The Agency Of Haruhi Suzumiya

[shickdits]

Yesterday, for the first time in nearly 8 years of working retail, i had called out sick when i felt perfectly fine. The day before had been incredibly stressful, a sunday afternoon in a grocery store for 8 hours is something that could kill someone whose hands have never touched a trashbag or a screwdriver. But the Star Coworker, a 30+ year old man who moves with a frightening speed and speaks in a deadpan nonchalant manner at all times, had hurt his back for the first tine in my presence. He left to an urgent care, leaving me with no help that night but a very small 70 year old woman, and her 16 year old grandson. With the weight of personal drama with old friends of mine weighing on me, i had hurriedly whack-a-moled empty shelves while mentally straining to not be teary-eyed the whole time.

A Monday morning afterwards for this particular Greek-immigrant-owned, white and orange tiled floor, New England based grocery store establishment, is always one of putting Humpty Dumpty back together. Without a delivery between then and Saturday, a Sunday night ends with many shelves left empty (or filled with a substitute), awaiting fresh produce the following morning. Trying to do the job of the top two hands at deck (myself and the aforementioned Star Coworker) had wrung me dry enough, that, when i overslept my alarm that morning, I called out sick, putting on my best impression of a tummy ache, claiming I threw up. A sort of guilt washes over me typing all that up. Being surrounded by an atmosphere of duty to New England's greatest low budget grocery store for 50 hours weekly, for more than half a decade can do that to an underdeveloped 29 year old mind. My mother, noticing my car atill in the driveway, later reassured me that, if I decided it was too much, it's for a good reason.

Did I do anything productive yesterday? No. I had opined online about searching for job openings at UPS "or something", but I never so much as looked at their website or DM'd that one gay furry I follow on twitter who has four Ford Crown Victorias in my city about whether or not applying would be a good idea. But I looked up visiting hours for a local art museum, thinking maybe I'll see something interesting or fun there, and found that they don't open their doors until Wednesday to Sunday, every week, 10am to 5pm, which perfectly places those open hours within time I am undoubtedly either going to, leaving, or at work. I didn't leave the house, I drank two cans of monster energy out of curiosity for their unusual flavor, and removed piles of clothes that don't fit me from my room into a vacant guest room next to mine.

I dipped my toes into Asetto Corsa with my budget racing simulator setup: a Logitech G29, an H-pattern shifter plugged into it, all bolted onto a cheap frame in front of a leftover office chair. A setup that takes up an uncomfortable amount of space in my room, but would be a large ans exhausting hassle to disassemble and stow away. It was the only taste I can get of an extremely expensive hobby I dream of having, amateur motorsports. The whole concept is a framework that, within, I could lose myself, comfortably into pursuing an assured and absolute goal, regardless of my skill level. A 3,000 pound machine that burns gasoline to propel itself up to 150mph will never ask me if I want kids someday, how I want to be remembered, loved, what kind of career I want to have, or expectations I have for a future. All it asks, is to get around Autodromo Piero Taruffi Vallelunga as quickly as possible. And the best part? I don't even have to fix the car if something goes wrong. I can make as many mistakes as I damn well please, even slamming into a concrete barrier at full speed, and there's no aftermath to be dealt with. No heart sinking glance at repair bills, or probably hospital bills as well in that example (lol), just a pure unbridled focus into how awful I am at managing understeer without a handbrake lever to pull.

Eventually, I found myself joining a group discord stream of skating videos. We watched, in awe at the spectacle, of Baker 3 and Fancy Lad's "Is This Skateboarding". Skateboarding is something the youth do, isn't it? The broken bones and bloodied limbs of teenage boys is a common sight to see when the light rumble of plastic wheels upon pavement is heard, and yet, when I was a teenager myself, my only taste of this world was video games. I was too scared of hurting myself. Making mistakes, and embarrassing myself with potential visits to a hospital, large bills paid upon my.. widowed? Does it count as widowed when you're divorced and aren't dating anyone, but your ex-husband died? My single mother wasn't exactly ready to be paying hospital bills for failures in me amusing myself. So skateboarding was so far out of the question for me that such a question was never asked. I had my digital friend, Tony Hawk (and Bam Margera) to satiate the expression of freestyle street skating, and in my young adulthood, my only taste of such a thing is driving a Subaru during a snowstorm. A method of self-centered locomotion that only came into my lap because the failures of American infrastructure demand it. The bridge across the Merrimack river, going past a gas station, with an immediate right turn onto a highway ramp that splits north and south, with the northward ramp leading to my workplace is recontextualized into an exciting 25 second serpentine rally course on snowy mornings. For that brief moment, I feel the same connection Ken Block did decades ago, between rallying motorsport and skateboarding, the lamentation that the artistic freestyling one enjoys while street skating is an exceptionally expensive endeavor when one tries to translate it to the automobile. The youthful spirit of dancing without music.

We don't have nightclubs in this city. We have anti-woke bars, Toronto-named restaurants, neon green dispensaries that sell kratom and ketamine, and recently-legalized casinos that drain what little they can out of the most financially desperate that remain here. Many a gas station and corner store echoes the same pre-recorded repition when a lottery ticket is cashed in for a single dollar, a passionless "congratulations, you're a winner", as one waits to purchase a single beverage or $5 candy bar. The Aviation museum doesn't interest me, as the prospect of flying a plane is something left to either the obscenely wealthy, the overworked commercial pilot, or the bloodthirsty imperialist. The Millyard musem is one I have already visited during a school trip, its stories of rampant 19th century resource and labor exploitation are one I am overtly familiar with. It was the largest cotton mill on Earth at the time, after all, and we all know how cotton was harvested in the 19th century, before the civil war.

With this cynical lens I have of my surroundings, why had I never left? Sure, there was an unusually long period of time after graduating high school where I lacked that sort of agency, but I have saved enough money to keep paying rent for nearly a whole year with no income at this point, and I have never thought of trying to explore things outside of this 50-hour-per-week cycle. Something I keep hearing in favor of this stagnation is Job Security. Even with rumors abound of something afoot when the CEO is ousted and replaced by hi sisters, the people of New England are still intensely loyal to the supermarket that refuses to progress itself beyond the year 1994 (for better and worse). Financial risk-taking is something that was hammered out of me in the multi-year wake of my father's death. Even as I became self-sufficient, it feels like a waste to just let go of this opportunity to only pay $600 a month, even with no savings goal in sight. It's the sort of fortune that many people in the world would kill for, and some even have been killed for it, if pro-military propaganda is to be believed. And yet, I feel guilt in wanting more. More than just money, it isn't even that much that I have, in the grand scheme of things, but there's this paralyzing guilt in trying something different. People being proud of me, telling me I do a good job, all this praise for normalcy, is another plank in the mental barrier of even thinking of something else, built upon years of wasting away in a room in the back of someone else's property in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the wilderness when my mother and I couch surfed in the late 2010s.

There's this internet famous anime from 2007 that I believe anyone reading this is overwhelmingly familiar with. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I have a strange admiration for the titular character, not out of old-school waifuism in the slightest, but because her character arc is realizing the key to finding fulfillment is something she has to take in her own hands, and she even has a comical unawareness in her agency for the outlandish things she wants to experience. In the first arc, she is intensely annoying to those around her, her directionless ambition, boundless in enthusiasm, but so aimless she is like a bull in a china shop, is something the narrator of the light novel, one we only know by the nickname "Kyon", finds himself dutifully managing to minimize the casualties of her selfish antics. Eventually, he finds himself embroiled in the supernatural happenings that surround her, as her wish upon a shooting star from years ago has granted her an unwitting omnipotence of summoning a time traveler, an esper, and an alien cyborg to her unofficial after school club.

Sat in the attic of a rented colonial era home in the outskirts of Concord, New Hampshire, huddled in front of a $50 LCD TV on the floor (because the ceiling was too low for proper furniture), with my PS3 playing each episode for 10 minutes before needing a refresh to continue playing the episode on kissanime in its web browser, I was enamored by how eerily familiar this TV animation felt. Even as I see more thematically deep TV anime in the years since,with more emotionally moving and more mature subject matter, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya still stands out to me. She felt like seeing an old friend. If there was a term like "waifu" except for an anime character you only wanted to hang out with, that's the word I would have used for her. In that time my mother and I were couch surfing, I hadn't seen my high school friends in person for a very long time, even as we kept daily contact through multiplayer games and instant messaging sites like Skype and Discord.

It was shortly after discovering this show that I started working this shit retail job, and my projection of myself onto its themes was something as simple as "I have money to buy video games with now". But in recent weeks, I think it can run deeper for me. Maybe I should explore my options like she did in episode one. The Real episode one, not the ridiculous film the SOS Brigade made on a shoestring budget that introduced the IP to the non-light-novel-reading public in 2007. Or maybe my memory in the years since I last watched has muddied enough that I'm looking for a simpler way for to explain how I'm starting to realize I have more agency in my life than I thought I had, and my awkward social stumblings are a symptom of holding myself back for so much longer than my peers. I usually kept to myself for much of my youth in fear of the many faux pas i have committed that led me into shaming myself into silence. Those little mistakes I made socializing with others back then still weigh on me harder than they really should. I still remember shooting down a girl that wanted to go with me to the 8th grade dance because I thought being seen with an awkward girl who was way taller than me would ruin my social standing somehow. I have this bad, lifelong habit where when I make a mistake with something, I give up on it forever, even when it's just hanging out with a group of people.

Maybe the biggest mistake I have ever made was avoiding even the slightest chance of making any mistakes whatsoever.