I’m not much into basketball, but I find the term “March Madness” to be strangely appropriate for this time of year. Both for the weather and my overall mental state. At least in comparison to any other time of the year.

I call my mental state madness, but most would probably understand it better as stir-crazy. Though I would say my mental state is actually something more than that, stir-crazy is probably the largest component. In other words, I’m sick of my life at home all by myself.

This will mostly be alleviated some at the end of next month when I attend my friends bachelor party and in May when I see my friends for a wedding. Though what I will do in the mean time or after that is nebulous, and now that my seasonal depression is gone (and now I’m just normal depressed) I feel pressured to do something about it. The question is though, as always, what?

One thing that’s not been helping is dating apps. Normally someone might think “Hey, at least you’re putting yourself out there somewhat” or at least that’s what I try to tell myself after spending about 10 minutes on one of three apps each day (total of about 30 spent among them all roughly) When I look at the at the actual process though, I can’t help but feel like it’s not going to work.

I’ve gotten a few likes in both Coffee Meets Bagel and Tinder, but out of them only one was somewhat attractive to me. Unfortunately, their profile made it clear they were looking for a sugar daddy type figure. Something that I don’t think I could go for even if I had the financial status to do so.

The big problem is that as you get older, the amount of single women who don’t have kids or some glaring cosmetic flaw drops to significantly low numbers. Add onto that my niche interests and where I live, and the formula is essentially dividing by zero. Something that can’t seem to be done.

I’ve tried to compromise, but the sad truth is I have a hard time getting interested in a lot of people. Even if I think “this person’s pretty” if I ultimately end up feeling like we’d have nothing in common, I don’t ever get a spark of interest. I just sigh and hit x and move on to the next one. Rinse and repeat for maybe 1 like every 50-70 profiles.

Despite it only being 30 or so minutes I spend, the entire process drains me. Very rarely will I ever come away feeling like “Oh there might be some possibilities here” Even on those occasions where I do (one actually happened to me recently) it always ends up leading to disappointment (Like where I find someone I think I’d jive super well with only to never get a mutual match with them)

I’m going to rant a bit here, hope no minds.

It’s almost unfathomable the amount of people who have their spotify linked to their profiles whose music tastes are practically the exact opposite of mine. Plenty of country and hip hop and artists I have never heard of, no classic rock, 80s or weeb music in sight (that last one is understandable, but the first two?)

The amount of people on Bumble, one of the services I use, that are polyamorous makes me want to write a manifesto about why polyamorous relationships are bullshit. Though as much as that would give me a bit of cathartic relief, I can only imagine the unwanted drama that could bring me. Heck even saying their bullshit here might get me some flack some day.

All I can say is if you find that upsetting, please understand. I don’t think you shouldn’t be allowed to have relationships like that. It’s just annoying as someone having trouble finding one person to be faced with people that already have one or many. If Bumble would fix it so people seeking polyamorous stuff wouldn’t show up, then I wouldn’t be able to say anything bad about it.

The amount dating apps want to get you to shell out money is gross. Obviously, I know these services can’t really exist out of the goodness of people’s hearts, but I wish they could be tailored more for helping people find matches. Like I’d would pay money for a service that actually produced results, but every app’s pay system has always made me think “They don’t want you to find anyone”

People take some god-awful photos. I’ll admit mine aren’t great, but at least you get a clear shot of my head and torso most of the time. Can’t say the same about a good swathe of the other profiles I see.

Adding on to that, people do a pretty poor job on their profiles. I understand that people don’t have the time in the world to make a perfect profile, but if you can’t put a good 30 minutes into it, I don’t think you should be even on the service at all. Because how can anyone tell whether your serious or not…

Argh, getting too swept up on the dating stuff. Let’s just say that it hasn’t been very successful. I’ll still continue to do it, as it’s all I got right now, but fuck if it doesn’t make me wish I could just be content alone.

For now, I think the play is to focus on getting out more. My brother has mentioned wanting to go somewhere during the summer, which might open up some possibilities. He even said he’d be interested in an anime convention, although I’m not sure what kind of convention we could possibly do (most of the local ones never seem to coincide with summer)

I’ve also thought about volunteering for an upcoming anime convention in the future. Though I’m a bit self-conscious about my ability to do it, I do think it would be a good way of meeting people that resonate with me more. Maybe. It would at least be a better opportunity than going as an attendee and spending all my time in the vendor room >_>

I don’t know. Right now my brain is a jumble of “Oh shit the snow is finally melting (maybe) Now I got to start thinking up some shit” Not that I haven’t before, it’s more like I need to make some of my previous ideas more concrete (like the convention one)

Lets talk about media for this month.

Honestly, I haven’t been up to a whole lot. Part of the reason is I’ve been absorbed in reading Sakura no Toki, and the other part is.. well bad habits I guess.

Sakura no Toki is good so far. Initially, I was hoping I could finish it by this post and give a huge write up (along with an explanation of what it’s prequel is about for people who are interested in knowing but don’t want to read them) However, that was probably being a bit too optimistic with my reading speed/ability. More than likely, a full write-up wont be until next month.

One thing I will say is that Sakura no Toki has illuminated some of my frustrations with my current Japanese ability. Where I would previously had said I was close to N2, now I’m kind of sliding back to N3. Pretty far from where I’d hoped I’d be at this point.

I can still read a lot of stuff naturally, but when the sentences get complex or the unknown vocab shoots up to three words, I start to get confused. I find myself heavily dependent on my text hooker and sometimes in desperation will use machine translation to see if it can help me figure out what’s going on. Not the most ideal situation.

I’m thinking once I finish Toki, that I might move on to a vn with somewhat simpler prose and challenge myself to use a monolingual dictionary for word lookups (basically instead of a dictionary that tells you what a word would translate to, it tells you the definition of the word in Japanese) It would make my reading a lot slower, but it MIGHT just be the training weights I need to start building some Japanese muscle again.

I’ve also been thinking of replaying some old favorite RPGs in Japanese. I previously did this with FF7 to moderate success, and since I’ve been wanting to revisit a lot of RPGs lately, it might be a good fit. No specific ideas for this yet, but if the Suikoden 1 and 2 remasters were to come out.. Well that would be an apt choice I think 🙂

(Speaking of where the hell are the Suikoden 1 & 2 Remaster Konami?)

Otherwise, I haven’t played much for games. I did buy Resident Evil 4 remake because it seemed if there was ever a RE game I should play, it’d probably be 4. I haven’t played a huge amount of it yet, but so far its interesting (though I’m not very good at it) I’ll probably talk about it more next month.

I haven’t finished rewatching Yu Yu Hakusho yet in Japanese yet. I haven’t been watching nearly as consistently due to taking breaks from my regular exercise regime (mostly to make sure I don’t overdo it) Right now I’m nearing the end of chapter black (ep 85) so it shouldn’t be much longer yet. Might still even get it done before the month is out if I’m feeling it.

One thing I mentioned to some of my friends is that for whatever reason, they translated all the Japanese titles but then they changed a bunch of them into a different title. While it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it does kind of feel like something they did for no real reason.

Manga-wise, I intended to be more consistent with reading, but I ended up only starting to do so toward the end of this month. Thus instead of my quoted ‘couple series a month’ I’ve only read about 2 of the collectors edition volumes of Fruits Basket (of like 12?) Yeah.. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s making sure I set aside time every night before bed to do so.

What else…. I could have sworn there was more to say, but now that I’m writing this, I kind of just want it to be done. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling dejected today due to learning that I wasted a lot of my time on making a solution to a problem that already had a solution (I just never knew about it)

It could also be my poor quality of sleep lately (Haven’t been able to get a quality nights rest in a while.. More fragmenty sleep) Bah…

Let’s just leave things there. Maybe this next month I’ll do two posts to make up for it. No promises, but I’ll try 🙂