Anime and I. Strictly platonic.

Watching:
Eureka Seven vol. #11

Over the past few years, I've really managed to stay afloat financially by drastically cutting back on the amount of anime I'd been watching as a teen. It's really a painfully expensive hobby, one that I probably would have never taken on had I not been working during my high school years. At its peak, my anime collection was well over 300 DVDs strong, with my overall library totaling something near 600 discs. I've recently resorted to selling off a lot of my DVDs, mostly because I simply don't have the room for all that stuff, but I think the other reality is that the vast majority of anime titles really fail to engage me nowadays. There have really only been a couple of television series since 2000 that I would actively classify as "great." The first, naturally, would be Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (both seasons), and the second would be the brilliant Rahxephon. I have no idea how Eureka Seven ends because I made it a point to stay away from its run on Adult Swim, but pending on the conclusion, Eureka would probably be on that list as well. Other than that though, the new millennium has delivered a lot of good titles, but scant few truly great shows. The mid to late 90s were probably responsible for my initial enthrallment with the medium, with Evangelion (1995), Escaflowne (1996), and Cowboy Bebop (1998) all coming out at the time. Even the period's marginally great niche shows like Cardcaptor Sakura (1998), Kare Kano (1998), and Berserk (1997), were better than almost anything on the market today. It's mostly an issue with the standard 26 episode shows, because we can always pray for an enigmatic OVA like FLCL, or a feature length offering from Studio Ghibli, but overall, it's just really tough for me to get excited about the genre like I used to. Perhaps the scene itself just has me a little jaded, because given the sustained brilliance and sharp writing exhibited in some of these shows, I don't think that I'll ever consider myself too "old" or "mature" for anime. Maybe the new Eva movies and Kite: Liberator will help with this rut. Given the expensive nature of the hobby, perhaps it's in my best interest to just let it die quietly, but I guess it's only natural to secretly cling to things that we were once passionate about. At the very least, I imagine that I'll always be a casual fan.

Since I more or less spent the entirety of last month sick, I've been taking one of those One-A-Day Men's Dietary Supplements in an effort to make sure that my body gets all the vitamins that it needs. My mom calls the pills "the Man."