Blog goals and creating happiness

     Post numero dos. Tyler reporting for duty, here to talk with you guys about creating your own happiness and about what the next few posts will be about. First: Evangelion hype.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

OH SHIT. What an intro.
If that intro didn't make you hyped, I don't know what will

     The post for my analysis of Evangelion is planned to be probably around 3-4 posts long, but it's kinda up in the air. Really depends on how in-depth I end up going in each of my posts. I intend to talk about the show's history/production, its characters, setting, theme, lessons, the conclusion, and most of all: delving into the character's psyches, figuring out what makes each of them tick and what that ultimately says about the staff who developed such a show. If any of these subjects sound interesting, don't be afraid to give them a read after I've released them. Hopefully everyone, even if not having watched the show, can enjoy the read. :)

Life's a blank sheet of paper

     Let's talk about goals. For some reason, last post, I didn't talk about my goal for creating this blog in the first place. The post consisted of  mainly talking about my history with my blog title and the focus for the future. But why make a blog? What's the goal of a blog? What's the goal of having a blog? Writing for me has always been a nice time to reflect on my life. In fact, this last semester I had an exceptional composition teacher who helped me figure out how to write well and not to sweat the small stuff. He helped students in our class not focus on grammar, punctuation, spelling, but more on the content of each paper. "Write down your thoughts first, fixing grammar and spelling mistakes comes after the thoughts are down" he'd say.
     Every day we'd write about anything for 10 minutes to find our writing voice. We'd use this new found voice to create papers about subjects we find interesting. 2 out of the 6 papers were open ended, so we could write about whatever we wanted using the free writing skills we had learned every class period. To be honest, that's probably one of the things that sparked my interest for writing, especially writing this blog. It allows me to get these intangible thoughts down into writing and in turn, lets my mind become less clogged. Think of it like a mind-toilet or something. Anyway, I can spew stuff down on this blog and get my thoughts out there. It's a great feeling and very therapeutic for me and I imagine for other people as well.
     Man, man, man, aside from that, I've been working on some school papers as well. We recently watched a movie called "The Ramen Girl" in my Comp 2 class because we've been talking about multiple perspectives. How the rest of the world (or at least America) thinks of ramen as this poor college student food, but places where ramen originated have it as this comfort food. Japan's perspective is much different. Becoming a ramen chef is a well renowned/respected profession there. How everyone wants to stand outside the shop, waiting for the doors to open up so they can eat some delicious food after work or school.

I wouldn't mind waiting outside for 20 minutes to sit down
at a place like this.

I remember reading something....somewhere (real descriptive, I know), that people who spent more time on other people were in turn, happier with their lives. People who spent money on other people and made those people happy, in turn made themselves happy. This past Christmas reminds me of that a lot, it was the first Christmas I had bought presents for my family (as well as the first Christmas I even had money to spend). I'll challenge you guys who are feeling down, or sad, to try giving something to the people you care about, or even anyone at all, and see how that makes you feel. I know it made me feel pretty good to see the happy look on my family member's faces when they saw I bought them a present and I hope the same happens for you. On the subject of making others happy:
     In 2011 and 2012 I had attended an anime convention named Anime Iowa. In short: it's a convention for anime fans to come, cosplay, go to panels, meet guest speakers as well as people who are interested in the same things as they are. Averaging around 3500 people for AI, it can get pretty crammed. My introduction to these events was with my former girlfriend: Amanda. She had always been into cosplay and sewing so, of course, she wanted to bring me along. I had never even heard of these conventions before, and it sounded like a pretty cool time so I wasn't opposed to going, I just wasn't comfortable with dressing up.

One of the best Jessie/James cosplays
I've seen

Dealer's room (at AI)
Huge gymnasium where people sell anime related things,
Japanese candy and even some original content

Bleach photo shoot
Lots of people like to take photo shoots with others
from the same series

Reflecting on the event now, the only conclusion I can come to, is that I wasn't really confident in my body, or of myself in general. You have to have some balls to walk into the convention center, dressed as some anime character or game character - walking around while people ask you for pictures. It seemed like it'd really stress me out, and as a result, I decided against it for my initial year. It really makes me wonder if there's other people like me in this community. Maybe the people who don't want to cosplay simply don't attend conventions? When I visited, both years, presumably around 80%, if not more, of the attendees were cosplaying. Maybe I'm a weirdo for not dressing up, who knows. Despite that, you're still treated as an equal. That's a really cool aspect of this community. No matter your decisions or opinions, people are, most times, really nice. Yeah, there are always those bad seeds, elitists, who think they're always right and you're always wrong, but screw those guys. Doesn't matter what they think. Be you and let them deal with it.
     "So why bring up anime conventions?" you might ask. Well, I've decided to do some writing volunteer work for this particular convention for the pamphlet/schedule. You can find the website here. I don't think it's going to be much, if any, creative writing, but more of rules/regulations, scheduling, guest appearances (what shows/games they've been in, or how long they've been in the business) among others. My group is pretty much the last because we have to receive information on schedules from the other groups before we begin creating the pamphlet. Because of that, the work for us doesn't really start until May/June (apparently June is going to be crazy busy).
     Well..that's kinda all for now. Remember to keep tuned for the Neon Genesis Evangelion analysis posts. I'm really looking forward to finishing those. Hope you guys enjoyed, and I'll see you next time. Stay cool, internet.