message in a bottle

I can't sit still without falling asleep lately. Anytime I pop on a movie, I'm out--then I have to back track to see what I missed. It's a bit of a pain in the ass.

Still, I can never get to bed early. I just popped a couple of NyQuils--there's still some residual stuffiness--so it's just a matter of time before I pass out. I have an early interview tomorrow, so I have to get up on time. I just finished watching the movie, and it was good, but right towards the end, it became impossible to keep my eyes open. I think I watched the ending four times. I'd blink, just close my eyes for a second, I thought, and when I opened them again, the credits were rolling.

---

I got a group of packages from my parents--all the Christmas gifts that I didn't have room to take on the plane. They also sent me a bunch of VHS tapes that I wasn't able to move out to California with me. A lot of them are way old, and I wonder if they still work. I got the full series of The Maxx cartoon that I'd recorded from MTV, as well as a bunch of bootleg anime that I'd bought at comic conventions and at this mall in Chinatown. The place was recommened to me by a customer of the comic book store I used to work at. The store was a mall type place in the heart of Chinatown, just off of Broadway and a few blocks away from the N/R train stop. All the stores are really small and are packed with colorful Asian pop culture paraphernalia. On the second floor, which is downstairs, there was this tiny video store that was basically a couple of racks of VHS tapes on each side and a countertop. The guy who worked the place barely spoke english, but I think he'd seen enough geeky white kids to know what I was looking for. I'd ask him what anime he had and he'd take out a binder that held the covers of everything he had in stock, which was pretty extensive. I'd just point to titles and he'd go back behind the counter and get them. I couldn't read the names of most of the titles, but I'd look for familiar characters. It was something like five dollars a tape--most of which were copied for laserdisc and poorly subtitled with lots of misspellings, but it was better than paying $29.99 for them.

I never really thought if what I was doing was legal or not, but I needed to get my fix and I was on a budget. That's one of the things I miss most about New York. You can get whatever you want for really cheap if you just look hard enough.