I want to be someone's white knight.

Listen to me out there. No one can hear me. No one cares about what I have to say, regardless of what I do say. I don't want to sound depressed, angsty, or emotional to the point that you throw down this page in disgust--I want to make clear the point that, in my mind, I see a little bit of my own emotion that I want to show you today through my prose.

I don't think you'd understand, and yet you probably do. That sense of loneliness you get when you realize that something is wrong with how people see you.  That sense of loss you feel when you realize that your voice is one among millions, that you are a single molecule in an ocean the size of the Pacific. I am not useless, I have skills, but at the same time I have nothing more than my desire to be heard driving me on towards the next tomorrow.

Friends are difficult to come by when one does not deal well with conversation. Conversations can drag on, on and on and on, emotions can tangle themselves up in big knots that one can then feel the consequences of, and sadness can creep into every aspect of someone's life before they know what has happened.

When you are sad, and you have no one to wrap their arms around you, there is a certain feeling that you have to understand only comes around in this miserable, filthy state of mind. The state of mind when you want somebody who understands you. Someone who, maybe not fully understands the entirety of your being, but gets you enough to know that you are hurting on the inside.

Where is the pain coming from? Is it going somewhere? Why do we keep feeling defeated like this, when the pain is driving us so crazy that we think it will never end? Where can we find solace from this never-ending fall from the cliff that keeps rising higher?

But I digress. I have nothing to say other than the thoughts I am scraping off the top of my mind. What I write is what I feel. I am trying to understand it, to describe it, to gather it up, my courage, and tell it to people straight, that I can do things that I don't understand.

I don't understand. But I do. Every last bit of that feeling in my chest has to come from somewhere. From where I do not know--all I know is that, sometimes, it goes away, and other times it is still there. I just want to be noticed. By someone. Anyone, someone who understands who I am and what I'm struggling with.

Which is to say, not much. I do not have that much emotional pain within me. But it does feel bad to get ignored completely by the people who I once thought were my friends, who I thought would stay by my side even after I went crazy and started believing things that weren't true.

But that's too much. I hope this post could, at least, open up someone's heart and let them see what they might consider to be a well of good-natured heart.

Anime you've never heard of: Joshiraku

Rakugo-source-Wikipedia Commons

I'm going to be doing this a lot because I'm out of things to do. My anime of the day that you probably haven't heard of: Joshiraku. https://myanimelist.net/anime/12679/Joshiraku

It's an anime about one of Japan's most honored and traditional art forms, Rakugo. Rakugo translates to "Fallen Words" in Japanese, and is a performance art where a single storyteller sits on a pillow in traditional style and tells a story from multiple perspectives using only their voice and their body language.

Joshiraku--Source: Myanimelist.net

But this show isn't about the actual performance. It's about five girls and the meta mayhem they get up to behind the curtain in the dressing room. There are a lot of quick-worded pure Japanese word games thrown about, and a lot of heavy deep culture references that Americans--not even the culturally relevant ones--would get. There is also a lot of enjoyable straight up plain comedy that will get pretty much anyone laughing.

Notably, the middle third of each episode features the five girls in street clothes going to famous locations throughout the Tokyo Bay area. It's a pretty good replacement for an actual sightseeing tour, and you'll get to learn a lot about Japanese culture and tourism.

Be warned, there is a little bit of sexual humor, but I'll be arguing in my next post why this should be tolerated by Americans as a cultural allowance in the same way we tolerate other cultural artifacts.

Overall, the best way to enjoy this deep dive into Japanese language and culture is to binge it all at once, because this show is one that you shouldn't miss. If you want to become an anime aficionado, you have to try this show, or else your portfolio won't be complete.