My last few blog posts...

...for awhile, anyways. Here's the update: I'm halfway moved out. I'm up late. I'm lazy. WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD, read only if you have time.

Now is the time to look back on the past year. I know I've learned more this semester than any other semester in college. (Is this Shayne posting? Where's the stupid, shallow jokes? Sorry, not this post. I have a fairly deep personality, but it isn't shown often. Which is the very definition of deep, really, isn't it?)

For some reason I'm in a philosophical mood tonight. I seem to get that when I watch Lester's anime. They're nothing like I've seen before. It's strange, I enjoy them, and... Lester may not even know this, but...

...Anime was(is?) my sworn enemy. It wasn't recently acquired because of being exposed to it, It was like this a couple years back, before I actually even really saw my first anime.

"But why? WHY?!" You might ask.

As you may or may not know, I'm a computer programmer. All computer programmers are nerds (programming is a subsection of nerd). I've got a stereotypical view that all programmers are watchers of anime. "I must separate myself from this," I thought, "or else I will go so deep into the realm of nerd from which I'll never escape."

Looking back on it, how dumb. It's almost as if I thought I could create a new perspective on programming (and solving problems through programming) by depriving myself of anime, which is just essentially another medium of the transmission of thought. I now realize that it is not the depriving of certain experiences (i.e. Selective Naiveness) that creates a unique perspective of life, but rather it is the interpretation of the experience that makes you, you.

I'm not saying that one should experience everything that they possibly can ( alcohol, drugs, getting lost in the Forrest, killing a man, losing control, taking Tynenol, eating, breathing... you get the point), no matter how illegal, how exciting, how mundane, how trivial, or how essential, but that whatever it is you choose to do, it is part of what you have become, even if what you do is nothing. Before you put this thought into practice, remember, all actions have reactions, some of which you can never recover from.

What is life? Life is experiences. Seeking stimulation, that's what every living thing, all the way down to bacteria, does. Life is also many other things, but that's a topic that's been done to death.

What does anime have to do with this? I'm getting to that, shut up.

But if you really must know (and if you're still reading this, you probably do), I don't really have anything against anime. "But why is anime your enemy?" you ask. Because I wasn't thinking straight. I thought that by avoiding the experiences that my negative stereotypical views of who I was about to become was going to make me turn into something everyone hates: Being like everyone else.

Well, I was wrong. A person can experience the same thing, but could have a completely different interpretation than that of anyone else. I was viewing it as a simple math equation: Same inputs, same outputs. This is not the case. A person could take his first taste of alcohol and love it and what it does, where as another person could have his first drink and fear what it can make him become. Then there is all the other things that could have happened.

I don't hate anime. In fact, I realize it is not my enemy (it is not watching the anime that makes me a nerd, it is how I would respond to it that does). I simply choose not to let it control me. There are a bunch of good anime series, and a bunch of bad ones. Thanks Lester, I saw some good ones.

Wait... what was my point? I forgot. Sorry to waste your time. Goodnight.
-Shayne Riley