Now that I’m more or less free to do what I want until next Monday when classes start again, I decided to look through some old stuff that’s accumulated in my room in my parents’ house to throw away the things I don’t need to keep and make room for new things. I found a huge stack of Italian manga which I bought when I was, well, in Italy. They had all the cool stuff back in 1999 or something, when the manga market here wasn’t really as massive as it is now. I bought lots of random stuff, basically anything I could get my hands on, mostly shounen and seinen titles like Macross 7 Trash, Gundam and Cat’s Eye – sadly no shoujo manga, though. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any manga for girls even though they were said to be already quite popular in Italy at that time. (We only had Sailor Moon back then.)

I also found old manga scripts that I’d printed out to read Japanese manga. Ah, the good old days as a manga reader! Yes, we actually bought Japanese manga and tried to read them in Japanese with the help of scripts kind souls with admirable Japanese skills had provided for us on the internet. This is how I learnt Japanese! I taught myself hiragana and katakana, got myself a good dictionary and started reading manga with the help of English scripts. I found scripts for Tenshikinryouku/Angel Sanctuary and other old Yuki Kaori titles, CLAMP stuff like X, Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda and Clover and more light-hearted shoujo series like Emura’s W Juliet. This way, I acquired quite an impressive range of vocabulary which I’d probably never been able to use in every-day life in Japan, including words like “organic angel” (yuukitenshi)…

I might not be doing what I’m doing now if I’d gotten into manga just three or four years later when the scanlation business took off and people became lazy and didn’t buy manga anymore but downloaded it and read it in English. Back in the days, you just had to learn Japanese if you wanted access to all the good titles…

(Does anyone remember fansub tape trading? So last century!)

This “as seen on” celebrity-inspired fashion boom is probably just one more item on the list of things to do to try and become part of the whole media-created parallel universe which is really just there to make people buy and daydream instead of making them think and trying to make a change. It’s almost like you haven’t lived if you haven’t acted out the life of someone famous by wearing the same clothes as they are.

It gets really weird and downright ridiculous, though, when someone actually retouches paparazzi shots so the celebrity in it only appears to be wearing a dress they’re trying to sell – like in these pictures of clothes horse Sienna Miller I found on eBay:

  

(Re: Sienna Miller. How did she become a so-called style icon? By being sent a gazillion Yumi and Orion mini dresses. Surely not by being a terribly talented, hard-working actress. Give me the name of just one film you remember she was in and that you’ve actually seen. For what should women admire her other than the clothes she’s wearing as free advertising for the companies which sent her their clothes for free?)

What type of person buys clothes because they were worn by celebrities? I cannot help but frown upon people who need fashion to cover up their lack of identity. Shouldn’t fashion be all about emphasizing your personality and character, and communicating your uniqueness? Sure, everyone’s free to choose what they wear but trying so hard to copy someone’s style is a bit like becoming the victim of something one might call fashion absolutism where celebrities seem to dictate what to wear, but in truth it’s just the industry telling you what to buy (and basically, to buy, to consume so they can make money with stuff people don’t even need).

Today is the first day of my postgrad life. It’s also the day after the day I accidently found out how to connect my phone with my MacBook via Bluetooth. It’s kind of amazing to think of all the data that gets transferred without any cable at all, and it’s happening everywhere, all the time. Admittedly, this thought is also kind of scary and makes me long for the good old analogue days.

Today I continued my series of surprising realizations: I had to learn the hard way why autumn is also called fall when an unusually large acorn crashlanded – massively accelerated due to the height of the tree and the raging storm – right on the top of my head. The sound of the impact was amazing from the inside! And from the outside too, I was told. That little fruit of autumn left a nice throbbing bump on my head. I thought it had also cracked my skull but I’m not so sure anymore. Should I go and have an X-ray or not? I’m kind of hard to crack, though, so I should be OK.