12-24-2002 Usotsuki.
As I'm sure many people who have visited AnimeProjects.com have noticed, John and I broke up about three weeks ago. I tried my best to not make it an obvious or political thing, as that's simply not my style. However, I don't also have to appreciate the fact that some other people couldn't take the proverbial 'high road' in this matter, which brings me to the one place where I can truly express myself without having to worry about how anybody feels, the rants.
I don't generally consider myself a bitter woman. I've been through a lot, and I've learned much, so I don't really have a reason to be angry for something that was bound to happen so long as the events kept on escalating as much as they had. I'm not going into the personal details of the breakup, other than I was on the giving end and it has honestly hurt me more than it has him, as you can tell from the way he talks about me.
This rant is more about the differences between reality and anime, and how one's greed can inflict so much suffering that it almost inspires me to drop this whole website and let the kids fend for themselves.
While there were many things unhealthy about the relationship, the biggest chunk of the pain came from his need to own everything anime, to the point of not only disgusting his peers with his constant drawls about "Lain" and "Boogiepop" but to make the only woman that will deal with all of his problems give up and walk away. This is why there is an unwritten and unspoken law that two otaku in America never hook up: While anime may have brought them together, it will eventually rip them apart. John's need to have everything became the most important thing in his life. The nameless and faceless people that looked to his cry for attention in his desktops and homepage only fed his insane greed. At midnight every night he would stop everything and take my computer to see how many people visited his website that day... where they lived, the types of computers they used, what they liked the most. Then the snorkling sound that I came to love when he was happy became my telltale sign that I was once again the last priority and I would head off to bed again, lonely and heartbroken.
I never understood how he could go on hurting his friends and me because he was more important and timely than anything else.
Money was always a problem. Money is always a problem when trying to get items from Japan. Two problems don't make a solution. I would beg John to take me places... Los Angeles and Santa Monica to visit our friends in the anime import stores, to Mission Valley to visit our other friends at Rising Sun Creations, to the Asahiya Bookstore in the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Kearny Mesa... anywhere that I could feel close to him. I didn't even mind giving him money to buy anime. I know now that I enabled this to happen, but I don't regret it at all. I believed that if I helped him buy things he would somehow love me more every time he looked at these things I bought for him, and that the love I showed getting him these things he couldn't afford, and I really couldn't afford either. Instead, it was all a trophy, including me.
Every club meeting he would be kind enough to offer to drive me, and I still don't know if it was out of kindness or the fact that my cars are bigger than his so he could bring more of his things to show off. He brought his books of B3 posters, computer (not a laptop, but one of the deranged lamp-like iMacs named Cortana), boxes of things to scan, his bag of DVD's (just in case he didn't like what we were watching), and various other things that changed on a weekly basis. I usually had a small bag or two of anime to give out to the members or DVD's to watch that day. In total, he had to call people from the club to come down and help grab things out of the car to bring to the meeting, and it usually took 5 people, including himself. He would show up late, and only have a few hours left (which in anime terms, isn't large at all) and by the end of the meeting, complain that when I wanted to talk to him or ask him how his day was... I prevented him from doing God's work: Updating his website. Actually, it wasn't always updating his website... it changed on a weekly basis too. Sometimes he blamed me for his lack of website updates, the stacks of unscanned and "unprocessed" books and magazines in his room, the amount of hours he had to work in his job, as well as other menial things that I stopped writing down because I stopped caring. I consider this the first sign that anime just *might* be a problem here.
Not to skip around, but now that I've established a beginning to the pain, I might as well go in order of how I began noticing things. Next were the trips to LA and the money I spent. It started as a "Oh honey, you don't need to do this for me. Are you sure? Well, if you say so..." in the beginning to "I do plenty of things for you" a week before D-Day. It really hurt that his want for more items and character goods drowned any compassion and kindness in that big head of his. Every time we went to LA I began noticing that I would buy less and less yet the bill would get higher and higher. More of his things would end up on "my side" of the table that belonged to him and he would just go and "pay me back later". I should have noticed it then, but he hasn't paid me back jack in the 18 months we were together.
Heck, I even tried working with him on AnimeProjects.com to get close to him again. I love Saishuuheiki Kanojo... Chise is my personal Jesus. I would help him get to the official sites and check up on things so he always had the correct information and the fastest way of getting that information in America. He even asked me to help him write the character synopsis pages, but I couldn't do it the way he wanted me to, and so I was fired. With the exception of Onegai Teacher goods, I probably helped contribute or gave him 60% of the materials on that site so it wouldn't suck. What I couldn't get him, I made sure I hooked him up with a pal of mine over at USAnime.net so they could give him things that I could never get alone. I still had to remind him to give me credit on the links and credit pages when the site finally went up.
The final straw came on a day when I asked him to take me out on a date. He didn't have to pay for the tickets or brunch, he just had to be there for me. He decided to spend the previous day all the way until 6 AM on my day in LA to scan cels at the house of a girl that I don't even know. I was invited to go over there by one of her friends, but I respectfully declined the offer because she did not directly invite me and I didn't feel comfortable... it's just the way I was raised. I reminded him several times within the two weeks before this event what time to be at my house so we could leave in a timely manner, cause I don't like being late to semi-swanky events. He called me 45 minutes before we were about to leave to brag to me about the girl's house, and was angry because I didn't jump and down with glee. Then, I was accused of conspiracy theories so that he wouldn't have the time to go with me and how he was so looking forward to spending time with me. Had he just hung up the phone and drove down, he could have made it to my house in time to leave. Instead, he yelled at me for a half an hour straight telling me how terrible of a person I was because I didn't get thrilled about this girl and that I apparently didn't want him to go to this event. I had to put my makeup on all over again, put on my pretty face, and went without him... my mother decided to take me instead. In the last 5 minutes she took the phone out of my hands, told him to stop yelling at me and that if he stepped on my property that she would call the police... I was that afraid of my safety. That night I either had to end the relationship or write my will. I talked to several of my friends that took shifts to protect me just in case he came to the house wanting to settle something, and I put everything that was his into a giant box that my mother volunteered to drop off at his work so he wouldn't have a reason to see me.
So this is where I am now. It hurts, I would be lying if I said "I did it, and I'm glad". I am glad because I'm alive to tell about this, but a large portion of my emotional self wasn't ready to embrace the fact that anime was and is more important than I am. In fact, I think it's something that I doubt I will ever get over.
I don't generally consider myself a bitter woman. I've been through a lot, and I've learned much, so I don't really have a reason to be angry for something that was bound to happen so long as the events kept on escalating as much as they had. I'm not going into the personal details of the breakup, other than I was on the giving end and it has honestly hurt me more than it has him, as you can tell from the way he talks about me.
This rant is more about the differences between reality and anime, and how one's greed can inflict so much suffering that it almost inspires me to drop this whole website and let the kids fend for themselves.
While there were many things unhealthy about the relationship, the biggest chunk of the pain came from his need to own everything anime, to the point of not only disgusting his peers with his constant drawls about "Lain" and "Boogiepop" but to make the only woman that will deal with all of his problems give up and walk away. This is why there is an unwritten and unspoken law that two otaku in America never hook up: While anime may have brought them together, it will eventually rip them apart. John's need to have everything became the most important thing in his life. The nameless and faceless people that looked to his cry for attention in his desktops and homepage only fed his insane greed. At midnight every night he would stop everything and take my computer to see how many people visited his website that day... where they lived, the types of computers they used, what they liked the most. Then the snorkling sound that I came to love when he was happy became my telltale sign that I was once again the last priority and I would head off to bed again, lonely and heartbroken.
I never understood how he could go on hurting his friends and me because he was more important and timely than anything else.
Money was always a problem. Money is always a problem when trying to get items from Japan. Two problems don't make a solution. I would beg John to take me places... Los Angeles and Santa Monica to visit our friends in the anime import stores, to Mission Valley to visit our other friends at Rising Sun Creations, to the Asahiya Bookstore in the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Kearny Mesa... anywhere that I could feel close to him. I didn't even mind giving him money to buy anime. I know now that I enabled this to happen, but I don't regret it at all. I believed that if I helped him buy things he would somehow love me more every time he looked at these things I bought for him, and that the love I showed getting him these things he couldn't afford, and I really couldn't afford either. Instead, it was all a trophy, including me.
Every club meeting he would be kind enough to offer to drive me, and I still don't know if it was out of kindness or the fact that my cars are bigger than his so he could bring more of his things to show off. He brought his books of B3 posters, computer (not a laptop, but one of the deranged lamp-like iMacs named Cortana), boxes of things to scan, his bag of DVD's (just in case he didn't like what we were watching), and various other things that changed on a weekly basis. I usually had a small bag or two of anime to give out to the members or DVD's to watch that day. In total, he had to call people from the club to come down and help grab things out of the car to bring to the meeting, and it usually took 5 people, including himself. He would show up late, and only have a few hours left (which in anime terms, isn't large at all) and by the end of the meeting, complain that when I wanted to talk to him or ask him how his day was... I prevented him from doing God's work: Updating his website. Actually, it wasn't always updating his website... it changed on a weekly basis too. Sometimes he blamed me for his lack of website updates, the stacks of unscanned and "unprocessed" books and magazines in his room, the amount of hours he had to work in his job, as well as other menial things that I stopped writing down because I stopped caring. I consider this the first sign that anime just *might* be a problem here.
Not to skip around, but now that I've established a beginning to the pain, I might as well go in order of how I began noticing things. Next were the trips to LA and the money I spent. It started as a "Oh honey, you don't need to do this for me. Are you sure? Well, if you say so..." in the beginning to "I do plenty of things for you" a week before D-Day. It really hurt that his want for more items and character goods drowned any compassion and kindness in that big head of his. Every time we went to LA I began noticing that I would buy less and less yet the bill would get higher and higher. More of his things would end up on "my side" of the table that belonged to him and he would just go and "pay me back later". I should have noticed it then, but he hasn't paid me back jack in the 18 months we were together.
Heck, I even tried working with him on AnimeProjects.com to get close to him again. I love Saishuuheiki Kanojo... Chise is my personal Jesus. I would help him get to the official sites and check up on things so he always had the correct information and the fastest way of getting that information in America. He even asked me to help him write the character synopsis pages, but I couldn't do it the way he wanted me to, and so I was fired. With the exception of Onegai Teacher goods, I probably helped contribute or gave him 60% of the materials on that site so it wouldn't suck. What I couldn't get him, I made sure I hooked him up with a pal of mine over at USAnime.net so they could give him things that I could never get alone. I still had to remind him to give me credit on the links and credit pages when the site finally went up.
The final straw came on a day when I asked him to take me out on a date. He didn't have to pay for the tickets or brunch, he just had to be there for me. He decided to spend the previous day all the way until 6 AM on my day in LA to scan cels at the house of a girl that I don't even know. I was invited to go over there by one of her friends, but I respectfully declined the offer because she did not directly invite me and I didn't feel comfortable... it's just the way I was raised. I reminded him several times within the two weeks before this event what time to be at my house so we could leave in a timely manner, cause I don't like being late to semi-swanky events. He called me 45 minutes before we were about to leave to brag to me about the girl's house, and was angry because I didn't jump and down with glee. Then, I was accused of conspiracy theories so that he wouldn't have the time to go with me and how he was so looking forward to spending time with me. Had he just hung up the phone and drove down, he could have made it to my house in time to leave. Instead, he yelled at me for a half an hour straight telling me how terrible of a person I was because I didn't get thrilled about this girl and that I apparently didn't want him to go to this event. I had to put my makeup on all over again, put on my pretty face, and went without him... my mother decided to take me instead. In the last 5 minutes she took the phone out of my hands, told him to stop yelling at me and that if he stepped on my property that she would call the police... I was that afraid of my safety. That night I either had to end the relationship or write my will. I talked to several of my friends that took shifts to protect me just in case he came to the house wanting to settle something, and I put everything that was his into a giant box that my mother volunteered to drop off at his work so he wouldn't have a reason to see me.
So this is where I am now. It hurts, I would be lying if I said "I did it, and I'm glad". I am glad because I'm alive to tell about this, but a large portion of my emotional self wasn't ready to embrace the fact that anime was and is more important than I am. In fact, I think it's something that I doubt I will ever get over.
P.S. AnimeProjects.com is currently down because of bandwidth problems, but it should be up no later than the 1st.
posted by Nuriko at 11:11 AM
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