Number 50

I always thought I would be very excited when I reached the last ten weeks of the year, since it would be just a countdown until my completion. To be honest, I lost track of the weeks and no longer thought of it in a numerical sense anymore. Only the first month was "Water Running: Week Three" and such. But now that it is December and there are only two weeks remaining after this, I realized, this was my fiftieth new thing this year, that is as far as my book is concerned. It is a pretty amazing land mark. Had this goal not existed, how many new things would I have done? Ten? Five? I can promise you it wouldn't be fifty.

A few weeks ago before I owned a laptop and would go to the library to use their computers, I noticed a bulletin board with a sign announcing an anime club which meets the third Tuesday of every month (today!). It looked like a kids club to me. I used to work at the library two and a half years ago, and that was my perception of the anime club. The poster did say for ages 12+ however, so I thought, hey, I'm twelve plus! Sure maybe I'm more than twice that age, but that's okay! So I figured going to this kids club could very easily be my new thing this week.

I was a little late; I wasn't able to completely close my store until around 6:30, and the club started at 6:00. After pulling into the library parking lot, I actually felt a little nervous. Not the kind of nerves I felt before skydiving of course, but I admit, I noticed a little apprehension just doing this new thing. (Apparently that never wears off, but personally I kind of enjoy a few jitters every now and again.)

It was nothing like I expected. There was a group of people in the auditorium sitting around the overhead projector screen watching "Avatar", an Americanized Anime series on Nickelodean. The people there were not all twelve-year-olds; most of the people, I later learned, were probably around sixteen, and there were even several people my own age. It was the opposite of my visualization. I thought I'd be towering over elementary-aged children. I saw an episode of Dharma and Greg years ago when Dharma, very much the free spirit, decided she wanted to learn to play violin and joined a class where she could clearly be everyone's mom. My experience was not that dramatic.

So it wasn't exactly a kids class, more teenage, but it was still going out of my comfort zone by attending a club out of my age group. And as I want to learn Anime so I can teach other people how to draw it, this really was an ideal club to attend.