A Manga for This?

Dearest Rachel –

Some days, when I’m recording what’s happening to me, in order to assemble it into a letter to send to you, I find myself distracted (if that’s the right word) by the events surrounding me. Granted, these are the very events that I’m trying to take in so as to tell you about later, but in the process of taking them in, I’m “in the moment,” and not really trying to come up with thoughts to arrange in such a manner as to make a particularly coherent, let alone compelling or engaging, narrative about it all. As a result, you get letters like yesterday evening’s, which I’ll be the first one to admit that it was pretty choppy. But I felt like I had to get it down and get it out, or you wouldn’t hear about it at all, and that would be considerably worse than the one-cheek job I did on it, to be honest.

The other complaint I have about busier days, when I’m simply trying to take in and record the surrounding events, is that I don’t really have time to focus in on certain minutia as I do so. There are things that catch my eye as they swirl about me, some that could, on a slower day, easily be an entire letter in and of themselves, but there’s far too much actually happening to spend time going into detail about this one little flash of something in my peripheral vision. Far too often, I have enough trouble documenting the activity of the day as it is; when everything is going on, it’s too frantic to record, and when I get a chance to take a break from it all, I just want to rest my mind rather than trying to finish the story.

You can probably guess that yesterday was one of those kinds of days. Heck, I felt it, and if I can see it, I can only imagine how it looked to you. But it was also like this insofar as I would catch a glimpse of something, and find myself wondering about it, but also letting myself know that there wasn’t time for that level of reflection in my writing. There was stuff to do, things to see, people to talk to, and just all sorts of things to take in, and there was only so much time to do all that in, and presumably, write it all down, however hurriedly and haphazardly. Save the ruminations for days when nothing is happening, okay? There’ll be plenty of those kinds of days in the future, I can guarantee myself of that (although somehow, I’ve still always managed to have something to write to you about, no matter how slow things have gotten from one day to the next).

Given that today promises to be ‘one of those days’ – or at least it seems to be, thus far – I figure that I can tell you about something that I saw on the convention schedule that I contemplated going to, before deciding that no, it wasn’t worth hanging around for the extra couple of hours when we were all basically tired and had seen everything we wanted to otherwise. Behold the blurb for the panel entitled “There’s a Manga for That?”:

You’ve read it all by now, action, fighting and drama. Well, how about a manga to learn calculus? some programming? or a manga about a lonely cockroach girl? We will dive in and find some of the more obscure/weird manga that have been made. Audience participation encouraged!

The point of the panel is that, if you can imagine a topic, there’s been a manga made about it – and probably hundreds of them, in fact, of various aspects, perspectives, permutations and what have you, depending on the subject matter in question. It’s basically a more family-friendly form of Rule 34 of the internet; if it’s a topic, it exists in manga form.

In theory, the possibility exists that there’s a manga out there that, while not exactly following the same details, might describe various aspects of my own life. Just over the course of the weekend, I’d been introduced to a title that begins with the girl’s passing and funeral, and then goes back to cover the relationship between her and the male protagonist (although in this case, both were aware of her terminal condition from essentially the moment they met, so… but admittedly, it still sounds interesting), another that covered a fellow’s attempt to find a girlfriend that got so desperate that he decided to rent one (and there, most of what was told to me about this was thoroughly negative; not for the whole transactional aspect of this relationship as much the story’s refusal to progress one way or another; everyone I heard hated the fact that this milksop couldn’t admit to himself or the girl that he really liked her, for instance). And let’s not forget how many stories that all but center on widows making ends meet as landladies who become possible love interests (see Maison Ikoku and Chobits, just for two prime examples), or that get kicked off with the blending of siblings due to their parents getting married (from Marmalade Boy onward – and probably before, come to think of it). Except… that last one would be something happening to Daniel, assuming I were to find Megumi, and she happened to have kids (although if they were Daniel’s age, you’d expect they’d likely be out of the house, and married with kids by now).

And that’s where it falls apart. Much as I’d like to read the manga of my life – particularly to find out what happens next, so that I could steer clear of certain possibilities, and accelerate others – I doubt it would feature a character anything like myself. I’m too old to be a protagonist anymore. While I admit that my mental self-image tends to be about half my real age, all it takes is a quick look in the mirror to remind me that I’m only a white-haired pretty boy in terms of having lost most of the color atop my head. Then again, seeing as the trope suggests an evil heart behind those good looks, maybe my physical shortcomings speak better for me.

It still wouldn’t net me a leading role… at least, not unless I wrote it myself.

In which case, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.