Today has been a very good day indeed!

Finally, the emotional realization that Fanime is so close has dawned on me, and I basically spent the whole day prepping for it. It feels good to have another whole day to prepare (and then a few hours on Thursday, as I'm leaving around 1 PM or so) because it doesn't feel like such a stressful rush this way.

And I'm so, so excited for it! I know it's going to be a wonderful time, because Fanime always is! Fanime is like my spiritual home (Pokémon world aside, and when I arrive every year it's like, "YES, I BELONG HERE!" I always hate leaving, because I get so used to being surrounded by fellow geeks who are so happy and excited, who I can talk to about what I love without any sort of explanation. It's just such a wonderful community of people that forms over just a few days. It's nice to be just a few words away from becoming friends with people, and the vast majority of the time at cons people are so polite and upbeat and fun to be around. It's always such a shock to go back to regular life, which isn't that bad, but in comparison it's definitely not the same. But, after I leave the con and head home, I feel this amazing glow of happiness that I can't even describe. It literally feels like my body is glowing with happiness. I swear, it's like I absorb all of that positive energy. I never get even the slightest bit tired of cons, and especially Fanime.

The biggest challenge of the day was figuring out how to carry all my Swap Meet stuff by myself, but I think I figured it out. It won't be easy or fun, but it'll work! I used dog leashes and the bags Gin sent me giant Shinykarp in, haha, along with a big box as well. Everything is full to the brim! I should be able to make a good amount of money Thursday and Friday. 8D I will be missing a lot of great events on Friday night, but, I mean, I'm practically being paid to miss those events, so I will survive.

I still have some work to do on my panel, but I can do that tomorrow. The majority of it is done!

The other great thing is that the big sale I was talking about went through, so that completely rocks. I made $400 on one sale! I'm so happy! Basically, this was the perfect month for my grail to pop up. 8D

Anyway, I'm in better spirits than I've been in a while. Conventions really perk me up! And, I don't have to go into work tomorrow, so basically I just get to keep preparing and getting excited~!

So voting day is here. If you like it please vote; if not then no worries:

Cracked Vision by me for Linkin Park Castle of Glass

"El que mayor virtud pretende, necesita ser sufrido"
-Mi Muy Ilustre Abuela

Summun ius, summa injuria
-Cicero

“ The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. ”
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The following proposition is, I am sure, bound to be controversial and ignite outrage; after all, telling people to re-conceptualize their paradigms often brings with it that guttural resistance that only fear can bring.

Today I have an immodest proposal: I ask you to consider that the Left needs less Social Justice and more compassion.

What would drive me to say such a thing?  Isn't Social Justice the bottom line of progressive movements, the very fiber at the center of what we do?  The answer to that is: well, sort of.  Social justice movements and the people who have tirelessly work in them are at the epicenter of what has made the US as a nation flourish; everything from anti-slavery to Stonewall to the Civil Rights Movements have developed better living spaces for those of us still in this country by choice, circumstance or necessity.  My respect to everyone who fought and to everyone who suffered through these injustices, and to everyone who still carries this shared sense of hurting; praise be to every Black man lynched atop a tree whose image ended in a greeting card; praise be to every person who has traversed the Sonoran desert when the Coyotes left them stranded in the middle of the journey; praise be to every Puerto Rican Islander who got sent off to fight in the name of a president they never had the right to choose; praise be on every body that has endured the dripping attrition on the soul of enduring poverty, systemic disempowerment, persecution, shunning, shaming or trauma: if I have any Fellow Travelers, it is you, the ones who society left behind.  I am an old-school Catholic, you see, and like Miguel de Unamuno posited in his seminal work, On the Tragic Sense of Life, that suffering provides us with the lexicon of love, that we recognize a shared sense of hurting that create the bonds in which love compassion can blossom.

However, "social justice" at the present moment has become less about compassion and more about integrating "diversity" into the ever-increasing self-regulated docility that Michel Foucault extensively wrote about.  It is less about understanding others and their contexts and more about policing our own communities for "excitable speech".  This self-monitoring and regulation of "oppressed" communities, this aptly-embraced self-cannibalization, squeezes out the very ambiguity and contingency that makes a marginal life marginally livable.  Canonizing and categorizing the spheres of affect and speech that "we" will allow each other to inhabit is a reproduction of the mechanistic docility of wider social patterns; everything suo jure.

I, for one, refuse to accept a project of otherness predicated on rubrics.  I refuse to engage in 'social justice' under the jurisdiction of self-regulative systems of collective indifference to nuance.  I choose instead to be compassionate; to make a conscious effort to relate to others and understand them from where they stand, not from where I do; I choose to allow a space for ambiguity, even if I am not always comfortable with it; I elect to try to see how other ways of thought are possible as opposed to reading for intentionality or blame.

We need more kindness and less self-righteousness.  We need more forgiveness and less anger.  We need more patience and less belittling.  We need to genuinely care for people beyond the concepts we believe they can embody (or not).  We need less postmodern word games, less concerns for taxonomy and more concerns about alleviating our collective sufferings; after all, perhaps it might be that the people with the 'right' to try to speak about 'social justice' are those that try to ameliorate the precariousness of our own disadvantages and those of others.  The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.  

I know it's petty and dumb, but I still get a little annoyed about the overuse of the word "grail" on pkmncollectors. I see people say they've been seeking their grail for "weeks" or "a few months," and oftentimes it's an item I've seen for sale many, many times. Sometimes it's even something that came out recently, sometimes even something available on Sunyshore, and often it's just something uncommon at best, or something more expensive than the person can afford at the time.

I don't think it's ever worth bringing up on the community or to the users misusing the term (in my opinion); it's a pet peeve, and bringing it up would be unnecessarily nitpicky and pointless. Who am I to say what an item means to someone? I also understand that a collector's ideas of what constitutes rare, expensive, etc., change a lot over time, and most of these people are newer collectors, or younger members who don't have jobs, or people who have never even ventured on to Yahoo! Japan. So, in a way, I'm understanding, and I'm not really judging them. But, it still annoys me a bit.

I guess it's just because I sought my grail for years (and here I'm referring to the Umbreon Pokémon Mini strap, though my other major grail is similarly rare). It only popped up a few times ever, despite feverish and very detailed modes of searching (many Japanese search terms, looking through lots, even searching by the release date, misspellings of the Pokémon's name, searching foreign Ebay sites). I spent countless hours looking for it. If one disappeared, it would be years until I would find another. To me, a grail is something that is so rare, or gets away so many times (not because it pops up that often, just over time), that you start to wonder if you'll ever get it. So, maybe it doesn't exactly match up with the term "holy grail" used in a non-collecting sense, which literally may or may not exist and there are only legends (though, those kinds of things exist in collecting, too, like Growly's Growlithe plush search), but at least it's closer.

I get that grail is a dramatic word--people want to be searching for their grail, meaning their highest want. If you're a new collector, you go look on Google at your favorite Pokémon, see something you love and want, and say, "THAT is my grail!" It's fine; I don't hold it against them, because it's silly to for something so petty. But, it does sort of cheapen the word for those of us who have sought an item for years, searching and wondering, "Will it ever pop up again?"

How do you all feel about it, if you have an opinion?

i know a few people are waiting on replies from me on various things, ive been kind of busy all month and out of it the past few days dealing with drama and translations, but this week there isn't much to sell until june 1st, so i will be able to reply to these long emails and pick my mods finally.

just a public service announcement, its not you, its me @_@

please go buy my substitutes so i can buy helioptile customs :D

Since I can't sell on the community anymore, I figured I could stick this here and hope it sells as a last ditch effort to have some money for my Disney trip, or something to get myself a couple of the Sylvies coming out since I can't actually collect her anymore.

If you want to do it directly through me instead of eBay it'll be $20 off of each of them.

Large toy lot:
http://bit.ly/189C7t2

Umbreon canvas:
http://bit.ly/YQtd0E

Friday: Tails and details, finish all bodies.
Saturday: Finish everything from Friday, start construction of jumbo plush
Sunday: Jumbo plush and ditto chu
Monday: Finish jumbo plush and the plush from Friday
Tuesday: Run off from the other days
Wednesday: Keychains and finishing up other projects