(no subject)

Wah, reading telophase's visual analyses of manga and watching Fruits Basket seems to have reawakened my long dormant desire to read manga! I am doomed. I hit the peak of my anime/manga obsession around senior year of high school, and I actually bought the entire set of Rurouni Kenshin and brought it over to America! That's a whopping 28 vols. Someday I need to ship over my collection of X, Mars, and assorted Yazawa Ai manga. Although maybe I'll just succumb and re-purchase all of her Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai in Japanese at the Kinokuniya here.

It's sort of funny, because I know people around me on LJ have been getting into manga for quite some time now, but I always sort of stood off to the side. It's still a little strange watching people go through the first stages of obsession, mostly because I remember doing it myself back in high school. I would think I'd be more nostalgic and happy about it, the way I am when people I know start to get into Buffy and Angel for the first time, but it's just so strange because all of my old favorites have just started to be published here, or people are reading all these new manga that I haven't heard about. I suspect my knowledge of anime/manga is still stuck in 1999. It is very strange though -- Rurouni Kenshin, the manga that got me started on manga, has only really recently started being published here. I still remember eagerly awaiting book 21 to come out in Taiwan, 6 years ago. For me, it's long concluded and over, but for people here, it's still new. Same with X. Well, not concluded for me, but prematurely ended! Grrr. And I look at all the shelves of manga at Borders and Barnes and Noble, and I don't know what to pick up anymore. It also doesn't help that they're still so expensive here. Used to be about $3 a volume back in Taiwan, and I can't quite justify shelling out so much yet.

So I've been reading people's entries and being very happy about that, but not quite getting into the spirit myself. But then I found out Nana by Yazawa Ai, possibly my favorite manga series, has finally been licensed! Joy! Celebration! I keep wanting to make everyone read Yazawa Ai, but only Paradise Kiss is translated right now, and that's far from my favorite of her series. Now I've been hankering to reread Nana and to finally read vols. 6-9. Except I lent vols. 1-3 to someone and never got them back before graduating.

Today I ventured out to Kinokuniya in search of the first three books and discovered it's up to vol. 12 now! Yikes! Of course I got them. But the store didn't have vols. 1, 3, or 10, so I have special ordered them from the SF store. And (you see where this is heading) I found that there is a Nana artbook!!!!!! I am so excited!!!! It's a Yazawa Ai artbook!!!! The only other one I have is from Gokinjo Monogatari, which I like, but not half so much as Nana! Also, I adore her artwork, because it's so different from typical shoujo style. I spent much more money than I should have because of that artbook. But... it's so pretty! And for some reason, buying them in Japanese makes me feel a little better because they're imported and still cheaper than the translated versions. So far... Plus, this way I don't have to wait for them to be translated, hee. And I shall also sort of justify this as a way to practice my extremely rusty Japanese.

You know, with all this talk of manga going around right now, I was sort of contemplating ripping off my thesis and cobbling together a brief history of shoujo manga/shounen ai, or a brief intro to the Japanese language or something, but I'm not sure if that would be entirely pretentious and telling people things they already know, or what. I think I researched so much for my thesis that I can't tell anymore. And it's sort of odd because I remember first getting into anime and people online spouting their "credentials" and the like, which is partially how I ended up in East Asian studies, but I really don't want to go off and sound like I am some know-it-all, because I am far from knowing much about it at all...

I spam LJ

I am currently gorging myself on all the figure skating Tivo has recorded for me. This is one of the reasons I love Tivo -- I always want to watch things like figure skating, but I never know when they're on or what channel they're on. With Tivo, I can just plug in keywords and it finds them all for me. Unfortunately, each competition is about 3 hours worth of viewing time. And they record even more for the big ones, so I have about 10 hours of the World Championships recorded! But... pretty people doing pretty things on ice. I am susceptible.

The plus is that I have mostly mastered knitting while watching TV, so I can at least be somewhat productive. Today's figure skating watching has produced four inches worth of the front right panel of my hooded sweater jacket. I think I'm even starting to work out a system. I've got sticky notes all over the pattern so I can keep track of my rows, as well as the stitch and row ratios. The pattern is supposed to be knit using Lion Brand Color Waves, but all the colors they had when I checked out Jo-Ann were really ugly. So I'm using Homespun. It knits up nice and nubbly, especially with garter stitch, but the problem is it's not really a twisted yarn. Instead, it's a whole bunch of fibers wrapped around with a thin thread, which makes the bumpy texture. But that means it twists up very easily. Grr. And I had to translate the gauge and everything, because it's not quite the same gauge as Color Waves. So far it seems to be going ok. I've found I knit mostly to gauge, although mine is just a wee bit larger than normal gauge. Sigh. It's frustrating because it measured out fine in the beginning but ended up changing! Also, despite tightening my end stitches, they're still a little uneven. Actually, all of my knitting right now is a bit uneven, but luckily I seem to have gotten out of the habit of dropping stitches. Amazingly, all those dropped and added stitches back in childhood seem to have helped.

Forthcoming projects include a mini afghan, a short-sleeved top in lavender alpaca, another cute top knit in the round (haven't tried that yet) in black cotton, hopefully with a pink ribbon, because if nothing else, I am incredibly girly, and this in green and gold yarn. elann.com is evil and tempts me with cheap yarn. I'm also tempted to pick up the yarn for this, but I think I should probably finish something that's not a scarf (and the dozen other projects I have planned) before getting even more yarn!

Luckily, I have a knitting group once every two weeks and another one every week at work. And lots and lots and lots of figure skating to watch....