Yeah. I haven’t written on this in a while. That’s going to change.

And I figure as good a place to start as any is with television. For me, TV is usually on in the background, with pro wrestling, Gordon Ramsay, TruTV, and ESPN taking up most of my watching/listening.

However, with the writer’s strike that went on for months, major television networks were forced to come up with things to fill time slots.

This reality has led to what I am officially terming the Sean Block on ABC, Tuesday nights from 8-11, as ABC puts on three shows back to back to back of such dubious nature that they really have to be catering to me at this point.

Without further ado, The Sean Block.

Wipeout: (8:00-9:00 PM): Basically, the premise here is a bastardized combination of mXc and Ninja Warrior. The show starts off with 24 contestants who have to run a “qualifier” obstacle course. The twelve with the fastest time move on to another challenge, then six to the next, and finally four move on to the climactic “Wipeout Zone”, with the winner taking home 50,000 beans.

Qualifier, on the debut, consisted of the Topple Towers (stacks of boxes that fall easily over mud), the Sucker Punch (a wall with constantly punching out fists with a ledge alongside, again designed to knock contestants into mud), Big Balls (four red rubber balls set up over water, the idea being to bounce across them to the other side), and the Cookie-Cutter Swing (contestant swings on rope over water and lands through cutout human shape to conclude the course.)

Now, Ninja Warrior has gimmicky contestants that can’t even usually clear the first obstacle. The problem, of course, with Wipeout is that the emphasis seems to be placed on these contestants.  The show lives up to its name, in that the Wipeouts are the focus, rather than any success on the part of the contestants. Again, this could be good — but the commentators are both too PG, and unfunny even with their given material. Watch mXc, and see how it’s done, gentlemen.

Onto “The Sweeper” for round two, a series of twelve round platforms with a rotating bar sweeping around like a clock hand, forcing the contestants to jump over to stay alive. This wasn’t a bad event, even if it may as well be called Reverse Rotating Surfboard of Death.

Third round is “Dizzy Dummies”, basically everyone spins around really fast on this whirly device, before having to traverse a teetering bridge (Balance Bridge from Ninja Warrior, but done sillier), or a bunch of stones (Sextuple Step from Ninja Warrior), with the four people succeeding moving on to the Wipeout Zone.  Comedic only really because I don’t think some of these people  could have cleared the obstacles WITHOUT having spun around in a ridiculous contraption.

With that done, we move to the WIPEOUT ZONE, upon which I still had hope for a Ninja Warrioresque finale. We instead get a water park ride down a slide on an inner tube,  a Donkey Kong-esque run up a slope hopping over barrels, a spinning platform, and a series of jumps up and down a bunch of trampolines. To be fair, the second and fourth ones were pretty legitimate, as I think I’ve seen something like fourth on Kunoichi, Women of Ninja Warrior.

The show’s problem, really, is that it wants to have it both ways. It wants to be a competitive show, and a comedy. The obstacles, though, really aren’t difficult/well designed enough for this. Really, the first qualifier stage’s best method of approach for some obstacles seems to be to fail, swim across, and move on to the next obstacle.

Pick an approach, please, to the show. You can’t have both.

I Survived A Japanese Game Show! (9:00-10:00 PM): This may be the dumbest premise of all time. Reality show is cast. Contestants end up at LAX, where it is revealed that they’re going to Japan. As part of a tour, they are led into Toho Studios, in a pitch black room…upon which they find out that they are to be contestants on a…JAPANESE GAME SHOW.

It sounds moronic. To an extent, it IS moronic, but it is also AMAZING television.

The host of the Japanese game show is tremendous. The contestants compete in such games as Conveyor Restaurant, in which an eater must eat a mochi ball from the basket on the head of a teammate who runs towards eater on a treadmill. Once eaten, eater pushes a button, causing the runner to fall down and land in a lot of flour. The winning team is feted on a helicopter tour of Tokyo, the losers run a rickshaw service for two hours.

Reality television works because it forces the contestants to take seriously the inherently not serious.  One contestant named Olga is hyper-serious in her discussion of the ongoing battle between the Yellow Penguins and the Green Monkeys, and it’s comic, to us at least. She has a shot at 250,000, so to her, this world of insanity is deadly serious. To the viewer, though, it comes off as “this nutjob is analyzing a game where you fall into a pool of flour.”

Million billion stars.

And I didn’t even get to see the show about the Amish drinking this week.

It feels like I’m at a crossroads yet again.

To make a long story short…grades first semester of law school: B in Property, B- in Torts, B- in Criminal Law. That’s about a 2.875. I haven’t seen a GPA like that, well, ever.

It wasn’t without cause, though; my usual mediocre study habits came through yet again, but the real culprit was, shockingly, World of Warcraft, which I picked up mid-September and played more than is healthy by almost any standard of the word.

But I’ve been logging into the game for fifteen minutes at a time over the past week…and the thrill is gone. I’ll probably stop playing by the middle of this week, which means I’ll have more time to study, and more free time to invest in something else.

It’s interesting, but I feel defined by my hobbies a lot more than by my study of the law. Before this, I played World of Warcraft. Before that, I was Seymour Almasy in e-Wrestling, or just generally a player of RPGs and the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG.

e-Wrestling’s always there, and I’ll always be in it in some way shape or form, but I need something new too. I’ve always been like this, to an extent. Ice skating gave way to gymnastics gave way to karate before I got pulled from that and discovered the internet.

So it looks in some ways like I’m back to the beginning, or a beginning. No WoW means that I’ve got time on my hands again.

What will I do with it? Thousand possibilities, but God only knows.

Time for another silly meme thing. This one they teach you in like, first grade, but eh, let’s give it a shot.

Sane. For the first time in a while, anyway, I feel like I’m in my right mind. It probably helps that the psychopath I was dating for a while has been exposed as the fraud she is, and that I’m set up in my apartment in NYC, but I feel pretty good and ready to tackle the challenge of law school with an open, ready mind.

Eating. Eating is good. Required for people to live. I enjoy good food perhaps a bit too much, but at the very least, I walk three miles a day and eat less now, so hopefully I can return to a semi-svelte figure. I had a cheesesteak today. Perhaps not.

Argumentative. I admit it, I would argue with my own echo. It’s why my family’s said I’m destined to be an attorney…but my own reasoning for it is perhaps vaguer. I enjoy being the devil’s advocate and challenging beliefs, especially the beliefs of people who believe without thinking.

New York City. Living here is strange. I’m used to walking outside and seeing green grass and shrubs everywhere, not concrete. It is a definite learning curve, but there are positives. Restaurants everywhere. Ease of transportation. It’s still hard to get used to though. I sort of miss East Brunswick.

Simon. My middle name for those of you who may not know. I’m the rare person on earth who likes his middle name, though Kat liked hers so much a variant is now her real name. Perhaps one day I will go by S. Simon Williams, Esq.

Or not, because that name sounds like I have a stick the size of a Jousting pole up my ass. x.x

Worrier. If you know me, you know I worry. About my appearance, my capabilities, everything under the sun. I’m trying the best I can. I really am. It’s just very difficult sometimes to override 22 years.

Ill. I’m getting sick a lot more in NYC. I don’t know if it’s the air, or just adjusting, but I feel quite icky. x.x

Law. I am more excited about my study of the law than I thought I’d be at this point. It is a lot less cut and dried than the world leads you to believe. Even through orientation, I have recognized that being a good lawyer is about a lot more than knowing cases, and I’m looking forward to practicing all of the skills required to be an attorney in the next three years.

Love. It’s hard to say whether a person is good or bad at love. I suppose I fall into the category of those that devote themself to it completely, which was part of the reason why Ashley turning out to be neurotic didn’t kill me. I wasn’t as far gone with her as I usually become. Usually, love takes hold of me as if I was a character in a novel, becoming an all-consuming drive. This isn’t all together bad, mind you…just would be nice if I ever managed to love someone in the same zip-code. ;p

Indomitable will. I am feeling particularly stubborn right now. Law school is a challenge to me on multiple levels, one of them being to not let it change me. I’m Sean, the Otaku Attorney. I don’t want to turn into some of the people I go to school with. They’re pleasant enough, but everything’s a means to an end, even law school. I want to enjoy my journey. Enjoy life. If I don’t enjoy life with a lawyer’s salary, what good is it to begin with? I will fight to be a law student, not a lawyer student.

Academic. I am an academic. I want to become a lawyer and make ludicrous amounts of money, but I also enjoy learning for learning’s sake. There is so much in the world that I don’t know, indeed, that I will never know. That saddens me, but also inspires me to learn as much as I can about everything that I can.

Money. I sort of need it to arrive already. My financial aid package arrives at the beginning to middle of September, which really doesn’t help me when rent is due Sept. 1st. Thankfully, I’m in a position where my parents can cut me a check and I can cut one back to them when it comes in, but it’s slightly frightening to think about what happens to people who depend on aid that don’t have it yet. It’s another example of how ridiculous the Fordham Law bureacracy is.

Sean. I am Sean. I will always be Sean, no matter how much/little money I make, or how young/old I am. That is what I strive for in this world, a sense of self.

Tomorrow, the world changes again.

I moved down to Richmond, VA for my college career, a four-year undergraduate tenure at the University of Richmond. This is different though. Down there, I had a dorm room, in a sheltered campus miles from downtown Richmond. I had no desire to go to school in a big city. I liked being at what was, essentially, sleep-away camp with papers and tests.

Also helped that my parents covered college for me.

This is very different. Tomorrow morning, I finish moving the last of my things into my apartment in New York City. I am paying $1700 a month for it, out of loans that I will be expected to pay back. This time, when my parents come back here, I will not be coming back with them. I will be living in NYC. Sure, I’ll come back to visit pretty often, and such, but this is MY apartment, in a way that a dorm room was never really MY dorm room.

I don’t start school until two Mondays from now. This Monday is orientation, so I have over a week to get myself well-adjusted and set up in my new home. I am living in the middle of the center of the universe, and it is more than a little overwhelming. Two blocks from the theater district and Times Square. A fifteen-minute walk to campus and Lincoln Center. Penn Station. Grand Central Station. Madison Square Garden.

It’s a far cry from Camp UR.

I’m nervous, but in a healthy way. I have a respect for what I am about to undertake, for taking out as much money in loans as I am to ensure one day I am a success in this world as an attorney.

Ever since I was ten years old, I’ve wanted to be a lawyer. The road begins here.

I coasted through high school. Pretty much did through college too, save for the Hell weeks of three papers and tests and not enough time to do it all.

I say this because I need to be honest with myself. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t sit on my ass and play videogames eight hours a day and expect to do well.

At the same time, though, I can’t become the automoton my mom expects me to be. I can’t go to law school, come home, study for eight hours, pass out, and do it again the next day. Sean Williams is more than a brain. I enjoy life because I can log online and chat with my friends, and play videogames, and be myself.

So, the trick is going to be balancing law school and taking it more seriously than other academic pursuits, and still being me.

Hold me to that, if you’re reading this. If I ever disappear too far into the books, tell me to come up for air. If I’m too far into the games, same deal.

If you’re reading this, I trust you a great deal.

Thanks for reading my rambles.

So, yeah. “Osu da. Dooshite?” is, in Japanese, roughly “It’s a lie. Why?”

Found out my girlfriend has been dating the guy that she told me she broke up with continuously, aka, she’s been dating both of us at the same time.

I only found this out by chatting with his best friend. Both he and her other boyfriend are friends of mine.

In the aftermath, figuring out just how well she played me, I am almost speechless.

It has also left me calling this girl a four-letter word that begins with ‘c’ that friends of mine know I never use.

To make a long story short…she let me feel like the knight in shining armor, saving her from a bad boyfriend. Fuck, I was Seymour Almasy, minus the flippy-floppy moves and really long hair.

She knew that’s what I wanted to be, though. And so she created a world in which I was that, a world that wasn’t reality.

I wonder what she wanted. I wonder how she expected me to never find out that he’s moving down to Texas to live with her. Maybe that’s why she wanted me to visit her in New York.

————–

What did you want from me? Did you want to fuck me, and then pull the same “I’m pregnant!” bullshit that you’re pulling on him? Did you want to ruin my life just to fit your own fucking amusement?

You said you loved me while telling him I had the wrong idea about everything. Apparently, you were right about the second half of that.

But you didn’t love me. You never did. You never will.

You won’t love him either. I have already told him of your crimes. To my unmitigated horror, he is still likely going to move down to live with you.

I am assuming you have other boyfriends, stashed about the world like knickknacks for your amusement. I can only hope that he finds them out one day, and that they all do. That they realize that you enjoy being the center of a million fantasy worlds.

Your mother offered to help me come see you. I can only imagine she doesn’t know about John. You even lie to your family.

There are people who love me in this world, thank God.

Which means that I never have to waste another sentence on you.

Goodbye, and good riddance.

Uso da. Dooshite?

The most frightening moments of my day are generally when I reach up behind me onto the shelf for my glasses. I am vulnerable. I am worried.

I am virtually blind without the damned things. I can make out shapes and such, but not much more, so appreciate that when I knocked them off the shelf to the floor, my first immediate thought was “FUCK!”

Step one of recovery, get out of bed, hopefully NOT stepping on the glasses, and turn the light on so I can see more than nothing.

Step two, get back to the bed and blindly paw at the floor for a while to try and find them.  Ten minutes, to be precise.

Step three, go downstairs, get my coffee, and sigh at how really vulnerable I am without the things.

Sorry for those of you who wanted substance. Felt like ranting, but it was a short rant really.

I’m trying to remember exactly when this was. Possibly in eighth or ninth grade, but more likely as late as tenth or eleventh, I wrote what I then considered the greatest piece of writing I had ever created, a short epic-style poem that I called “The Death of Samuel Hughes McClellan.” Roughly, it was the tale of an Irish folk hero who fell in love with a woman, only to have that woman betray him, leading to his death.

I remember handing the poem over to a friend of mine whose name I have just thought of for the first time in probably about five years, Manan Shah, someone whose opinion I respected. I gave it to him, and eagerly awaited his thoughts or criticism.

Politely, he read it, and then looked at me and said that I probably shouldn’t submit it to the school literary journal, as I had been planning. I was dumbfounded, and promptly asked him why he felt that way.

“Because,” he said, more or less, “it would probably hurt Laura’s feelings.”

Laura? Ah, yes, the girl I happened to have a crush on at the time, who was dating a fellow that I found rather disagreeable (incidently, Samuel’s girl also had a similarly disagreeable ex).

I looked at him, shrugged, and asked him if he really thought the McClellan story, with all its attempted use at literary device, big words, Irish brogue, and ABAB rhyme scheme was that similar to my situation.

“Read it again,” he told me, “and then answer me.”

So I did, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right. I hadn’t even consciously thought of the situation when I wrote the Epitaph, but there it was, written out in my little poem.

In the interest of avoiding hurt feelings, I never sent it to the literary magazine we had at the high school. It was the right thing to do, but I do regret that the Epitaph itself disappeared two fried computer hard drives ago.

All of this really, I suppose, leads me to two things:

1. Why is it that our best writing always seems to come out of sorrow?  I guess a corollary to that question is, why is it that when we are sad, we write sad things? So much of the literature deemed great by the world can be considered quite sad. My father and mother have both asked me in high school on numerous occasions if we ever read anything with a happy ending, and I was unable to answer affirmatively.

Even when I wrote for Seymour in eWrestling, when I was depressed, I would never try to compensate when sad. No, I wrote my most upsetting pieces when I myself was sad and least able to handle sorrow. Happy Seymour, by contrast, was always written when I was happiest.

Is it simply a desire to write the emotions we’re feeling at the moment, or something deeper? Probably a little bit of both.

2. My innermost fear in this world, contrary to the likely opinions of my family, who half-jokingly refer to me as a hermit and curmudgeon, is dying alone. I am not at a point in my life where marriage would be a remote possibility even if I had a steady girlfriend, but the idea of union has become far less of a pipe dream to Sean’s future goals and ambitions in life than I once was.

Right now I am in a long distance relationship with a very sweet girl. Unfortunately, her ex will tell anyone who listens that they are still dating. She has told me repeatedly that this is not the case, but I find myself feeling sympathetic for those who hear lies so often that they come to believe them.

She lives two thousand miles away. She is going to be in college in the fall, I will be in law school. It is unlikely that the relationship can endure such strain, particularly when doubt lingers in my mind that I cannot extinguish.

And yet…I cannot help but feel that ending the relationship would be playing into her ex’s hands. If it does end, I want it to be because of where we are in our lives, not because of a delusional former friend of mine who cannot accept reality.

I’m afraid to be alone, far more so than I’m probably willing to admit to all save those closest to me. Living alone in college and law school is one thing. But to be forty-five years old and still dwelling by myself is a thought that I do not consider especially pleasant.

I will leave you with what little I remember of the McClellan poem, the final two line stanza.  Keep in mind that it was written by a hurting, grieving teenager.

Even so, I pray that its sentiments are false.

“Let the death of Samuel Hughes McClellan pound a lesson in tae yer head,

Be ye not quick to trust in love, or findeth thyself dead.”

– Sean Williams, from “The Epitaph of Samuel Hughes McClellan”

Hello, one and all.

You might known me under a varieties of names, characters, or aliases, but here, I am simply Sean Williams, your future Otaku Attorney.

I went looking for a silly blog meme to kick this bad boy off with, but I decided that wouldn’t be right for me.

No, I’m a man who dances to the beat of his own drummer. So, I invented my own meme, the title of which can be seen above in the nifty title bar thingy.

It’s pretty hard to sum up twenty-two years of living on this Earth in twenty-two sentences, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try. Some of these are probably run-ons.

Deal with it.

1.  I was born in Jamaica Heights, Queens, on March 21, 1985.

2. At the tender age of one-and-a-half, I read my first book, the great literary tome known only as The Cat in the Hat.

3. When my sister was born in 1990, and my parents offered her to me as a great Hannukah present, I proceeded to ask them what else I was getting.

4.  The only popularity contest I have ever won came in fifth grade, when I was elected class treasurer, and it has been all downhill on the popularity front since.

5. I read the school-distributed social studies/history textbook every year from first grade on through high school, cover to cover, for fun.

6. My first ever crush was on the girl that I checked my math homework with in sixth grade.

7. One year later, I got Final Fantasy VII, fell for Aerith Gainsborough, and realized that the fictional character was far more worth it.

8. Nicknames of mine include “Swills,” “The Absent Minded Professor,” and “The Hardcore Isosceles Trapezoid.”

9. My friends from my hometown only ever refer to me as Sean Williams, never as just Sean.

10. I met the first girl I ever dated in a Final Fantasy VII chat room.

11. I credit discovering the internet at the age of thirteen with saving my sanity, if not my life.

12. I was a member of the high school Model United Nations and Academic Teams, thus earning myself even more nerd cred than I already had.

13. Google “Seymour Almasy.”

14.  I graduated East Brunswick High School in 2003 with a 3.9 GPA, acceptance at the University of Richmond, and a superiority complex the size of Eurasia.

15.  I spend upwards of eight to ten hours a day on the computer.

16. The “Otaku” in Otaku Attorney comes from the Japanese word meaning ‘house,’ which eventually came to be used to describe individuals whose hobbies meant that they remained indoors often.

17. From October 2006 to March 2007, I was destroyed by a breakup, in what I know refer to as my “Emofag Period.”

18. I broke out of said period by falling for my Japanese TA.

19. I graduated from the University of Richmond in May with a 3.53 GPA, degrees in History and Political Science, and a superiority complex that had increased to the size of Pangaea.

20. After growing disillusioned with people who claimed to be my friends, I destroyed my old screen name, and created a new one that only a few people have to begin anew.

21. This summer has been spent practicing my craft at the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG, which paid off when I top eighted the first regional I ever entered.

22. After being accepted to a top 25 law school (Fordham University School of Law), I found an apartment in NYC, and took out $60,000 in loans for the 2007-2008 school year to begin funding my legal education.

And that, friends, is where our story begins…