Simply put, trying to be positive. The fires of Idealism! Now I'm just appropriating mannerisms.

I was loaned the first three trades of Top Cow's "Witchblade" series. In total that'll be about 24 seriously exposition/text heavy books (if the next two collections follow the pattern of the first).

It isn't a very well told story by any stretch; poor art, poor storytelling, poor characterization. We all know WHY Witchblade was so popular- but it doesn't interest me.

Something more interesting: I've spent the majority of the day, like 97%, reading the Naruto manga. I haven't caught up on Naruto's adventures in what feels like years... I think it really has been years. The fights are really unclear, just back and forth yells until someone goes down and then another party explains why the one person won instead of the other. When it comes to the fights, at this point I'm just zipping through until I get to those explanations, it's pretty much impossible to make sense of it on your own, and I don't have the patience for it.

But the story itself, I've gotta hand it to these manga, they really keep on with their thematics. While the western serials have their themes, their long running status means even the best of them have been diluted with one creative team or another.

Naruto deals in passings of the torch, the coming inheritors and the old guard. Every persons story is the same as anothers, and it's the heroes who realize this shared experience to empathize with everyone else. There's also this escalation, as each generation gives way to a more learned group- will the next thing they learn destroy the world or save it from a viscious cycle of retribution?

It's super idealistic, but I'm cool with that. Over the course of the day I've been moved by their trials and I've smiled when things work out. And that's pretty nice.

My fingers are pretty cold and slow moving right now. It's January.

I randomly ran into someone at the library the other day- it was easily the longest we've ever spoken in person. Instead of a normal trip, now I'm standing around chatting for a good long while, and I'm smiling and excited, and talking with my hands, and talking about Superman (the movie). I told her about how some people don't know me as that kind of person- there are people out there that don't know I smile. I'm glad there are people out there that elicit this kind of positive autonomic response out of me. It helps that she's cute.

And then when I got my book from the library just before it closed that good mood stayed with me- the librarian didn't even mind that I payed my late fee off with 80 pennies and an assortment of other change. It helps that I had them in separate baggies with the exact numbers already counted and recorded, but still, she seemed to be in a good mood. And then another librarian told me I looked like a guy that performs in a choir she's in.

It was a few hours of a day where community happened, and it was a good thing.