sour grapes make delicious wine

to drown your sorrows in.... Or something like that.

I'd been looking forward to going to Sakura-con, an anime convention, in Seattle for the longest time, at least five years. And every year something would happen that stopped me from going, including no money, boyfriends that didn't give a shit, no money, and no money. This year I vowed to go, being so bold as to send in the $40 preregistration fee to guarantee a spot.

Hotels tend to cost money, as do transportation and food. So I tried to rally some friends into going. For months all I got was meager enthusiasm and no real committment, which of course is not encouraging when you're going to be the one reserving a $120/night, 3-night hotel stay on your bank card.

Besides the vague 'yes' vote on the part of my friends, my car is a piece of crap. I've known this for a while, but when pushing it out of intersections became a daily affair, I decided this car would not be an appropriate choice of vehicle. This left planes, trains, or someone else's automobile, none of which were viable choices. Trains take too long and cost too much (although the cheapest of the options), airplanes suck and cost too much, and nobody I know owns a car that can drive that distance.

But it wasn't any of these things that destroyed my desire to go. It was sitting in Japanese class listening to some spoiled kid ramble on about how she was going to go abroad to China for a term, and then Japan after that, how her Grandpa was paying for all her school, how it was so silly that she didn't get any financial aid because her family did construction (yeah there's no money in that business at all....), and how she couldn't wait to go to the convention with her Chinese teacher. It struck me then that these were the kinds of people that went to anime conventions, brats with disposable income coming out of their asses and nothing better to do with it than buy toys and think they're cute for speaking Japanese and liking anime.

Well, okay, there are the kids that sit around playing D&D (nothing inherantly wrong with D&D, I'd probably play if I'd gotten into it earlier on) and discussing how in episode #47 Naruto's hair is parted the wrong way in scene 24, and how that's some sort of symbolism for his state of mind throughout sidestory brought up in episode #33. (I made that up, I don't have a fucking clue). And then there are the squealing cutesy fan-girls that you want to slap. I've come to realize that these people are going to do nothing but make me hate anime, and that would be a shame. Anime is best enjoyed alone or in the company of a few friends, and there's no need for plastic figurines of characters, running around in an uncomfortable costume for the pleasure of 12-year old perverts and pedophiles, or even the signature of your favorite voice actor.

So yeah. Have fun at Sakura-con, assholes.