I really like Bleach. It's been a staple in my manga reading habits for years now, but sometimes I fail to appreciate it's finer points I think. One thing that has stood out to me since moving here and being able to get the real thing, raw and original every week is that the chapter titles actually are written in English. Albeit sometimes very poor and grammatically incorrect English, but it's all the more interesting to wonder just what was he driving at with that particular title? I think Kubo-sensei is actually a little unstable. After reading Zombie Powder and doing some research on it's rather abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, I feel like I can kind of relate to the guy. The pain his characters are in, the lengths they go to, the things they say, it makes sense in a creepy sort of way. That being said, my post titles are, until further notice, Bleach chapter titles.
So a great thing about living in Japan: $3 a week for Shonen JUMP. A not so great thing: reading, speaking, hearing, and sometimes even writing Japanese non-stop has a detrimental effect on my dexterity with my own native language. Old people talked about how they were forgetting English so much when I first got here, but I thought either they were exaggerating or just plain stupid. Yesterday Pin and I were discussing the merits of humans potentially having tails along with a girl we like to call my "wifey". Inevitably, the tailbone we all possess was brought up and we couldn't think of the word to describe it. The word that means something which has no function, but is a vestige of prior species evolution. The two of us just stared at each other in horror for a while. The wifey decided to take a nap, and we went back to our usual, more perverted conversations, but neither of us forgot. Eventually I came up with "prehensile" but that, of course is completely wrong because it refers to tails that can grab things, like a monkey's. Ironically, it also means "gifted with mental grasp or moral or aesthetic perception", which we apparently are not.
So do you know what it is? There's a hint in the beginning of the description. Vestigial. Left over. Completely useless. Blame it on the all night dancing in Tokyo, or the year of reading nothing but manga in it's native format. Either way, I'm forgetting things I'm going to need to make my future as a writer possible. The night before that I couldn't think of the word "translucent". I knew what it meant, I knew opaque, I knew I didn't WANT opaque to describe the partition between the train cars, but translucent was nowhere to be found. Conversely, I've just misspelled that word about four different ways, but I'm not a bit bothered by it. That's been happening for 25 years. Then again, maybe I'm just stupid.
