Sunday 1 May 2005

Pic of the day: A main difference between manga characters and me is that I am ugly. (This is a random un-edited photo. Sad but true.)

Kare Kano and I

Kare Kano (His and her circumstances) is an unusual manga (comic book), or at least for me. There is no magic, no science fiction (well, except in one of the bonus stories), no angels or demons or cat girls. Also, as of book six I still don't see any plot in the traditional sense. It's all about almost normal people and their almost normal lives. Almost, but not quite.

Not quite larger than life, perhaps, the characters are still more colorful than most. They may be super pretty, or really smart, or have some amazing quirks or live in unusual family situations. Sometimes you see a character who seems to be a real weirdo, and then much later you find out that there is a perfectly valid reason why they act that way. Sometimes I wonder if even the author knows beforehand.

***

This all caused me to think: Perhaps I am not so different from these people. Perhaps lots of people are like this, actually, but if so most seem to be hiding it. I'm not exactly hiding, though. I'm not exactly larger than life either, at least not when I'm sick! But still, I guess I qualify as smart and quirky. The smart may be fading gradually as I grow older, but I'm not so sure about the quirky...

And don't get this wrong, in some ways I am a lot less normal than you might think by just reading an entry or two. Let's start with something really basic: The language.

I'm Norwegian. Foreigners may not know this, but Norway has its own language. In fact, it has two official languages, and if you grow up with the least used of them, you pretty much have to learn them both. (There is a third, very different, for the Sami minority, the aborigines of northern Norway, I never learned that though.) Anyway, this makes English my third language. I never studied it beyond high school; after that I switched to studying economics for a while. Anyway, I've never been outside Norway. I don't use English in my work. None of my friends or acquaintances in the physical world speaks it. Despite this, I have a larger active vocabulary than ordinary Americans. Oh, I sometimes make mistakes. But still, it's pretty weird, don't you think?

I didn't do particularly well in grade school. This was partly because I was already incredibly lazy (which I still am), partly because I was sick a lot, and partly because I developed rather slowly. I was still going through puberty when I moved out at the age of 15 to go to high school in another part of the country. That's unusual too, isn't it? After that I started to catch up and got some really good grades for a while, until I dropped out to get a random low-paid office job. I guess that's a bit strange too.

I don't have a TV. I grew up without it, no one in our family had the time to play vegetable in front of a box. If we had time on our hands (and sometimes even if not), we would read a book. The place was almost a library. Note that this did not hurt my brothers, who are all happily married, hard working citizens. They are still reading, I guess, but they also have TV. I suppose that is part of the price you have to pay for marrying ordinary people. ^_^*

Seriously, even though almost all people around me take TV for granted, I just don't like it. I distrust it, and every time I see humans interact with it, I get my fears confirmed. It does something to people, temporarily numbing their brains. I love my brain. I don't even drink alcohol, or at leas way too little for my own cardiovascular good. But the idea of sedating my brain goes totally against the grain of my personality. I may watch movies or cartoons now and then, which I buy or get through the Internet, but the ones I choose, at my own time and my own pace. My favorite entertainment however is computer games. To use my brain while my body relaxes seems like the best of both worlds for a lazy guy like me.

***

The big difference between me and the characters of Kare Kano is perhaps that love has such a decisive influence on their lives. One by one they discover that even though they thought they were OK, they were actually lonely. Once they find love, they consider it more important than anything else in their lives.

But with me it is not like that. It seems that I don't really have that big gaping hole in my life that only my soulmate can fill. Actually I suspect that in the real world, there are a lot of men like me in that regard, but they probably hide it. Women can be nice, I've met a very few whose company was better than nothing. I probably wouldn't have minded living with one such, in whole or in part. But it is not an all- consuming need. They are just nice extras. I can get by quite fine without them. This evidently does not make women happy. And also there is the small detail that I am somewhat ugly. Ugly and emotionally distant, not a good combination if you try to latch on to the rare superior quality woman who is in short supply and high demand. ^_^*

But I'm sure I have rambled on long enough for today. After all... smart, quirky people aren't very interesting unless they find True Love.