I've done a lot of moving since starting my undergrad studies, taking the transience of college life to something of an extreme. I did try to take root and make connections at first, spending all of first-year at New College of Florida in Sarasota. Then I decided to give the National Student Exchange a try and spent a semester up in Boston. Too expensive to stay the full year, so I made the trek back to Sarasota for, oh, about another year. Then I upped and moved to Charlottesville, VA for a while, followed by Boston again, and back to Charlottesville... Until finally I ended up at home with the 'rents about two months ago where I hope to stay put for at least a year.
All this traveling is great for meeting people (albeit briefly) and getting a feel for different regions of this, our most eclectic country. But gypsy life can be stressful, especially if you also happen to be a literature major with a view that keeping books is equivalent to or better than keeping a journal. I'm up to nine hefty boxes now, and that makes it rather impossible to just toss everything in the back of the car and take off. In the midst of all this moving about—on top of constant classes, part-time work, and all the mundane drama that goes along with college life—I realized I had to develop a way to relieve the built up stress. Preferably a way that didn't involve more books...
Enter my first anime. I went through all of Naruto up to the current Shippuden episodes in under two months. That's roughly 370 episodes... or 142 hours of watching anime. Okay, so maybe it wasn't just a way to cope with stress. Somewhere along the way I crossed the border between reasonable stress-relief and otaku-in-training. When I caught up on Shippuden I signed up for Crunchyroll (see Otaku Resources) so I could get the latest episodes as soon as they were released—who has the patience to wait a week?
Fellow US otaku will recognize the temptation of Crunchyroll's Shinji's Deal of the Day, which offers hard-to-resist discounts on all things anime and manga. I did pretty good for the first few weeks. Character figurines and dolls didn't really pose too much a threat to my wallet, nor did I particularly want deals on bundled volumes of Bleach—I've still not got round to checking that series out. The collection of Kakashi-sensei useless items did make me drool a bit—a flashlight with a sharingan light beam would be so cool, right?! Still, I managed to remain level-headed and keep control. You all know where this is going. Blast Shinji and his daily deals! When he offered me a year subscription to Otaku USA for only $10 I cracked. No matter that, young otaku that I was, I'd never heard of the magazine before. Otaku was in the title and damn it I wanted it. Yeah, I really get hooked on diction.
Well, I don't really mind. The October arrived in my mailbox a few weeks back (Still confused about that, actually. October in mid-August?) and it's so jammed packed with interesting tidbits... So worth the ten bucks. I'm still not completely through it since I inevitably do research in between reading their reviews, and end up watching entire series before coming back to read more. Plus there are so many words I'd never heard of before, all of which require further research! Waifu, for example, in reference to certain characters, voice actors, etc. I'll share the results of this research in a post soon.
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