Author: Lauren Orsini

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Tanaka-kun should get his thyroid checked

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2018 was not a particularly productive year for me. I didn’t write any new books and I barely kept up my blogs. Instead, I watched a lot of anime and took a nap nearly every day.

At first, I thought maybe my endless fatigue was a symptom of depression, or complacency, or another problem that lay squarely inside my head. But as I kept losing weight and my hair started falling out, I realized I needed to get help. From June until December, I saw four different doctors. I received a few different diagnoses—some of which were way scarier than others.

Thanks to support from my family and friends, I kept trying until I found a doctor who was able to diagnose me while taking all of my symptoms into account, not just one or two. In the end, I was diagnosed with a thyroid disorder called Hashimoto’s Disease. I like to joke that of course I got sick with a disease first discovered in Japan, but as a woman in my 30s with a family history of the illness, I fit the profile. In hindsight, I’m surprised the diagnosis didn’t come sooner.

December was incredible. Hashimoto’s means that your thyroid isn’t producing the hormones your body needs to function, so after my diagnosis I began taking synthetic hormones. Right away I noticed a change. I replaced my daily nap with a daily run, something I used to love to do before walking got me winded. As I began to regain my energy, I realized just how deeply the constant sleepiness had started to feel like a part of my personality, like a part of who I was.

In Tanaka-kun is Always Listless, Tanaka-kun is defined by his fatigue. It is more a prominent point of his personality than any interest or hobby. All of the people in Tanaka’s life must work around his inseparable fatigue if they want to be close to him. What’s incredible about the story is that even though Tanaka’s personality can be inconvenient, nobody tries to change him. Instead, his best friend Ohta literally carries him where he needs to go! If you’re born that tired, I guess it’s normal. Meanwhile, my own listlessness, which came on suddenly, was an enormous problem in my life and something I devoted my remaining energy toward trying to fix.

Ohta never tries to change Tanaka, even when his listlessness is inconvenient.

Of course, Tanaka-kun isn’t a medical mystery drama. It’s a very sweet low-key anime with jaw-dropping backdrops far nicer than it deserves (thanks to its setting of Hiroshima Motomachi Senior High School, an architectural marvel). It also sounds great. I could never skip the intro or ending song, which were both light and slow but just rhythmic enough to be addictive. Tanaka’s fatigue had parallels to my own, but escaping into his world was much more fun.

Then in January, my exhaustion came back. Watching Tanaka’s daily life wasn’t so fun anymore. The fog of sleepiness had just started to lift and it was doubly frustrating to lose my energy. I’d just started to get excited about the things I was going to accomplish in 2019, and all of a sudden my life was once again about how much work I could get completed between naps.

I was disappointed until I figured out what the problem was: I was pregnant.

The thing about thyroid disorders is they mess with your fertility. I had just about given up on starting a family of my own. But after I started taking the medicine, that problem vanished, apparently within weeks. And because we have a specific societal image of what it means to be pregnant (morning sickness, which I haven’t experienced and which is rarer than the movies would have you think), I didn’t realize that for me, the main symptom I’d have would be run-of-the-mill sleepiness. Apparently, creating a tiny human body can take a toll on you.

Pregnancy turned out to be a lot easier to diagnose than Hashimoto’s, and I have mostly gotten this second round of fatigue under control. (At least until my daughter arrives—I have a feeling that she’s going to be an excellent source of sleepiness for years to come!) But it’s made me a little frustrated with Tanaka. I am more than my tiredness, and there turned out to be a diagnosable cause for it—twice. But Tanaka doesn’t look for treatment. It’s treated as his personality quirk. Maybe he just has anemia or something! Along with Aoyama in Clean Freak! Aoyama Kun, I’d like to see him get some medical attention for a symptom that makes for an entertaining show but is probably making his life more difficult than it needs to be.

Tanaka may be inextricable from his symptoms, but he is still capable of change. At pivotal moments he realizes how difficult his listlessness is on Ohta and vows to walk himself to class (after all, it’s the least he can do.) It’s at these times I have the most sympathy for Tanaka. I know how hard it can be to do basic tasks when your body is screaming to lie down.

In times of good health, I thought of myself as little more than an ambulatory brain, but my physical condition has a huge effect on my behavior. I realize this is something only an able-bodied person would just be figuring out now, but better late than never! I am more than my symptoms, but it doesn’t always feel that way. On days when even medicine doesn’t help, I might as well take a cue from Tanaka and just go with the flow.

How Leaving Twitter Is Helping Me Set Boundaries

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If you’re mutuals with me on social media, you may have noticed that I am on a Twitter break. It shouldn’t be such a big deal to me to fully log off Twitter for a week, but here we are. And this time, it’s not only seven days. This time, I’m going to see how long I can last.

This is almost a year to the day since my last one-week Twitter purge. Then, like now, the anime community was going through a lot of tension and even trauma. Both times, I knew I had to break the cycle of checking Twitter 100 times a day, and that for somebody as anxious as me, the only effective solution would be to go cold turkey.

It worked last time, after all. It took months for me to reinstall the Twitter app on my phone and nearly a year to feel like my habits had once again become so unhealthy, I needed to quit. As usual, the feeling of miserable withdrawal, of needing to know what’s happening right now, has dissipated after a few days. And in this newly blank space in my mind, I’ve realized that by stepping away from Twitter, I haven’t just undone a bad habit. I’ve also set new boundaries.

I’m an older Millennial, one of the first people to grow up both before and after the internet. I got my first AIM screen name when I was 11. I remember the first piece of advice I got from my parents and teachers alike: “Don’t talk to strangers online!” We laugh about that now.

I’ve spent ten years talking to strangers on Twitter with plenty of benefits. I got my first job in journalism because of a tweet. I have more than 8,000 followers, which feels like an accomplishment. I’ve had hundreds, sometimes thousands of people press “like” on a joke I made or an article I wrote and linked! That feels amazing.

Do you know what feels worse? Screwing up in front of that same-sized audience, and having to deal with the fallout. And even worse than that? Random attacks I didn’t cause and don’t deserve, like that time some Twitter users figured out I have Jewish ancestry.

For better or worse, Twitter makes it easy to reach out to strangers, and for strangers to reach out to you. You can tweet at people you admire and slowly develop a rapport with them simply by replying to one another’s tweets, and before you know it, you’re friends.

Or are you?

Right now I’m wondering if it’s so good to be so available to anyone who reaches out to me. Right now I’m wondering if the connections we make over the internet really run that deep.

2019 will mark the tenth year I’ve had this blog, which is only the latest and most enduring in a series of blogs I’ve had since middle school. If you send me an email through the contact form asking for career advice, I will tell you all about my own career and maybe throw in some issues I’m dealing with right now. I will work through a problem with one or three people I know mostly online. I recently tweeted about going to therapy, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but maybe not the kind of thing that everyone needs to know.

Now I’m wondering how healthy it is to give away so much of myself. How much trust or time should I give to somebody I met online? I tend to see everybody as a potential friend, every writer as a potential collaborator or colleague. But recent events have shown me that just because somebody likes the same cartoons as me, they’re not necessarily my friend.

Before I left, I experimented with cutting down my Twitter feed. Instead of looking at the feed itself, I created a list of Twitter users whose tweets I don’t want to miss, but that slowly got too big to handle. Interestingly, a lot of the people I put on the list are people I see only a few times a year at cons or even people I’ve never met once. Am I intuitive enough to really be as fiercely loyal to and supportive of these people as I have been?

Then I started using a tool called Block Chain that allows me to block a troll and all of his followers. I used to avoid blocking anyone at all because, as we all know, if you block somebody you “lose” because they made you upset. (After all, I don’t want to be in my “bubble” and refuse to hear “the marketplace of ideas,”, which in practice means letting anyone who wants to tell me I’m stupid. The future is dumb.) This got rid of interactions in bad faith, but then I started thinking about how real bad actors would be clever enough not to let me see that side of them.

Finally, I realized that the best way to extricate myself from all this is to just not participate. It’s a privilege to simply check out. It wouldn’t work if I were currently getting paid based on the number of clicks on my articles, for example. It’s not a perfect solution. But it works for me, for now, at a time that I feel like my intuition is broken and I’m not sure who to trust.

Here’s what used to give me alarm bells: when somebody would ask me a question about anime, or building Gunpla models, or writing about fandom which I’d promptly answer… and they’d immediately turn around and ask me three more. The more quickly I wrote back to this type of person—the more available I made myself to them—the more they’d take advantage of it. These days, if you ask me a question I tend to let it sit there for a couple of days and it’s not because I’m ignoring you personally, but because I’ve been burned too many times.

Anything and everything gives me alarm bells now. My alarm system is broken. So at least for the near future, I’m sitting this one out.

What it felt like to cosplay again after ten years

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The best compliment I got on my cosplay came the following day. I returned to MAGfest in normal(ish) clothes and ran into somebody I’d met in cosplay the previous day.

“You were Kokichi?” he asked. “I didn’t recognize you.”

I must have had the biggest smile. I’d wanted to spend a day as one of my favorite characters from Danganronpa instead of as myself, and at that moment I felt like I’d succeeded.

On Friday I cosplayed in public for the first time in about a decade. I wore my last cosplay, Mako from Nerima Daikon Brothers, in 2008. After that, I wrote a book about cosplay, appeared on Fox News to speak about cosplay, and went on q radio on the Canadian Broadcasting Channel to do an explainer on cosplay, among other media and event appearances. A lot of this has had me dispelling common myths about cosplay. Yes, you can make your outfit from scratch, assemble it piecemeal from clothing stores, or buy it outright, and it still counts as cosplay. And yes, a million times yes, anyone can cosplay, no matter their age, appearance, resources, whatever. I guess it was only a matter of time before I started taking my own advice.

Left: November 2018 eyeliner test with old wig. Right: new wig mid-styling.

It took me several months to get ready. I relied on the kindness of other cosplayers for which costume and wig to get. I got a recommended costume on Amazon and a wig from the same seller. But after two different attempts, I listened to another cosplayer and bought a new wig from The Five Wits that looked good even before I styled it. Since I wear contacts and have no problem sticking stuff in my eyes, I got circle lenses from Pinky Paradise to complete the look.

My very understanding hairdresser helped me give my wig defined, lasting flipped ends using got2be glued hairspray and toilet paper rolls. An enthusiastic Sephora employee helped me figure out how to turn my eyebrows purple. After a couple of different makeup trials, I figured out the right combination of Pinterest tutorials to contour my face and enlarge my eyes so I could try to look more like a 2D teen than a 3D woman. Overall, I spent so much time on my wig and makeup alone that I have renewed awe for cosplayers who also construct their own outfits. By the end of the transformation, I didn’t just look like a different person, I felt like one, too. 

I wanted to have the full cosplay experience, so I asked my friend Barrett to do a photo shoot with me in and around the beautiful Gaylord atrium. The best photos we took were Barrett’s idea. It was lightly misting at night and he suggested I stand in front of the lit Ferris wheel. It had a halo effect that complemented Kokichi’s megalomaniac personality.

I also timed my cosplay with the day of the official Spike Chunsoft photoshoot so I could meet up with other cosplayers (one of whom was also dressed as Kokichi)! I felt like an extremely old lady when I first showed up at the meet but slowly began to get comfortable after realizing that everyone there was just as into Danganronpa as I was. There’s no age limit on fandom.

I was also surprised by how much more respectful the cosplay world is compared to ten years ago. After I cosplayed at Katsucon 2008, I was afraid to do it again because I could never guess when a stranger would recognize my character and envelop me in an unexpected hug. Since then, the Cosplay Is Not Consent movement has had a major impact. Before our photoshoot, a MAGfest volunteer gave us all a talk about no touching without permission. There were several instances during the shoot where people asked for explicit consent, like when photographers asked for cosplayers to pretend their characters were romantically involved. (There were also Gen Z meme references like dabbing and T-posing.) The kids are alright.

It took me half a day to start responding when people asked “Kokichi” for a photo, and a little longer than that for the poses to come more naturally. I wasn’t very in character because I was genuinely smiling all day, I was having so much fun. Meanwhile, Kokichi is a pro at faking emotions but not so much at really expressing himself.

Kokichi’s personality ended up being a real detractor for me later in the day. After the photo shoot, I connected with a card game creator who had photographed me earlier. He gave me a prize card from Dangan Werewolf, a fandom mod that combines Mafia, Werewolf, and the Danganronpa games. We got a group of cosplayers together to demo the game, but I had a very hard time being taken seriously because Kokichi would never tell the truth. I hadn’t planned on roleplaying Kokichi, just dressing the part, but as other cosplayers got into character, I realized that maybe next time, that’d be another way to have fun in cosplay, too.

Cosplay was a new and remarkably intense way to celebrate a fandom and connect with other fans, using my entire body to express that passion. I’ve compared cosplay at a convention to characters walking around at Disney World in the past: it’s one of the coolest feelings to know that any time you attend a convention, you could see your favorite character in the flesh. But what’s different here is that anyone can cosplay—you don’t need to wait for somebody else to cosplay a character you love; you can choose to do it yourself at any time.

Overall, what really made my return to cosplay great were the attitudes of other cosplayers. Even though I’m older than the average cosplayer, even though I bought my cosplay instead of making it, I felt completely welcome. It felt amazing to take off my wig and heavy false eyelashes and ten layers of makeup, but now I’m anticipating the next time I’ll have an opportunity to cosplay again.

2018 in Review: 9 questions to help you process and reflect

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Welcome to the last Otaku Journalist post of 2018.

Usually, I mark the end of the year with a holiday shopping guide for anime fans, or some remarks on Otaku Journalist’s birthday (turned nine in November!), I’ve decided to wrap things up a bit early this year. As a freelancer, my work grinds to a near halt after Thanksgiving and doesn’t pick up again until January. I’ve decided to take advantage of that by visiting friends and family, traveling for the holidays, and celebrating at least 5 birthdays including my own.

The end of the year is a particularly arbitrary benchmark into which I assign a LOT of importance. My New Year’s Eve ritual involves at least an hour of journaling on what I learned in the past year and what I hope to accomplish in the year ahead.

And so, for this last post, I’m revisiting an exercise I started last year, and which I encouraged readers to join in on, too: looking at my year through nine questions. Fittingly, that’s now one for every year this blog has been in existence! Read my answers, and maybe try it for yourself, too.  

What made up your body of work this year? Which parts are you most proud of?

What were your top 5 moments of the year?

  • Watching the sun rise over the Kamogawa River from my rented Kyoto villa.
  • Guesting at Anime NEXT and getting to talk to a new audience about geek careers and Gunpla building. Also, en route, having the best Philadelphia cheesesteak of my life.
  • Moving the final item (a Skyrim figure) to our new house.
  • Taking the Japanese English conversation club to the Maryland Renaissance Fair and realizing it’s weird no matter which culture you’re accustomed to.
  • Hearing the laughter and applause at our midnight Otakon panel on Gundam humor.

What are you really glad is over?

The move! John and I lived in our apartment for seven years and accumulated a lot of stuff. We thought since we were moving a block away, it would be easy to just make lots of trips before and after the movers came. Instead, we unwittingly made it a lot harder.

Then there was the process of getting unpacked, buying furniture for a larger place and figuring out where to put it, all the while fixing any surprises that came up. My weekends disappeared as we spent them working on home improvement when we’d rather be playing video games.

By the time we hosted Thanksgiving, we had a fully-furnished downstairs, two guest beds, and I even knew where all of my plates were. That’s when it finally felt like home.

How are you different today than you were 365 days ago?

I devote my time to different things. I used to put a lot of emphasis on putting aside time for myself and my work; these days I’ll drop everything for my friends. I think that means my values have changed. I care less now about making my mark on the world and more about just living.

Is there anything you achieved that you forgot to celebrate?

I wrote a lot more fiction than I have in years. I think completing NaNoWriMo 2017 made me more comfortable with creative writing. Also, allowing myself to write stuff without immediately sharing it with the world has made it easier to experiment with my writing style.

What have you changed your perspective on this year?

Living with uncertainty. I’m trying to remember that motivational advice about how life is not a dress rehearsal, it’s happening whether you’re ready or not. So I just need to live in spite of not knowing, enjoy the good days without worrying if bad days are on their way.

Who are the people that really came through for you this year?

John was incredibly handy, replacing a burnt-out dryer cable, rewiring the ethernet through the attic, and bypassing more than one $300+ electrician bill with a $4 part and some Gunpla tools. He also made a great travel partner and fellow convention panelist. And of course, he’s been supportive of me in general no matter what. We’ve been married for five years this year!

My Japanese English conversation club became a much bigger part of my life. We began with weekly study groups and expanded to weekend events like pumpkin carving and a painting party. It’s been amazing to realize I’m still capable of making new, close friends in my 30s.

What were some pieces of media that defined your year?

The Danganronpa franchise. I can’t thank Sarah enough for recommending I try it at Anime NEXT. It led to a new obsession for me and my friend group plus my first cosplay in a decade.

Avatar: The Last Airbender. Believe it or not, I never watched it before 2018! My friends and I have been doing a remote watch-along for a couple months. Much like The Good Place last year, it’s given us some common ground and a handy topic everyone likes to discuss.

What will you be leaving behind in 2018?

Feeling personally responsible for everything. It’s hard to relinquish that illusion of control, the belief that if I could just be… better I could force the world to work a certain way, but it’s a much more reasonable worldview to realize that I can’t.

I hope the end of your year is marked by time spent with the people most important to you, plus plenty of downtime for catching up on 2018’s truly impressive anime releases (I suggest beginning with Laid-Back Camp, Hinamatsuri, and Zombieland Saga). And in between all that, I hope you’ll consider thinking about these questions, too. See you in 2019!

What really matters.

While washing dishes last weekend, I dropped a plate. Like a crab claw, my thumb and finger automatically snapped apart. I remember this from last year: the beginnings of carpal tunnel. Even though I type hundreds of words every day, somehow NaNoWriMo is my tipping point. Since it’s the kind of stream-of-consciousness fiction that prioritizes just getting raw, unedited words on the page, it’s a lot more repetitive than the type of thoughtful writing I usually do.

So with that, I’ve quit. Sort of. Even though I’ve taken myself out of the running for the 50,000-word goal, I’ve still gotten a few things out of this exercise:

Four new pieces of creative fiction

After last year’s heavily researched science fiction draft on quantum mechanics, this year’s novel was on the lighter side. I wrote about a fanfiction author with a secret who visits her pen pal in Japan. And whenever I ran out of ideas for that storyline, I broke it up with drafts of actual fanfics I’ve been meaning to write. I published one, and I’m working on the other two now. Without NaNo, that might have taken me years or more realistically, never happened at all—since I put such a low priority on fiction.

A new way to write

I was stuck on a slow Metro train when inspiration for my novel struck, so I started taking notes with my thumbs. By the time the car started moving again, I’d written 300 misspelled, poorly grammaticized words—but 300 words all the same. I realized that when I can’t finesse the spelling and grammar, it frees me to get my thoughts down first without worrying about the final result until later. I’m not a particularly speedy texter, but when I type just for me, I can write almost as quickly as I think. I’ve started writing my weekly streaming reviews this way as well, and the best part is I can still type easily while wearing my wrist brace.

Not always writing to my strengths

One of the reasons I don’t prioritize fiction is because the nonfiction writing that makes up my day job comes first. The other reason, if I’m really honest, is because I’m not as good at it! As a ghostwriter, I’m good at matching other people’s tone and voice; as a fiction writer, I’m not too good at developing my own. As a technical writer specializing in niche topics, I’m good at establishing detail; as a fiction writer I’m crap at worldbuilding and creating a convincing plot. I could just avoid those things, but then I’d never grow. One advantage of personal development that should get more attention is that improvement is a lot more interesting than sticking to your comfort zone. NaNo has been a great way to hone my weaknesses in a kind, supportive space.

Continuing to write every day

I’ve decided to no longer aim for the finish line, but I’ve still been returning to my manuscript daily. After 20,000+ words (that’s 50 pages in Google Drive), it’s habit forming. I have a lot of unfinished threads I want to pursue, even if it’s not at the rate of 1,600 words a day. I’ve been editing, rearranging, and massaging the wording—all the things they tell you not to do during NaNoWriMo because it will slow you down, but it’s precisely this slower pace that is keeping me from injuring myself further.

Last year, I kept writing beyond the point where I was dropping plates. After a close friend died, I’d realized that we never know when it will be our last chance to accomplish a goal. I’d been putting off NaNoWriMo for years and nothing was going to stop me that time; my resolve was unwavering even as I knelt to pick up the shattered china. My novel that year, about a woman in a parallel universe trying to return home, is a palpable metaphor for grief. But this time I’m choosing to celebrate the writing I did do instead of worrying about the writing I didn’t.

NaNoWriMo is an amazing exercise that can push you beyond your comfort zone; I guess this year it was just a bit too much of a push for me. I still want to try it again next year, just with daily carpal tunnel exercises baked into my writing routine. Even if I don’t finish again, it’s such a good opportunity to grow as a writer, which is why I’m always encouraging people to join. Want to use it to work on an existing project? Sure! What if I use my 50k to write 30 different daily blog post drafts? Sounds good to me! Maybe I should offer that same flexibility to myself.

I’m concluding my official count at 21,708 words, but if I do a word count on the manuscript I’m still editing, it’s grown to 23,441 by now. I’m moving a lot more slowly, turning this lump of pure ideas into something more polished. If NaNoWriMo is less about finishing a book in a month and more about starting a habit, well, it’s working for now. Maybe that’s all that really matters.

Photo of kintsugi pottery, which has been broken and mended, via.