Friday 11 February 2005

Pic of the day: Nuku nuku shitetai futaride! (I want to be warm and fuzzy together with you?) Screenshot from the anime Mahoraba - Heartful Days.

Nuku nuku & the flow of time

I was peacefully watching the anime Mahoraba – heartful days (no, the Japanese part of the title does not translate into the English part). Episode 4 was out, and as I watched the pretty intro song again – as I had done a few times before – I noticed something. "Nuku nuku" said the Japanese text of the song. Now that's something I have heard before. When I had just recently discovered anime, there was a comedy called "all purpose cultural cat girl Nuku Nuku" which was about a cyborg girl built around a cat's brain. It was pretty simplistic, but I enjoyed it.

Well, this new series is not at all about cat girls. It is about an 18 year old boy who leaves home to study art in Tokyo, and lives in an small apartment complex owned and managed by his second cousin. Naturally she is a girl just a little younger than him. And there are also various other residents, all of them a bit strange. Then again, that's the way people are, right? But the young landlady is the main character except for the boy. Anyway, in the opening song lyrics, the expression was "nuku nuku shitetai" which seemed to be translated as "cuddle". That sounds about right to me. I always thought "nuku nuku" was not something to say to a random member of the opposite sex, just from the sound of it.

Well, I still don't know that. When the anime itself started after the opening song, the title of this episode was ... "nuku nuku"! Which was translated as "warm and fuzzy". (A rival fansub translates "nuku nuku" as "carefree". Really?) It referred to the personality of the Landlady. Well, one of her personalities, but that's a long story in itself.

Whatever "nuku nuku" actually means (and there's no rule that a concept in one language overlaps a concept in another, as well I should know, being Norwegian myself), the fact remains that I noticed this expression in the song first in episode 4, the same episode in which it was used repeatedly in the actual anime. If this had been the ending song, it would make purrfect sense. However, it was the other way around.

Sometimes when things are close, they have an effect on each other. For instance, a magnet will pull on a small bit of iron. But the small bit of iron will pull on the magnet too, only very weakly. So weakly that in almost all cases, it has no visible effect. The magnet stays, the needle or whatever moves. But if the needle is stuck, and the magnet is perched really precariously, then once in a blue moon it might happen that the magnet moves instead of the needle. I wonder ... could something similar happen when things are close in time? After all, time is a dimension too, isn't it? Scientifically speaking, the future is just as real as the past. No, seriously. Due to the way our brains process information, based on entropy (humans are basically walking fires, feeding off entropy differentials in our surroundings) we cannot access information about the future, only conjecture it. But that doesn't mean the future is any less real than the past. So ... could it happen that once in a blue moon, the future influences the past instead of the other way around? Of course, not knowing the future, this is no help for us at all, because we won't know WHICH event is influenced by the future until we arrive at that future.

Or perhaps it's just that I randomly notice things, and then when the random notice is strongly reinforced by a later event, I remember it better so it seems significant. Perhaps if I had discovered this part of the entry song in episode 3, I would not have thought more about it.

***

Enter the mysterious Significant Other of Tsaiko.

OK, perhaps not so mysterious. But it's not like she has actually come out and said until now that she is in that kind of relationship. But now she has, and it is surely a blow to all the guys (and girls) who have been dreaming about Tsaiko. This category, literally speaking, would include me, since I've been dreaming about her now and then in the nights for a year or so. Luckily for all involved those are not the kind of dreams that require me to change any textiles. It's more like I've been thinking of it as a miracle: Despite my unwise decision to not breed, Tsaiko was born at the appropriate time, only on another continent and to other parents. I could not have wished for a girl to be more like me, down to sharing some the same vague bodily afflictions, not to mention obsessions. (At least I don't suffer from PMS, though!) As people must have noticed, I am really fond of her.

People being who they are, however, they probably have a hard time imagining a guy not wanting to hump a girl he likes. (It's not like I would have said no if she asked me, either. I would just have stared at her like she was mad, for reasons that will be obvious once you know her.) So it was probably just as well I self-locked that LJ entry I wrote just before I read her journal. I almost never lock my LJ entries, but for some reason I did that one. The entry where I write about spending hours working on my OK Cupid profile. (OkCupid is a matching service. As the name implies it is mostly of romantic / erotic nature, but you can also look for friends and even penpals, which is the box I ticked. (Face it, the lot of you don't exactly excel in that department, with one exception.) Besides, OkCupid has tons of quizzes, a few of which are actually fun.)

I guess it is kinda evil of me to be on such a site in the first place, but I doubt I will lead anyone into severe temptation. However, writing about it on LJ right after Tsaiko's entry there would definitely have given the wrong impression, don't you think? Never mind that I first spent hours on OKCupid, and THEN read her entry after I was finished. It would still look like "Waah, Tsaiko is otherwise engaged, I'm flinging myself into the arms of the nearest dating service! Err, matching service!" ^_^*

You know, that would look almost as suspicious as Alvin Maker leaving Vigor Church only a few days after the rumors begin to fly about him and a certain young girl. But I am not going to read about that for the first time until Monday...