Monday 17 July 2006

Pic of the day: What does this picture have to do with lesbian dream girls? (Except for the magazines, that is?) Well, it is from the anime Welcome to the NHK, an anime about boys who shut themselves away from the world.

Lesbian dream girls

It is seven years since my entry about "lesbian dream girls". I chose that constellation of words specifically to bait the search engines, which were quite primitive back then. These days, it would not work, at least not with Google, which is THE search engine now. It does not just rely on how often you use a phrase, but also the overall popularity of your site, and the sites that link to yours, and how the search phrase relates to those sites again. So if you search for "lesbian dream girls", you'll get highly relevant links. If such a thing exists for that subject matter.

One of those seven years brought me the friendship of an actual lesbian dream girl, my eternal NaNoWriMo rival, the more or less published writer Tsaiko. OK, so it is an online friendship, but it is still enough that I would from time to time dream about her in the night. Nothing like those Google links, mind you. But in my dreams she would sometimes be by my side, just like family and friends from the fleshworld sometimes are, eating together with me or walking together with me or watching the sunset together with me. Of course, these days all of this only happens in my dreams, but the fact still remains that someone I had never met (and would probably not have recognized if I saw her) was part of my dreams sometimes. And yes, she really has a real girlfriend. Unlike me, obviously!

In fact, I recently changed the ingress of my website to "Letters from a middle-aged man who never has sex." I used the Norwegian version on my Norwegian diary, and liked it. I like it better than the slogan from my previous Chaos Node, "No kids, no wife, no TV, no life, no time to spare, chaos everywhere".

One reason why I'm unlikely to ever use that slogan again is the anime Welcome to the NHK. In this we are introduced to a very real phenomenon in Japan, the hikikomori. This is young people who don't leave their room for months or even years. Judging from the movie – and I see no reason to doubt it – their apartments can be more messy than mine ever was. Not to mention that now I have enough floor space to host a small dance party. Not that I would ever do such a thing. But I've realized that when it comes to "no life", I am not even a runner- up. In fact, I am not even participating in the preliminaries. True, I have even less of an offline social life now than 7 years ago, but I go to work, I buy my groceries, I take walks outdoors (except when it's too hot, like now... it is seriously hot here folks). Compared to people who live years in a fantasy world while their bodies stay locked in a room... I'm nothing like them.

But I'm still more single than the average pope. I am definitely a middle-aged man who never has sex. Rarely even in my dreams, now. And definitely not with lesbian dream girls.