S.C

Dr. W's Space Travels
2021-08-10 22:48:22 (UTC)

Space Cadet Falls for Musani Again

Just got back from watching the Shirobako Movie and I loved it! “Today was awesome!” That’s what I was thinking as I was driving back home from the Center Valley Promenade, in my lovely Spark, with rain pouring down. I could feel myself smiling a lot today – which is always a pleasant notion. I guess I’ll take the time to recount a bit!

After finishing work, I went to fill up my car for the very first time. Yeah, I bought it like a month ago and only just today refilled it with gas. I was surprised at how much smaller its tank is versus my Dakota (though it wasn’t completely empty when I filled it up). Oh, and I found out that it displays the number of miles it can go on the dash before running dry – how nifty! So then I drove out to the promenade, parked, and grabbed some dinner at The Fresh Market. I got a… *checks receipt* a Greek salad wrap and a non-alcoholic rosé-flavored drink. Sat down at my usual spot in the promenade grounds and had a lovely meal while listening to OneRepublic’s “Kids” on the outdoor speakers. I had like 35 minutes before the movie was to start (just as planned, because I love derpin’ around a bit before a movie), so I walked around for a little while and even stopped at Barnes & Noble to browse the manga section. There were some guys there talking about manga and I kinda wanted to chime in, but in the end I opted to remain silent. Ah well.

When I sat down for the movie, there were like no more than six other people in the theatre. Kinda made me feel good as Shirobako is a bit of a jealous love of mine, if that’s the right term to use for something that I want to be the subject of my admiration and my admiration only. But for the sake of practicality, I *suppose* I’ll share in the praise-giving with others. The movie rocked! I fell deeply in love with the original series – cried on both of the last two episodes and even gave it a standing ovation when it concluded. Just to provide a bit of context, it’s about five friends in high school vowing to someday make an anime together, and years later working towards that dream, albeit separately (for a while). It’s such a brilliant work that abandons tropes and common archetypes to portray both realistic yet still unusual personalities, and it makes the viewer really root for the animation studio to succeed in their ventures. It was especially unique in its ability to invoke feelings of stress in me. I was very overwhelmed simply as a spectator. Like, just watching Aoi Miyamori as the production assistant coordinate with every department – character design, animation, music, dubbing, storyboard creation, scriptwriting – made me feel so glad that I’m not in the anime industry. I mean, the thought of it is super cool, and I could totally see how fruitful it’d be for those dedicated to such painstaking hours… but fudge! I was so impressed by these characters for their tenacity, like they really worked their tails off. The movie was a marvelous supplement to the series, and while I wouldn’t say it brought anything *particularly* new, it rekindled the beautiful charm of the beautiful cast of characters working for the beautiful (and at times not so beautiful, but such is animation studio work) Musashino Animation. The movie did not fall any bit short of the precedents set by its accompanying series. I think maybe it was less stressful to watch than the series, but that could be just because the characters already had established a reputation of kicking booty in their line of work, so I had faith that they’d overcome the obstacles that were chucked at them. Such a good friggin’ show… and I know I say that about EVERYTHING, but Shirobako is just something that has an especially reserved section of my heart.

So now I’m home, still bubbly from the movie and the mini-adventure from today. Work has been fine this week so far. Yesterday and today were pretty easygoing. Well, easygoing by peak season standards. And by Musashino Animation standards. I haven’t heard anything yet about the underwriter job, but it’s at the top of my mind each day. Okay that’s kind of a lie, I have way too many other things perpetually on my mind for there to be room for work-related stuff. But I am genuinely eager to know what the scoop is with the job situation. I don’t know when to expect feedback or if I will get any at all. I asked about it during my interview but no set time was given. Which is understandable. It’s just that this is a really good time in my career to finally make a big leap forward. I’m at the point where my duties are getting very blurred. I spend a lot of time doing things outside of quoting: helping people solve technical issues, doing underwriting tasks like renewal processing and spreadsheeting for blocks of cases, doing other random crap my primary sales rep might ask me to do (and then deliberating in my head whether or not I’m being a pushover by agreeing to do it), etc. My direction is getting a bit convoluted and I think having a role as an underwriter will set me back on a clear path, if that makes sense. I’ll still have to be flexible with the projects that I partake in, even more so than I am now, but I think knowing that such flexibility is part of the job description will help me have a better sense of professional identity. I don’t know if any of that made sense just now – it makes sense in my head but sometimes my brain goes alingual and my typing fingers are just like “uh… so yeah, what exactly do you want us to write?”

I have a little less than an hour before the nighttime hygiene routine is in order. The day’s exhaustion is finally starting to catch up to me – I’m gonna sleep very well. I’ve been REALLY falling short of my goal to lucid dream, like sheesh that was a total fad. I do really wanna get back into it, though. I’m relying so much on the WILD method that I’m neglecting the other ways of achieving it. But whatever. If reality could be like how it was today for many more days to come, maybe lucid dreaming won’t be necessary. Eh, I might revoke those words actually. Always room to turn sleep time into ehhhhh my brain’s checked out, I don’t have anything further intelligent to say. Not that I had anything intelligent to say ever. I’m just a guy who thrives off of sensory experiences and talks about them in a way that sounds poetic at first but is really me just flipping through a mental thesaurus saying “yeah, that sounds like it’ll make me seem profound”. And then I call myself out on my own partially made-up BS to make me sound even profounder. All right this entry’s taking a turn for the worse haha I’d better wrap it up with a nice, simple, completely unprofound statement: today was a good day!




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