the Light manga series, I might as well talk about the TV show.

A few years ago (I'm thinking 2004, but I could be wrong about that), the With the Light manga series was adapted into an 11 episode live-action drama of the same name.

And it is a good show. It's one of three anime live-action adaptations that I think did well (the other two being the Detective Conan live-action specials). It follows the story pretty closely and stays fairly true to the source material, unlike other adaptations I've seen (*coughDragonballEvolutioncough*). I grew attached to the characters in the show, same as with the manga, and when something good or bad happens to them it's hard not to react along with the characters. So, in my opinion, it was all very well done.

Having said that, there are still some things I don't like about it, and other things I've noticed. There are a lot of things that are different from the manga, which is the original story and what I read first, so I feel that the manga is the superior version, but that's more of a 'book-before-the-movie' argument.

First of all, the length. The manga goes from when Hikaru is born to about junior high or high school (or wherever volume 7 ends). The drama takes place over the course of one year (or one school year, not entirely sure) with a bit of background of Hikaru as a toddler, but aside from Hikaru at about 4 or 5 years old climbing a building to get at an aluminum balloon (which didn't happen in the manga), it's told in flashback.

So the manga covers a longer period of time. And it happens in real time so none of it is really told in flashbacks because we'd already read it when it happened. In the manga, flashbacks were used to show things from before Hikaru was born, and to remind us of things that happened in past volumes. In the drama, flashbacks are used to remind us of what happened in past episodes, but they're also used to explain what happened before Sachiko met Rio-sensei.

In my opinion, I like the way the manga handled that better. Reading about it as it happened gets you more emotionally invested, I find. Then if there's a flashback about it, you can look back too and be all like 'I remember that, that was great/gunny/creepy/whatever'. But the drama is only 11 episodes long, where the manga had no set length (as far as I know), so the manga had the time and space to move as slowly or as quickly as it wanted to.

Second is the place difference. In the manga, the Azuma's live in an apartment a 5 minute walk from Hikaru's elementary school. I also got the idea that their apartment building was in or nearby some kind of shopping district. Or maybe it's like that in the drama too, I never really got that. Wither was, Shichigatsu-cho Elementary is, in the manga, in some kind of suburb, or something. It's definitely not as isolated as the drama portrays it. I mean, the school in the drama seems to be on a back country road, or something.

But the biggest difference between the manga and drama is the difference between the characters. And this is a pet peeve of mine. The characters are all there in the manga, it shouldn't be that hard to write them into the drama, or at least make the ones you do write in who they're supposed to be.

Sachiko and Masato, Hikaru's parents, are written in. And their characters are pretty accurate. Sachiko in the manga is more preachy, and Sachiko in the drama is more... spineless? I dunno. She's more sensitive and apologizes way more than Manga!Sachiko, I find. And Masato is more of a workaholic asshat in the beginning of the manga, than he makes a complete 180 and is Best Father in Teh World. As great as that is, it's kinda extreme. Drama!Masato strikes me as more realistic. He doesn't really come off as a workaholic either, just a hard worker. He's a good father to Hikaru both before and after the diagnosis, and he was never really unlikable to begin with. He doesn't change personalities overnight, and it takes him a bit to accept that Hikaru will never truly be like other children, but he does come to grips with it on his own time and he then decides to be more involved.

Hikaru's little sister Kanon does not make an appearance in the drama. And that sucks because Kanon brings her own brand of humour to the series. She doesn't treat Hikaru like he has a disability at all. To her he's just 'Onii-chan'. If he bothers her, she'll bother him right back. They learn from each other and they're there for each other. They behave like a real brother and sister would. Since the drama really only consists of Hikaru's first-grade year at school, Kanon wouldn't really be in there much, since she's born near the end of the school year (I think).

Sachiko and Masato's mothers make it into the drama. Sachiko's father is absent for some reason. Sachiko's mother is pretty much the same in both mediums. She's there more often in the drama, so she has more of a personality there. We don't see her much in the manga. Sachiko talks to her when she has problems, which took place in a time before the drama covers, and Sachiko moves back in with her parents when she temporarily separates from Masato, which never happened in the drama. Masato's mother is portrayed pretty accurately in the beginning of the drama, then she becomes less unlikable. In the manga, Masato's mother is a proud woman who cared a lot about image. When Hikaru was still a baby, before he was diagnosed, Masato's mother would often show up, while Masato was at work, and berate Sachiko for 'cutting corners' by using store-bought baby food and disposable diapers. She often compared Sachiko and Hikaru to Masato's sister and her daughter Noa (who don't appear in the drama). When she learns that Hikaru is autistic, Masato's mother blames it on Sachiko and the way she raised Hikaru. This creates much tension and intense emotions between everyone. Eventually, Masato's mother learns a bit about autism and is less of an ass in general. Then Kanon is born. Throughout the series, Masato's mother flops between accepting Hikaru and pushing him away. She does love him, but its obvious that she prefers her granddaughters Noa and Kanon, who are well-behaved and aren't disabled. In the drama, Masato's mother is still critical of Sachiko, and she does blame Hikaru's autism on her. But unlike the manga, Masato's mother seems to finally accept that Hikaru will never be cured of his autism, but he is not a burden or a lost cause. Masato's mother in the manga gives off the impression that Hikaru is a bother more than anything else.

Hikaru's friends seem to be missing from the drama, or they have been re-named. Hiroaki and Oyamada are absent from the drama. Since Hikaru's life before Shichigatsu was barely glanced over, that's to be expected. Sachiko met Oyamada at the welfare centre, since that wasn't in the drama, neither is she. In the place of all that, we get Megumi and Hotomi at some kind of hospital. Sachiko goes there to get a diagnosis for Hikaru and that is where she first meets Megumi, whose daughter Hotomi is also autistic. To me, Hotomi is a combination of Hiroaki and Miyu (another autistic girl who went to school with Hikaru). Hotomi has a different kind of autism than Hikaru, like both Hiroaki and Miyu. She's the same age as Hikaru (I think, or she might be a year younger, although she has an elementary student backpack). Like Hiroaki, Hotomi goes to a different school that Hikaru, but like Miyu she is in Hikaru's class (for a bit). Hotomi is mild mannered and smiles all the time, like Hiroaki, but her family situation is like Miyu's. So I'm convinced she's cross between the two of them.

Nobuaki, Kanata, Ooki, or that fat kid with the glasses whose name I can never remember, are also missing. We don't get replacements for them, not direct ones anyway. Hikaru's classmates at school could fill in for them, but they aren't specifically named. Speaking of classmates, Hikaru's classmates from Special Ed, Nat-chan and Isao (or something) are also missing from the drama.

In the place of Moe and Eri, we get another combination, Moe. In the drama, Moe lives in Hikaru's building, but it's basically Eri with a different name. You've got Eri's overbearing, perfectionist, useless, asshat mother and her abusive, distant, asshole father (thought I don't thing he's abusive in the drama). Also, when Hikaru gets locked in the storage locker (this happens in both the manga and the drama), it's Moe who watches it all happen. In the manga, it's Eri who sees it, but she's not in the drama. Drama!Moe and Manga!Moe are alike in the way that they both want to look out for Hikaru and help him, although Manga!Moe does it more often.

Ishida, a boy who is older than Hikaru, has been replaced by Wataru, who is one of Hikaru's classmates in the drama. In the manga, Ishida was Hikaru's buddy (from the buddy class) and it was his job to help Hikaru water the tomatoes in the garden and take a picture of them every day at recess. This happens after Hikaru's first grade year, so it really shouldn't be in the drama anyway, but it is. In the drama, the tomato growing is used to get Hikaru to interact more with his classmates, and most of the episode is devoted to teaching Hikaru how to water the plants and the steps leading up to it. In the manga, Hikaru already knows how to water the plants since he'd been gardening at school for a while (read: years).

Oki, an older boy who once made fun of Hikaru, was replaced by Kenta, who is another of Hikaru's classmates and one of Wataru's friends. In the manga, Oki's mother has abandoned him and he lives with his father, who is an alcoholic. as a result, Oki is severely mistreated and he is jealous of Hikaru, who has two loving parents. Oki makes fun of Hikaru and seems to be an all around mean child. But one day after school, Hikaru follows Oki home and then he gets on a bus by himself. Worried, Oki follows him and they have a small adventure around town while Hikaru's parents are worried sick. It all ends well though. In the drama, we have Kenta, whose mother is dead and who lives with his father, who is not an alcoholic but works a lot. Kenta doesn't make fun of Hikaru, exactly, but he's not the nicest boy in the world. Like the manga, Hikaru follows Kenta home and then gets on a bus. Kenta follows, but we don't see what they get up to, instead we are with Sachiko and Masato and Hikaru and Kenta's teachers as they try to find the boys. Personally, I like the manga better because it showed what everyone was up to. Also, in the manga, this takes place after the tomato project, so it wasn't during Hikaru's first grade year either.

Hikaru's teachers are also different. In the drama there are four teachers we always see: Rio-sensei, Hikaru's special ed. teacher, Sakura-sensei, who teaches Hikaru's first grade class, Kawami-sensei, the music teacher, and the principal, who is probably on something but we love him anyway. These four teachers are not in the manga. Hikaru's special ed. teacher is Aoki-sensei, who is a man (unlike Rio-sensei) and whose hobby is making learning tools for disabled students. Hikaru's first grade class is taught by Wakabayashi-sensei in the manga, who is female, instead of Sakura-sensei, who is male. The romance between Rio/Aoki-sensei and Sakura/Wakabayashi-sensei is present in both mediums, but the manga just sort of springs it on us while in the drama, it's always there. There is no music teacher in the manga, that I know of. The principal in the manga is also a different gender than in the drama. But thehy are basically the same person, they are both very kind, understanding and accommodating. But Drama!Principal is more nuts and hyper than Manga!Principal.

And finally, we have the main character, Azuma Hikaru himself. There is a difference between the manga version and drama version. I don't know which version most accurately portrays an autistic child, so I'm not basing anything on that. Anyway, Manga!Hikaru is more animated than Drama!Hikaru, in my opinion. In the drama, Hikaru's facial expression doesn't change. Every once in a while he smiles, and people can make him laugh, but other than that he just stares. That is probably consistant with autistic children, but not really with the manga version of Hikaru. Manga!Hikaru has more facial expressions. They run from happy to surprised to angry. That could be because it's easier to draw expressions than it is to act them. The abilities also differ between mediums. In the manga, Hikaru has a photographic memory and can draw anything from memory, when he's interested, and then there's the Mouse March, to name a few things. Hikaru from the drama doesn't seem to have any artistic skills, aside from that one tomato picture he drew, and he never managed to learn the Mouse March. Also, Manga!Hikaru seems to interact with others more. They are still both very similar though, both love bullet trains and shiny things.

Obviously, the story and pacing of each medium is different from the other, but that's to be expected. I am so glad that a show was made instead of a movie. A movie summation of everything would have been a mess. Of course, an even better TV show idea would've been to have a longer show, like with seasons, and follow the manga exactly. But that would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

holy shit yes win!

2010-10-27T17:54:00.002-03:00

I have just discovered the most awesomest news ever!

Just now, I discovered legit existance of With the Light volume 8 (15)! I cannot believe this! I'm so excited!

Apparently, while Tobe-sensei was sick, she did enough work to be compiled into one last volume which is being released in Japan in January 2011. Yen Press will be publishing the American version and it should be released in September 2011!

I am beyond excited! Finally, we have a chance for the series to get a true ending! Maybe this time, we will be left with a 'and the future looks bright for Hikaru' feeling, or maybe even a glimpse into the future (if we're lucky).

Maybe we'll even get a memorial thing for Tobe-sensei, to acknowledge her life and that because of her, autism now has a face among fans and information about autism has been made available to a different demographic in a completely new format.

I cannot wait!

Dinnernet

2010-10-25T13:54:00.002-03:00

Because I can't pronounce my words... yeah.

So, new news. I managed to find the first two seasons of Digimon with Japanese audio and English subtitles for download. This is great news! Digimon is a series I've loved since childhood, but it hasn't aged well. I keep saying that my biggest problem with the series is that the dialogue sucks. It's corny, full of puns, and obviously made for very young children. It hurts to listen to. In my opinion, the Japanese dialogue is far superior (I realized this after I discovered fansubs to the three first movies and compared them to the American release).

In other news, I have to do a project for school. It's a totally self-directed affair and the project can be anything I want on the topic of my choice. I wanted to do something with the With the Light series (since they cover autism and I'm in that kind of field). I got the go ahead this morning so I'm starting on that now. First thing I'm doing is scanning the entire series (not only for the project, but to have a digital copy of it). After I finish that I can gather information and pick out the images I want to include in my project. Should be interesting.

Last bit, I just got the first Chobits omnibus edition in the mail that covers the first four volumes. And oh my God, it's even thicker than my With the Lights, which were the biggest volumes I own. This thing's a monster! And it's shorter than the others so it's a weird shape. It's nice to look at though, and it's got coloured pages inside so it's got that going for it.

old person moment

2010-10-23T23:08:00.002-03:00

I was just looking back through the first volume of With the Light and I had forgotten how cute Hikaru was when he was small. I've been reading volumes 6 and 7 lately and in those volumes Hikaru is in junior high. Now I'm reading the first volume and he's just so cute and tiny.

And Nobuaki with a superhero blanket/cape just cracks me up.

It's like that time when I watched the first Harry Potter movie for the first time in years, everyone's just so cute!

Now instead of feeling sad that the series is over (booooooo), I can go back to the beginning and see the beginning of the Azuma's journey and remember how cute everyone was.

Manga Roundup #2

2010-10-12T09:29:00.009-03:00

Time for another manga roundup. I did my first one in January and my collection has grown muchly since then. Onward, ahoy! (this is gonna be so long...)

Absolute Boyfriend (Watase Yuu) 1-4 (My friend recommended this one to me. She told me to read it because she thought it was funny. I read it and agreed, so I started buying it. The main point of the story is that a girl buys accidentally buys an android off the Internet to act as her boyfriend. This manga is awesome, most of the humour comes from the interactions between the characters and the characters themselves, mostly Night and the salesman.)
Aishiteruze Baby (Maki Youko) 6 (This is the story of a high school playboy named Kippei, who suddenly finds himself caring for his 5-year-old cousin Yuzu, who was abandoned to Kippei's family by her mother. This is sweet and funny story and I read it online before putting it on my buy list. I found volume 6 for sale at Animinitime and it was cheap so I bought it.
Baby and Me (Ragawa Marimo) 1&2 (11-year-old Takuya's mother has died so he is put in charge of taking care of his baby brother Minoru. The online scanlations are only available up to volume 5, so I don't know the whole story, but what I have read so far is Takuya's adventures as he takes care of Minoru and interacts with the people around him. This manga gives me a fuzzy feeling every time I read it.)
Beyond My Touch (Maeda Tomo) (This is a shounen-ai oneshot volumes containing one multi-chapter main story and two shorter oneshot chapters. The main story is about a boy who visits a classmates funeral and brings his classmates ghost back home with him. It seems that the dead boy had a crush on the live boy and regrets never kissing him in life so he follows him as a ghost. It's a really sweet story and made me laugh. The other two stories are both shounen-ai and one is about a boy's first kiss and the other is about baking, I think.)
Confidential Confessions (Momochi Reiko) 2, 5, 6 (I think this is the first serious manga that I read. And by serious I mean containing adult themes. There's six volume in all and there's no main plot. Instead, we have a bunch of oneshot stories about different girls each talking about a different serious topic. Such topics include suicide, prostitution, sexual harassment, and drug abuse, to name a few. I have volumes 2, 5 and 6, so I got sexual harassment, stalking, rape, AIDS and bullying. I have a weird love/hate relationship with volume 2. It's about sexual harassment and the story takes up the whole volume. I want to kick every single character in that story in the face, with the exception of the main characters parents and that one girl who kicked the gym teacher in the face.)
Croquis (Takanaga Hinako) (This is a yaoi oneshot, the story of which I forget about after I read it. Every time. I know the main story is about a... I think he's a transgender, who works in a bar and an artist and they fall in love... and stuff. There's three oneshots after that. One of them is about two boys and astronomy, and the other two are about the loss of a first love. I didn't like the one about the stars, the ones about the lost first love were bittersweet and made me sad, and the main story just made me laugh. I think I just bought it because it's only one volume long and by Takanaga-sensei. I love her art.)
Deadman Wonderland (Kataoka Jinsei) 1 (This is a relatively new manga and I found volume 1 at Animinitime cheap so I just bought it. The series starts off with a massacre of a class of high school students by some weird monster thing. Everyone in class is dead except for Ganta Igarashi, who is then charged with the murders. He is sent to Deadman Wonderland, the prison/circus that houses criminals in post-major-fucking-earthquake Tokyo. And stuff happens. Ganta gets new powers that allows him to shoot 'bullets' made up of his blood, and he finds others who can manipulate their blood into weapons. They are called the Deadman. This manga is like a horror/action/sci-fi thing, which I'm not usually into, but I like it quite a bit.)
Detective Conan (Aoyama Gosho) 1, 25, 26, 30, 31 (I love Conan. Growing up I always watched shows about murder mysteries and detectives and all that. Detective Conan is like a Sherlock Holmes story, with a twist... and it's in Japan. Kudou Shinichi is a famous high school detective who gets in over his head when he spies on two men in black doing a shady business deal. He gets fed a poison that's supposed to kill him but instead makes him age down about ten years. So he has to go around solving crimes as a child while trying to find the men in black who shrunk him and keep his identity a secret from those around him. Along the way he solves a butt-ton of cases and meets a few colourful characters that make each case interesting to read over and over.)
Dining Bar Akira (Yamashita Tomoko) (I discovered this yaoi oneshot volume on a manga review site and read it online before deciding that I liked it and buying it. The main multi-chapter story is about two older guys, in their 20s and 30s, who work in a bar and enter into a relationship with each other. I read it for the humour, any deeper meaning is pretty much lost on me. There's also two unrelated stories after that. One about a gay high school student who can't find the courage to confess to his straight friend, and another one that made absolutely no sense about a man who had a wet dream about a coworker of his, or something, and tries to pick him up the next day, or something. I never got it.)
Dragonball (Akira Toriyama) 1-16 (I grew up watching Dragonball Z, starting when I was 3 or 4 years old. I discovered the manga in Shonen Jump magazine when I was a kid. I discovered the Dragonball manga a few years ago. I never knew much about the story and events of Dragonball, but I had a great time learning about it and reading it. It's mainly about fighting, which is fine but it's not really my thing, but it contains many humorous elements. Also, a lot of the characters I know and love from Dragonball Z are in there and they're always fun to watch.)
Eerie Queerie! (Shiozu Shuri) 3 (I discovered this title while looking at a picture of someone else's manga collection. The title is what caught my eye, it's just something that requires an explanation. So I read it online. Giggle fit. It's a story about one high school boy who is sensitive to spirits, and another who manages to make all other guys fall in love with him, or something. Can't really remember, it's been a while since I read it. I don't remember there being a set storyline, I just like watching the characters interact with each other, makes me laugh. I found volume 3 for 4$ at Animinitime.)
Fruits Basket (Takaya Natsuki) 1, 4-7, 11, 18-23 (Fruits Basket 18 was the first manga volume that I bought for myself, it was the official start of my collection, though I didn't know it at the time. The series is 23 volumes long and I've read through it about 3 or 4 times already and love it every time. It's the story of a family with a cursed and tortured existence and a young woman who hopes to free them. I keep saying that this series could be material for someone's college paper, with all the themes and tragic pasts and moral and ethical dilemmas. I love the story and I love the characters. We get to learn a lot about every character in the series and we learn about what made them who they are. It's really a great series.)
Fullmetal Alchemist (Arakawa Hiromu) 1-3 (Me and my two friends were way into this show when it first came on TV in our area. We thought it was one of the best things ever. We watched the anime first and halfway through I discovered the manga. For the record, I've never seen the Brotherhood anime, just the crappy first version where Ed dies at the end. The manga is waaaaaaaay better than the anime. It goes on longer for one thing. I tell ya, I got so attached to these characters. And bad shit keeps happening and you just keep hoping that something good will finally happen. It's great, the final battle at the end completely blew me away.)
Godchild (Yuki Kaori) 1&2 (This is the sequel to The Cain Saga. I kept telling myself that I wasn't going to buy this series. It's full of religious junk and all that and I just hated the ending. But then I found it for sale in the store, and I just loved the art, and I couldn't find anything else by Kaori Yuki anywhere, so I bought it. The story follows Cain, his little sister Merryweather, and his manservant Riff, as they go around London, or whatever, and get involved in crazy cases. There's a main plot under everything that gradually comes to a head as the story goes on. It gets crazy near the end.)
Hana Kimi (Nakajo Hisaya) 1-3, 5-7, 14, 16, 19, 20 (I found this series in a SIMS2 forum thread, funnily enough. Someone had made SIMS of the characters and had mentioned the manga. I was bored so I decided to check it out. Holy shit I was not disapointed. The main plot is Ashiya Mizuki travels from California to Tokyo and disguises herself as a boy to attend an all-boys high school with her high-jump star idol, Sano Izumi. I realize that this plot is completely ridiculous, but don't let that stop you from enjoying it. Enter for the novelty, stay for the characters. I love the characters, they're what really make the story work. Like Fruits Basket, I've read this series many times over and I never get tired of it.)
Hands Off! (Katsumoto Kasane) 5&6 (Found for cheap at Animinitme. This series is about three boys with psychic-type powers. I've only read the whole series once, so I don't really remember the whole plot. I do remember that there is no shounen-ai in there and I was waiting for there to be shounen-ai. I was disapointed that there wasn't, but the awesome story made up for it.)
Hikaru no Go (Hotta Yumi) 1, 2, 14 (I discovered Hikaru in Shonen Jump magazine when I was a kid. The manga is just about a bunch of people playing go, but the characters make it very interesting to read. The main character, Hikaru Shindo, is a beginner at go at the beginning of the manga, but we get to see him grow as the story goes on. You'd think reading a manga about a bunch of people playing go would be boring, but it's very interesting and suspenseful.)
InuYasha (Takahashi Rumiko) 1, 2, 6 (InuYasha 6 was the first manga I ever owned, bought for me by my mother somewhere around the 7th or 8th grade. I watched the show a lot, and eventually moved over to reading the manga online. When the manga ended, I decided to start buying it. It's a fantasy/romance/adventure manga with a suspenseful storyline and very colourful characters... and one of the most annoying enemies ever.)
Kingdom Hearts II (Nomura Tetsuya) 2 (As far as I know, this is a manga version of the Kingdom Hearts II game. I've never actually read the whole thing, or played the game, so all I know about it is that Sora goes around with Donald and Goofy to different Disney movie locations and beat evil bosses. And there's Roxas and all that. Which is great. I only started buying this because I found it in the bookstore and the online scanlations were dropped and it was cheaper than buying the game.)
Koukou Debut (Kawahara Kazune) 1 (I don't know much about this one because I only read it once a while ago. But I know it's a fun story to read. The main character was a real sporty girl in middle school and is now in high school and wants a boyfriend. So she gets a guy from school to coach her on how to fall in love with a guy. It's a sweet story and the characters are pretty fun to watch.)
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Otsuka Eiji) 1, 2, 5-7 (This manga entertains me to no end. It's about a group of college students with supernatural powers who deliver corpses to their final resting place, for a fee. As far as I've read, it's mostly episodic events with a jumbled plot somewhere underneath everything. It's still entertaining though. Each member of the delivery service has their own unique personalities and special power, which makes for interesting story development.)
Liberty Liberty (Takanaga Hinako) (This is a shounen-ai oneshot volume about a independant TV station person worker thing and a young runaway. It's a light and cute romance story. It was the first of Takanaga Hinako's works that I bought, mostly because it was her only lisenced work with no sex in it.)
Little Butterfly (Takanaga Hinako) 3-in-1 omnibus (If no one's caught on by now, I'm a big fan of Takanaga-sensei's work. Little Butterfly is about the romance between Kojima and Nakahara and all their troubles. And of course, it's cute and funny. It's three volumes long and they released all three volumes in an omnibus edition in February, so I bought that. Cheaper than buying all three books separate.)
Love Round (Takanaga Hinako) (Heeeeey, Takanaga-sensei :D. This is another yaoi romance. I love this one, I laugh out loud every single time I read it. It's hysterical. Most of the book is just Komatsuna beating up his pro-boxer crush over stupid comments. Eventually, they get their act together and finally come together as a couple. But until that point, hilarious knock-outs!)
Mail (Yamazaki Housui) 1-3 (Even though I have them listed under different mangaka, I'm pretty sure that Mail and Kurosagi were both done by the same people. The art is the same, and Akiba Reiji, the main character from Mail, shows up for a cameo in Kurosagi at one point. Mail is just a series of mostly unrelated ghost stories in which Akiba goes around and finds restless spirits and shoots them with his spirit gun to send them to their final resting place. And it manages to scare me every time I read it.)
Only the Ring Finger Knows (Kannagi Satoru) (This is a shounen-ai oneshot volume about two boys who slowly realize that they are in love with each other. This was the first really realistic shounen-ai manga I read, and I like it for that. Plus the art is nice and the extra chapter at the end makes me giggle every time.)
Ouran High School Host Club (Hatori Bisco) 1-3 (Omigod this series is made of crack. It's about the shenanigans of a group of rich boys, and one cross-dressing normal girl, as they entertain their female schoolmates. There really isn't a set storyline. Time doesn't even move properly, I'm pretty sure it's always spring or summer, unless it's Christmas or Halloween or something. Every time there's a lull between the volumes, I keep asking myself why I'm even buying this series, then I read the next installment and laugh so much I wonder why I even asked in the first place.)
Pokémon Adventures (Kusaka Hidenori) 1-7 (This manga is based off of the Pokémon Gameboy games. Volumes 1-7 cover the Red, Blue, Green and Yellow games, which is all I was really interested in so I didn't even bother going past volume 7. I was mostly interested in this manga for the nostalgic value, that and it's much better than the anime that was butchered by 4kids.)
Ranma 1/2 (Takahashi Rumiko) 5&6 (From the creator of InuYasha comes another fantasy tale with fighting and awkward relationships, among other things. Ranma is just plain fun to read because there's really nothing that serious about it. Every character is some degree of crazy and when they interact with each other there's just a whole load of crazy going on.)
The Tyrant Falls in Love (Takanaga Hinako) 1 ('Eeey Takanaga-sensei! A yaoi romance about Morinaga and his at-the-moment unrequited love for his sempai, Souichi, who is straight-for now-, and homophobic, and tyrannical. The best part of this series, so far, is the interaction between Morinaga and Sempai, it just makes me laugh soooo much. I wasn't going to buy this series at first because there're a lot of graphic and rape-ish sex scenes in it. But it's really funny, and it's by Takanaga-sensei, so it has two things going for it.)
Totally Captivated (Yoo Ha Jin) 1-3 (This one's from Korea and is a yaoi story about a mob boss type thing name Mookyul Eun... I think I spelled that wrong... and Ewon, his maid/slave thing. Once again, this is a funny story with nice art and zany characters. Mookyul and Ewon are in a very weird relationship, and I'm pretty sure that they're both aware of it. I just fell in love with this one after the first time I read it, it's just so different from what I usually read.)
Wallflower (Hayakawa Tomoko) 3 (The main point of this one is that it's kinda like My Fair Lady. Four boys get to stay for free in a big house if they can turn the owner of the house's niece into a proper young lady. The young lady of the house happens to be a horror-obsessed loner who is determined to avoid being turned into a proper young lady at all costs. This one is pretty funny, and it entertains me enough, but the only real reason that I bought it was that it was 75% percent off.)
With the Light (Keiko Tobe) 1-7 (OMYGOD I LOVE THIS SERIES!!! This series was recommended to a forum community so I decided to check it out. I couldn't find it anywhere to read on the Internet, but it's the only manga that I know of that deals with autism, so I decided to go ahead and buy it. And I've never looked back. Seriously, I love this series. I love the story, I love -most of- the characters, I love the information, I just love the whole thing. It's a very inspiring and touching story about one family's dealings with autism, and how they try to connect with a lovely little boy who loves sparkly objects and trains.)
Yotsuba&! (Azuma Kiyohiko) 1&4 (This series is mainly comprised of episodic chapters about the daily lives of 5-year-old Yotsuba and her father and friends. They're very simple little stories, but they make me laugh every time and they leave the reader with a warm and happy feeling after reading.)
Your and My Secret (Morinaga Ai) 1, 3-5 (This one just makes me laugh. Two classmates, a boy and a girl, accidentally switch bodies and must now cope with living life as the opposite gender. Roles they are actually well suited for. This one's just made of crack, probably more than Ouran. But the art is really nice and the story is very humorous... and totally made of crack.)

...well, that turned out a lot longer than I thought it would. Just think of it as a replacement for not posting in August or September.

yeah... so

2010-10-07T12:38:00.003-03:00

Okay, I know I said I was gonna do reviews/recaps/whateverthefuck, and I will, eventually. I'm just really slow.

A few things to report, uhh... one of my classmates from elementary school was killed in a car accident in August. I was never really close to her so this doesn't really affect me in any way. So I have nothing else to say about that.

Also, my summer job ended without any major mishaps, and thanks to that I got a ton of new books this summer. But now the paychecks have stopped, so I can't get more books every other week. I got my last books in the mail on Tuesday, and I probably won't be able to buy any new ones until December (when Wandering Son 1 and Tyrant 2 come out).

I was at Wal-Mart the other day and I found Roxio Easy VHS to DVD program, which can record VHS tapes to DVD or to the computer. Awesomest thing ever, now I can finally record my family's home movies to DVD/computer. I've been wanting to do that for years, and now I can. :D It's really easy too, which helps.

I finally got the last volume of With the Light (volume 7) and I finished reading it in about an hour. I am sad. It's over! I can't believe it's already over! Hikaru's only in his second year of junior high! It can't be over! But, it is. The author died so there's really not much else to do on that front. Hopefully, she left behind notes or something so that someday maybe someone else can finish Hikaru's story. I wanted to see him as a happy working adult, now we don't even get to see him in high school.

And the end of the last volume doesn't help either. The last chapter ever is about Hikaru's grandmother-who-I-hate and how she goes to visit a friend and meets someone with ADHD and Asperger's syndrome. Really, the end of the volume doesn't give off a 'and Hikaru's future is looking bright' feeling. In fact, it doesn't even give off a feeling of a completed series. It feels like something else is supposed to happen when the grandmother gets back home (Hikaru and his family are living with her now, bleck). She felt bad about the way she treats Hikaru so you're set up for some kind of resolution, or something. Instead we get the end.

On a lighter With the Light note, Hikaru is going through puberty. This is only really addressed in the beginning of the volume, and it was funny because there was a panel of Hikaru and Sachiko on the snail bus where it explained that Hikaru didn't want to sit next to his mother. I must've giggled for about five minutes. I mean, most of the series is about dealing with Hikaru's autism and how it makes him different than the other kids his age. And then he goes and does something like this, which is something that most normal teenagers do. I had to laugh, gave me a happy feeling.

And then the ending came and the happy feeling fucked off somewhere. I seriously hate that grandmother. She even insinuated that Hikaru should be put in an institution, instead of living at home. All I can do at this point is shake my head sadly. What the hell, Azuma-obaasan, what the hell? But Hikaru did hit her in the face at one point (by accident), so that was cool. Frankly I was hoping that she'd have an accident on her trip and die, which I suppose is harsh. But I just reeeeeeeeeeally don't like her.

I mean, if she feels that way about her own grandson, then how is she going to treat other disabled people that she knows. She was kinda awkward around the person she met with ADHD and Asperger's (which is understandable), but I wonder how she would've acted if she had known beforehand that he was autistic. Would she have treated him the same way she treats Hikaru (like he's a nuisance)?

Jeez, Sachiko's parents are much better people for Hikaru to be around, why aren't they in there more?

On the upside, Hikaru is now in his second year at junior high, and he's starting to take more notice of the people around him and what they are doing. That does cause some problems, but it means that he's growing. Too bad we don't get to know how well he does in future *gloom*.

New plan ladies and gentlemen

2010-07-29T17:19:00.002-03:00

So, there isn't much going on in my life right now, or much ever really. So there's really nothing to blog about.

Therefore... I plan to do more 'reviews', or summations, or whatever they are. Like the one I did about The Princess and the Frog. I've got novels, manga and movies so I've got a lot to work with. And it gives me an excuse to reread/re-watch stuff.

Bear with me people. And look out for posts on the Dragonball manga, since that's what I'm reading now. They'll be up whenever I get around to posting them.

This probably means I'm desensitized

2010-07-28T22:19:00.002-03:00

Some background:

A few years ago I discovered online manga and got really into it. I'd been watching various anime series for years before that, but then I found out that most anime series are based off of manga, so I switched over. Because I'm a reader before anything else. In the beginning, I would only stick to series that I knew like shows I watched and the manga I read in Shonen Jump. Dragonball/Z, Fruits Basket, Hana Kimi, InuYasha, Yu Yu Hakusho and all that stuff.

Eventually, I ran out of series to read. I had read all the series I knew about, or I was waiting for updates on the series I was still reading. So, one weekend, I started downloading random series from mangatraders.com. I picked titles at random from the selection and went crazy in the oneshot section.

At this time, I was still fairly new to manga and didn't see the warning signs on the manga I was downloading. I didn't look at the rating or the genre, and even if I did I had never before heard of yaoi or yuri. Or ecchi, but I could pretty much figure that one out on my own.

So while on there, I ran into my first yaoi with sex in it. I came across Memories of the Future (or Future Lovers, which is the American title). I thought the summary sounded all right so I downloaded it. It was only one volume long anyway.

I did not make it past the first sex scene. I didn't even make it past the beginning of the first sex scene. The clothes started coming off and away I went. This was probably also the first graphic sex scene I ever read in a manga. So that kinda ruined manga for me for a bit. Then I didn't learn my warning lesson and read Jisatsu Circle, because I'm an idiot, but more on that some other time.

Back to the present:

I was recently reading some manga reviews, trying out a smarter way to find new manga to read, when what should I stumble on but a review of Future Lovers. I didn't know that it was actually Memories of the Future, but some tiny part of my brain suspected it because the review sounded familiar. I looked it up on mangatraders and lo and behold, there it was. The yaoi manga that had scared the crap out of me the first time I read it.

Of course, since my first reading of Memories of the Future/Future Lovers, I have read many yaoi titles of varying sexy scenes, some tamer or wilder than Memories of the Future.

So I reread Memories of the Future and am now trying to figure out why the hell it bothered me so much the first time. I mean, it's not even that graphic. The Tyrant Who Falls in Love, Love Round, and My Paranoid Next-Door Neighbour, which I am all very fond of, and to name a few examples, contain much more graphic scenes than Memories of the Future.

Of course I built up to them, but still. I figure I'm just used to it now. Wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Even weirder is that Memories of the Future is on my 'manga to buy' list. Weird.

Did you get my text?

2010-07-26T17:38:00.002-03:00

Saw A Very Potter Sequel and I just loved it!

It's hilarious, very well planned and very well executed. They even brought in jokes from Starkid Potter's other plays A Very Potter Musical and Me and My Dick, and I caught on and that all on it's own made me happy. I usually miss the jokes... oh well.

Anyway, it was totally awesome! And I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Harry Potter and/or comedies in general.

And after rising from the dead...

2010-07-21T18:46:00.003-03:00

Hey, I'm not dead, believe or not. I've just been... Well, I haven't really been doing anything so I have no real excuse for the shitty posting schedule I have not been maintaining.

Soooo... point form! (everyone saw that one coming)

-The job I mentioned a few posts back turned out to be in the purchasing department at the company where my dad has worked for the past 20-odd years. It's pretty fun, I guess, it's work. And I'm getting paid 14$ an hour, 22$ while I'm taking over for my boss while she's on vacation. My job mostly consists of filing things, recording things and asking for invoices. It's pretty laid-back, so I don't have too much to complain about.

-What I do have to complain about, however, is that almost everyone is asking me when I'm getting a car. They think that, since I have a well-paying job, I'm going to go right out and buy myself a car. Well, no. First of all, I don't need a car, I don't go anywhere. I get a carpool to work and I take a bus to school, so I have no real need of a car. Besides, my parents let me borrow the van when I want (which isn't often anyway). Second of all, I only have a summer job, so when I go back to school the job is over and my income is gone. If I get a car, I'll have to pay for payments and gas and insurance, and that will drain my account pretty damn fast. Especially since I still have to pay for all my college junk and whatnot. And I'm sure that the people who keep asking me about buying a car aren't going to help me pay for it. 'Tis very frustrating.

-A while ago, we had family visiting from Toronto, my mom's cousin and his two boys (aged 11 and 7). They stayed for about a week and a half and I was so happy when they left. Really. My mom's cousin is an annoying douche and his kids aren't much better. The oldest is a pain in the ass who's just generally annoying, like the usual annoying kid multiplied by 3. The youngest isn't too bad, he actually didn't annoy me much at all. Their father was the worst, holy fuck. I have this thing where I smile for anything, it's an involuntary reaction which I have no control over and I hate. Well, he seemed to think I was laughing and proceeded to call me Smiley and annoy the fuck out of me the whole time he was down. I don't like it when people annoy me just to get a rise out of me, and I especially don't like it when people stare at me for no reason. It's quite creepy.

-On a lighter note, I recently went to a yardsale and bought a case of pogs for 3$, because pogs. I haven't seen pogs since I had some when I was a kid. I have no reason to have them, and I have no idea how to play the game, but I own pogs now, just because. I mean pogs! In 2010! Nostalgia much?

-Recently I have been unofficially diagnosed with CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) that I've apparently had since birth. From what I understand, my adrenal gland is producing too much male hormones. It actually doesn't bother me too much, but probably only because I don't have all the information, and I don't know what to think about it. If I've been like this for my whole life, then it must be fine because I didn't notice much out of the ordinary. I was never really like other girls, but nothing much noticeable. I dunno, I don't know enough to have a real opinion about this.

-And, last thing, my manga collection has grown to 82 books. I am very proud of myself and am enjoying being able to physically have the manga in my hands to read. It's better than reading it on the computer, more convenient. Ordering from the Chapters website has made it easier for me to collect manga because it's all right there and it's delivered to my house. This is great because the nearest bookstore is like an hour or so away from where I live.

Political correctness sucks, just sayin'

2010-05-04T00:17:00.002-03:00

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

This is very immoral, but also very funny.

I have a complaint

2010-04-30T15:36:00.003-03:00

I bought two volumes of the Conan manga at the con last weekend and I couldn't help but notice that the names were switched out. Like the American names are used instead of the original Japanese names.

All I want to know is, why? I know the manga is called Case Closed, like the dub, but there is no need to change the names. There really wasn't a need to change the names for the dub either but, whatever.

And they didn't even change all the names either. So you get situations like, two childhood friends who were born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and their names are Harley Hartwell and Kazuha Tomoya. That kinda makes no sense...

And I don't even know why it's like this because the names are fine in the French publication.

They don't change the names of the random suspects/victims/people either. So you've got a story set in Japan, but most of the main characters have American names. Nice going, Viz.

I haven't facepalmed over this since these two security guards on the dub introduced themselves as 'Baka Security' (shouldn't it be Baker anyway?).

COOOOOOOOON!!!!!!!!1111

2010-04-28T14:42:00.003-03:00

*Ahem*

So, this is a tad late, but here is the post where I tell about my trip to the anime convention.

So me, my mother, my friend, my friend's cousin, and her aunt went up to Halifax on Saturday, the day before the convention. After being dragged through shops and stores and a family restaurant, we made it to the hotel, which turned out to be the poshest hotel I have ever seen in my life. For srs.

The place had bellhops and chandeliers. I have never before seen that in a hotel in my life. My mind was blown. Anyway, our room was on the 11th floor and was small as all hell. Our room in the creepy hotel in Sorento was bigger, and that hotel sucked. We only had two beds for five people, and the beds weren't very big either. Oh well.

After a hockey game and a few anime episodes on my laptop, everyone turned in for the night and got up again at 7:30 the next morning, because we're masochists. Actually, it was probably good that we got up that early because we only made it down to the registration line-up by 9.

The line-up stretched from the registration counter all the way down two flights of stairs. Yeah, at least it moved fast. Me, Meghan and Hailey were floored at everything we saw, or I was anyway. I had never before seen cosplay in real life, and there it was standing all around me!

After registering, the first place we went was the vendors room and holy shit people! There were cosplayers everywhere, and I had a ball just pointing out all the ones I recognized to my mother. Then I saw the manga for sale and that held my attention for a while (at one table they were going for 4$ a book and at another they were going for half the US price, score!). By the time the con was over, I had 17 new books. If I had been allowed to use my card I would've gotten a lot more (really, you don't see those prices, like, ever). There was also a Ranma 1/2 DVD box set, but I wasn't about to shell out 50$ for it.

Other than the manga, I also got a Sanosuke key chain for my phone and a hat with bear ears. (I'm wearing the hat right now, actually, very comfy.)

After we spent some time in the vendors room, it was time for the opening ceremony and then the panels started. All the panels I went to were great, I had a so much fun just being around other fans like myself and I just loved the fact that we could all talk openly about anime, manga and cosplaying without getting dirty looks from non-fans.

Other than the panels, I also spent some time going around and asking various cosplayers if I could take their picture. I got some good ones too. I got Mario, Naruto, Riku, Link and Zelda, Jigen, Zuko, Colette, Light, Misa, Phoenix Wright, and a bunch of Kingdom Hearts people.

Also, there was a plushie making panel so I got to make my very own plushie. The only pattern available was for a riceball plushie, and I must say I did very well for a first-timer (although I stab myself twice with the needle... fucking needle).

We ended up leaving early (at like 5) because we live hours away from Halifax, so we left. And that was that. I will never forget this con and I hope that I'll be able to go to more. Maybe one of the big ones, I mean this one only had like 500 people, and I don't think there was even that many there. I'm hoping that one day I can go to Anime North in Toronto, but who knows.