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.