Ever since they cut my head open and told me not to do anything stupid to it

[snarp]

I react nervously to high winds, because I worry that a branch will fall on my head.

Relatedly, my hair has grown back enough that you can't see the incision, but there's gotten to be a dent in my temple. I first noticed it maybe a couple of weeks after the surgery, but it's gotten deeper; apparently this is muscle atrophy and normal. It's only barely visible, but I think I need to come up with an untruthful explanation for its presence anyway. Swordfight doesn't really make sense, so I guess it was a hammer fight?

(I would have appreciated it if they'd mentioned Head Cratering as a possibility at the hospital. When I first noticed it, I thought I'd somehow shoved the metal plate out of place.)

Unrelatedly, I guess I'm finally watching The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi? Kyon kind of sucks.

Comments

[sophisted]

Aw, I love Kyon. Maybe he'll grow on you as the reasons for everything starts coming to light? Are you watching it chronological or canon order?

[snarp]

I've been watching it in chronological order, but I just hit the end of the series, and now I'm kind of thinking I should have done it the other way. This doesn't really work.

I just think Kyon's overly passive. Also, I do not appreciate the apparent message of the series (frequently embodied by said Kyon), that it is not valid for Haruhi to be dissatisfied with her life as a Japanese high-school girl. Because that role means that you're being put through a harsh, competitive educational system with arbitrary standards, and indoctrinated in a highly-codified but self-contradictory set of sexual behaviors - both of which you'll be shamed for trying to use later in life. While there are much worse places to be in terms of material comfort, it's certainly a position that would give a person good reason to feel angry and trapped.

This is my problem with a lot of manga and anime with a school setting. With certain notable exceptions, probably the most common message about school life is, "you should be happy, and if you're not, you're doing this wrong." I don't think it's especially healthy that that message is so prevalent in media aimed at adolescents - particularly in a country that's got one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world. While this is something that American teen lit probably overdoes, I think Japanese kids could use more manga and anime that says, "Sometimes it isn't you who's crazy. Sometimes it really is the world."

That said, this series was aimed, if I understand correctly, at adult men. So I care less than I do when this kind of thing shows up in LaLa or Shounen Jump. But the pattern bothers me.

How about

[(Anonymous)]

You were the subject of a forced trepanation wrought by a mad (or possibly just rogue) scientist intent upon sealing the vast mental potential stored within your brain, lest your wrath be unleashed upon the hordes of the unthinking and discourteous.

Re: How about

[snarp]

I prefer personal mythologies in which I hit people.

[ajnabieh]

I have a metal plate in my leg, after they thought the best way to repair a crack between two screws was JUST TO CUT THEM OUT AND LEAVE A HOLE THERE, WHO GAVE YOU MEDICAL DEGREES, GENIUSES. Anyway. After the surgery for the plate, I threw a clot and had a pulminary embolism, which left me slightly paranoid as you could imagine.

Like a year later, I was sitting in my cold dorm room, idly running my hand down my leg. And then: SHEER TERROR. There was a spot on my leg that was COLD. REALLY COLD. It was really cold and I could feel something raised there and OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I'VE THROWN ANOTHER CLOT I'M GOING TO DIE RIGHT HERE and that was when I realized it was my plate. Which was metal, and right beneath the surface of the skin, and therefore colder than my body because the room was cold.

That was fun.

I won't tell you what happened when I got the cyst on my ankle. It involved making my best friend sleep in my twin bed with me in case I died in the night.

maybe you were fighting a hammerhead shark? with a hammer? and it got the hammer away from you?