#only other option is that she keeps ending up working at places Asa goes

[imsocialshit]

Here's how Kobeni fans (me) can still win

I'm just choosing to believe the person who gave Chainsawman blood a few chapters ago was Kobeni. It couldn't have been Yoshida because he wears different shoes and there's only a handful of people who would have motivation to do this.

In my heart of hearts it's either the Devil Hunter Club Prez or it's Kobeni, and I"m hoping it's Kobeni.

Mostly because it's funny, but also because I miss her and want her to come back.

[darklightsworld]

So I got Yamashita Tomoko’s White Note Pad. First the second volume, than the first a day later, but even before that I flipped through the book, and it blew me away. I generally like Yamashita Tomoko, and some of her works have an incredibly big impact on me. Hibari no Asa was like that for example, where you witness the narrative spiral down to the sexual abuse of Hibari, while people know about it and intentionally choose to do nothing against it, some even wishing for it out of jealousy - very unsettling. And White Note Pad was just as unsettling for me, and it doesn’t let me go.The basic setup of the story is, that an average 17-year-old high school girl and a 38-year-old guy switched places. However, it’s quite different from all the body switch stories, and we start the manga when they accidentally meet for the first time - one year after they switched. The guy (I will refer to them by their original pronouns) comes off as a real asshole at first. He has been fully enjoying his new life as a young girl, polished herself, became a reader model, and never really cared about what happened to the original owner of the body. And there is the girl, who was suddenly treated as someone with a memory loss, barely keeping herself alive in the body of a not really attractive middle aged guy after having to quit the guy’s original job she knew nothing about. The guys now helps the girl to get a part-time job at the magazine he works for, and things slowly start to change for them.

In a way it’s a story of restarting your life, but what got to me was the unfairness of the whole thing. Because no matter how you look at it, the girl got the shorter end of the stick. As a child, still depending on her parents, she was suddenly stuck in the body of an adult man without family to fend for herself - while the guy ended up in a loving family providing for him, but even if it wasn’t like that, he was already an adult knowing how to survive alone. And well, there is a big difference in restarting your life from zero at 17 or 38... The guy also seems to realize after a while that the girl’s life and future were destroyed and he wants to help, he also wants to live the life she would have lived, but the girl knows it’s impossible. And it really is. They are two different people, the lives they create in their new bodies are different from both their original lives and the original lives of the other - they become new ‘selves’. ‘The who am I’ is a reoccurring question of the manga, also because their memories start to mix after a while.

Another crucial question is love. The guy is unable to be alone, because he feels lonely, and he starts dating a young part-timer from her workplace - a guy, although he wasn’t gay, but it goes well for him. There is however the girl in an adult man’s body - inexperienced in love and sex, afraid of the male body, she was still only dreaming about love, and although at first her heart is throbbing meeting guys she might have liked before, she soon gives up. After jerking her male body off for the first time she’s sure, even if they ever switch back, she won’t be able to love a man anymore. In general she’s pretty resigned about everything, because it can’t be helped anyway, but there is a drama in the fact that she doesn’t even seem to realize what was taken for her. She says, not everybody needs love in their lives, which is perfectly true, but she was not given the option to consider. The same with her life. At 17 you rarely have the final answer of how you want to live your life, everything changes, it’s trial and error, but her options were limited a lot, and being in an adult body the expectations are also different, and failure is grave. It is great she’s not despairing about her situation and is trying to make of it what she can, but there is something heartbreaking about her giving up things she would have had in her original body, or how she’s saying she’s not afraid of death, and when pointed out that she feels like that because she’s young, she’s wondering if she would die young - which she will anyway.

For me another tragedy was that in the male body the girl had no family to lean on anymore. The guy’s mother passed away, no other relatives. In the first year after the switch she was helped by a friend and an almost lover (who get together in the process), and afterwards she’s generally well-liked for being hardworking and nice, but being alone in the world can be hard, I think. I love living alone, I couldn’t do it otherwise, and don’t ‘need’ my family in my daily life, but _knowing_ there is a family makes a difference. This made me think about the unavoidable, how I would also be without this background in (hopefully) over 20 years, and yeah, that hits hard.

Later in the second volume the guy gets the body pregnant - at 19, way to go to mess up another life, but at least he’s aware what it means for his new life. The manga ends with the guy and the girl traveling together and the guy considering the options, but we don’t know if he decided to abort or not. The manga finishes on a positive note that they both are empty white note pads. To be honest I wanted to have a bit more definite ending, not to mention their chances to do something with their new lives aren’t exactly the same, as described above, so no, you can try to change, but you are not an empty sheet... I think you can get many different things from this manga (you can also read it for gender or societal expectations towards different ages and genders and so on), and depending on how old you are you will read it in a different way, because it resonates with your current life. For me it’s a very upsetting and fascinating manga, and Yamashita Tomoko is a genius - give her an award already!

[canaryatlaw]

alright. so today was pretty chill. I woke up to my alarm at 11:30, which I intentionally set 15 minutes earlier than I normally would’ve because it was going to be 80 degrees out and I knew I had to lug my giant suitcase in from our back porch area (it’s not really a porch) and dig through it until I could find a tank top and some shorts. luckily it didn’t take me very long to do so, so I just had some breakfast and chilled out for a bit. I opted to walk again because the bus options were like 12:09 and 12:38, which obviously neither work for me to arrive at 12:30. I loosely timed it today and it took about 15 minutes to walk there, so not bad (at least when you’re used to living in a city without a car and walking everywhere). PT session was good, I think I’m gonna have to tell the guy that the exercises he has me doing right now are too easy haha because he’s like “okay do 30 bridges’ when at the other place I’d moved up to doing single leg bridges with a 15 pound weight on my chest, so I could do 30 normal ones in my sleep lol. but other than that it was good, I like it there, it’s a bit smaller than the other place but everyone is very friendly and cordial, so that’s good. Got out of there are 2, walked home, had some lunch and tried to get some studying done. I did the remaining two secured transactions lecture videos from the bar website back to back, so I could get the rest of that info into my brain, then I downloaded an outline from outline depot, which I was slightly irritated about because none of the outlines I uploaded had been reviewed yet, meaning I didn’t get a credit for them, so I ended up having to shell out $20 for the outline (which, like I said last time, is really a fair price compared to other options, it’s just annoying when you know you could’ve gotten it for free). I can’t really blame them though, it’s finals time and I’m sure they have a ton of people like me trying to submit outlines last minute so they have a ton to go through. I had decided I wanted to make vanilla pudding and an apple crisp, the pudding to use the two egg yolks I had in my fridge that were left over from me making the meringues the other day, and for some reason I just wanted apple crisp. the pudding was simple enough, milk, sugar, cornstarch, egg yolks, vanilla and butter (and a few other minor things) and that all came together quite nicely. After that I went back to my computer and made a table of contents sheet for the outline so I don’t have to waste time flipping through it trying to find stuff during the test (or at least have to waste less time doing so). I had gotten a new ink cartridge from amazon, so I went ahead and stuck that in there, then printed the outline. I decided to print my notes too, just because it’s better to have more information, even if they’re pretty sparse because I didn’t quite pay attention for most of the class. So I printed all that a hole punched it so it’s ready to go in my binder. I then wanted to make the apple crisp. I had three granny smith apples in my fridge, so I found a recipe that could work with that. Peeled and sliced the apples, made the crumb topping (which turned out super good, not entirely sure why, but it was heavenly) made a flour/butter/brown sugar mixture to coat the apples in, then stick it all in the pan and put it in the oven. It was ready around 6:45, perfect timing for me to get some and go watch The Flash. apple crisp is obviously a solid dinner choice. As far as The Flash goes, well, it was definitely not my favorite episode, by a long shot. the whole council of Wells thing is a great example of just because you can doesn’t mean you should (which is what I tweeted while watching it), it’s just so overdone at this point and I really don’t want to see Tom Cavanagh playing any more ridiculous versions of the character. so that was not my favorite. I liked the stuff with Iris getting back to being a journalist FINALLY (we’ve only been asking for that for like, 2 seasons now), but I can’t say I was too into the whole Amunet Black storyline, I just didn’t really care about her, and the entire goal they were aiming towards was kind of nebulous and the stakes weren’t really there. Not sure what to make about the Caitlin/Killer Frost storyline at this point, I am very much against character attacks on both Iris and Caitlin, especially when it’s because of a ship, and I’ve seen some WA shippers attacking Caitlin for being selfish, and I feel like, at the very least, that is lacking in empathy. I very much ship WA and love them together, but I don’t harbor any ill will against Caitlin, a fictional character, who shouldn’t be demonized because some people ship her with Barry. But anyway. Not sure how I feel about that whole thing and where they’re going with that. When that was over I switched over to Rise, which was a very intriguing episode. First off, I have to say I kinda hope Lilette’s mom gets arrested for child neglect, because she is very much guilty of it at the moment. like, you can’t just walk out and leave your teenager alone for days, doing nothing to take care of them during that time, I don’t care what you’re going through or what happened between you, you’re a fucking adult and a parent, you don’t get to just storm off and leave your kid alone. So obviously that bothered me a bit, for reasons that I would think are pretty apparent at this part. The whole plot about cleaning up the show I found to be rather amusing, because to cut all the things they wanted to there would like, be nothing left in the show lol. All of it is so essential to the characters, and hearing them sing “YEAH YOU’RE HOSED ALRIGHT” was really fucking amusing, I was legit laughing at that. Being that next week is the season finale and the night of the show, it’s pretty obvious that they’re gonna end up saying fuck it and do the correct version of the show, though I’m sure that will have repercussions. The storyline about Maashous gave me a lot of feelings (again, for obvious reasons) and I hope they play that out in a way that is doing justice to the source material and the many real children who end up in these situations. When that was over I switched over to Amazon Prime Video and watched a few episodes of The Good Place before starting to get ready for bed. At some point during the day, I don’t remember when, I checked my email to find one from the tech company I had done the two phone interviews for, stating the classic “thank you for applying to this position, we’ve decided to go another way” rejection letter style. I was honestly somewhat relieved, because if I ended up there I was *very* concerned that if I got it I was going to end up hating the job and just being miserable. Of course though, that knocks out one of my Illinois prospects, leaving the only active one to be the DV clinic, which isn’t exactly a job prospect, but I’m really hoping if I just knock everyone’s socks off I can turn it into one. Whether I stay here or not is still going to end up turning on what happens with the NYC job, which I should be hearing from any time now, but it does make it somewhat harder to justify staying in Illinois on the basis of having more prospects and opportunities here when one of those is gone. At the same time though, job prospects in New York would also be quite limited, there really aren’t any active possibilities, the only somewhat active one would be interning at the county attorneys office (they do the job the ASA’s do here in child welfare court) unpaid until I get officially sworn in as an attorney in November/December, then *maybe* they’ll hire me, as they are currently stating they’re only looking for licensed attorneys for their positions. I’m kinda disappointed I didn’t hear back from any of the other jobs I sent all those applications to, mostly because I felt like a lot of them were very strong and would give me a good shot at the job, but I guess being straight out of law school is just not something they’re looking for right now. So yeah. that was a massive tangent. I still have mixed feelings about the NYC job, because I don’t want to leave Chicago, but I want that job, and there’s not (currently at least) any options for that job here, and who knows when OPG will lift their hiring freeze, it’s already been in place for over a year, so hedging my bets on that it’ll be lifted soon doesn’t seem like a good decision. Sigh. I keep praying about all of it and saying if you want me to go to New York then make this job happen and I will, if not don’t make it happen and I’ll stay here, so I’m hoping that job with be somewhat of a sign of what I should do. I am somewhat of the opinion that “God’s Plan” for our lives isn’t one set path, that we have free will to make decisions, and (as long as it’s a good decision) He will find a way to bless the path we take. That idea was first told to me by one of my theology professors in college, after I went to her with a very broken heart after certain events, and was broken up about what was meant to be and who I was meant to end up with. She said there was a book, I don't remember the exact name, but something along the lines of “Good news for the anxious Christian” basically communicating the idea that God will find a way to bless whatever positive decisions we make, and that really stuck with me. Sadly enough, the next semester, that professor happened to be one of “The 8″ that had been terminated by the school in the incident that led to the whole “Support the 8″ campaign where basically the entire undergrad study body was infuriated and the administration was very, very shook. So when they were collecting letters I wrote one supporting her along with the one I wrote for Derek (theatre professor that was the heart and soul of the undergrad program who they carelessly fired) and emailed her to let her know I had done so, she was out on maternity leave at the time (which of course makes it that much worse that they fired her). I just wanted her to know that the students were actively supporting her, and she responded very thankfully. That was all such an unfortunate incident...I’m really, really off a tangent now, and it’s past 1 am, so I think I will take my leave now. Goodnight dear friends. Be blessed.