thanks giving week

It's Thanksgiving down in the States, hope everybody enjoyed getting exposed to the germs that will give you the colds you'll just be getting over by the time Christmas rolls around and you get exposed to them again. You'll notice this cycle occurring with people that go to a lot of conventions, as well - you pick something up from the show in January, pass it on to somebody at the anime club meeting, get it back at next month's anime club meeting, give it to somebody at the spring convention, pass it on... by the time the summer rolls around the exhibit halls and video rooms are full of coughing, hacking disease vectors. I don't go to that many conventions any more but I managed to pick something up from AWA. Too many babies, I think. What happened to that trend of keeping babies in controlled, air-conditioned, sterile environments until they were 12 or 13? Did we just give up on that?

It's astonishing to remember exactly how much time I was spending on 'fandom' back in 1988-1992 or thereabouts. I went to six or seven conventions a year. I went to monthly anime club meetings. When we were publishing the anime club newsletter, that meant a weekend of composing the text, printing the thing, envelope-stuffing, address-labelling, and mailing. I was in two or three APAs that had bi-monthly or quarterly schedules to meet. I was coming back from every anime club meeting with a stack of tapes to copy for people. And remember, this was pre-Internet so keeping in touch with people out of town meant letters, writing actual physical letters and swapping tapes through the mail, which meant going to the post office. By the mid 1990s I was the OE of one APA which meant assembling the whole thing and taking 25 or 30 APAs to the post office and trying to convince them I didn't need to file for a bulk mail permit. We were driving out to Dallas every year for A-Kon, that's five days right there. By 1995 we were prepping AWA and that meant more meetings, more weekends and spare time taken up.

When did I sleep? I know I did things like see movies, date girls, see bands, buy records, work part time jobs, go to college... I just don't know HOW. It's a wonder I accomplished anything, I was always moving in eight directions at once. Unable to focus on any one thing long enough to actually get it done RIGHT. I still have that "do a little bit here, a little bit there" mentality, but if necessary I can focus. That would have helped when I was in college.

It's actually kinda shocking that I have a job and a car and a marriage and a mortgage, all that adult responsibility stuff. I was definitely headed down that lifestyler-fan path I'd seen so many adult fans take - working a crap part time job, living in an apartment with two or three other single guys, filling your life with role-playing games and fantasy art and expensive VHS sets of Star Trek episodes, late nights with soda and chips and fuzzy bootlegs of "Legend Of The Super Heroes", never seeing the sun, doing laundry only on extreme occasions, bumming rides off of long-suffering friends, watching your health and bank account dwindle as your marketable skills get less and less marketable and convincing "mundanes" that you are a worthwhile employment risk gets more and more difficult. I make fun of those guys, but it's because I could very easily have been one of those guys.

As to what's wasting my time NOW, you can check out Cousin Brucie Meets Mother Goosie at the Mister Kitty Found Sound bunker, as America's favorite DJ cuts a nursery rhyme comedy album.



Then you can hop over to Stupid Comics and listen to a bunch of 11-year olds and a robot tell you not to smoke. Smoking is bad.



At least THAT'S one bad habit I never picked up. And yeah, I did have to help clean up the spit cups from the bleachers after high school football games. EUUUUCHHHHHHHHHHHH