This started out as a recap of Anime Boston 2005, but I won't bore you with that. Suffice to say that's where Bonnie and I spent our Friday and Saturday -- we signed up as soon as they were offering pre-registrations last year, and I promised her we'd spend the weekend. Unfortunately, we could only stay for Friday and Saturday because the church Bonnie and the kids go to decided to schedule Emmeline's first communion for this Sunday. Next year, hopefully there will be no conflicts at all. And if you're curious about some of the folks we saw at the event, check out this Flickr photo album.
Anyway, on the way home on Saturday night, I had an epiphany -- Bonnie and I are both dedicated to hobbies that are, by and large, youth-oriented. For me it's video and computer games -- and yes, I know what the ESA says about the average age of game players, but there's no question that the adolescent and 18-24 demographics still dominate the market. Every time I've popped in to a local business that's hosting a game night, I see these kids who have been dropped off by their parents. And the ones who are older than that totally freak me out: Beings that seem incognizant or uncaring of the fact that they are walking stereotypes. People I walked away from when I quit the Sci-Fi Club at my first high school and let my membership in the local Star Trek fan club run out at about the same time.
For Bonnie, it's anime. And at least the way it is here in the U.S., this is still a market that is dominated by teens and college kids. Especially the cosplayers. We're talking about a social experience that's really dominated by kids who like cartoons, essentially, although there's a lot of really serious creative expression going on there with college kids and some young adults who invest a huge amount of time and effort to create imaginative and inventive costumes, create works of striking visual art, or express themselves in other creative ways. Still, once they hit a certain age, or develop a serious professional career, or get married and settle down with a family of their own, they tend to drift away.
It has, frankly, made it difficult for us to socialize directly with people our own age (we're both 35). We live in a distant suburb of Boston, in a fairly conservative town, so there isn't an easy resource for us to channel our interests into. Bonnie's found two fairly close regional anime groups, but they're both made up of teenagers from local high schools. She's getting more and more into the online scene, but like a lot of social networks, these bulletin board systems and Web sites are populated by younger people with more time on their hands. It makes it difficult for her to connect with people in our age group.
It's largely the same for me with gaming. I've been really lucky to parlay my gaming interest into a major facet of my professional life, and that's put me in touch with some really cool people I consider close friends. But they're not geographically close -- they're all hours away, or a plane ride away, and far enough that I see them at most twice or three times a year. Still, at least I get that online connection, thanks to iChat and the message boards I visit.
Still, when we're talking with people in our area and it comes up in conversations that I review video games and that Bonnie likes anime, there's inevitably this glazed, uncomprehending look that creeps into the visages of the people that we're talking with.
The most common reaction is a glazed look that lets us know that the person just doesn't think it's right. Who knows what's going on in their head -- I don't attempt to psychoanalyze them. But the body language and the reaction is that stiff, uncomprehending reaction that lets you know for whatever reason, you've just been identified as other. Weird. Not normal. I don't drink beer and watch Nascar races on Sunday afternoons. We don't take our kids to soccer practice. That's just not our scene.
We've made a conscious effort to stay far away from densely populated urban areas where we'd be more likely to find people in our age group with similar interests. We've done for two reasons: One is pragmatic -- we just couldn't afford to raise a family of three kids on a single income living anywhere near a city. The other is more sociological: Frankly, neither of us ever really connected with people who we knew were living that urban lifestyle. Many of them developed a focus on upward mobility or an intellectual arrogance that Bonnie and I both found off-putting. That probably says a lot more about the company we kept than anything to do with that lifestyle in itself, but it was enough to make us distance ourselves from that experience.
There's plenty of pettiness and arrogance of one type or another out here in the 'burbs -- I'm not making any pretense that people here are more "real" or better than folks in the city. But it's a healthier lifestyle for our kids -- they have a big backyard with a swingset, woods, a pond nearby. The beach is a fifteen minute drive in two opposite directions. We're lucky here. I think green things are important for kids to be around. And frankly, I never want to move too far away from the water.
The ironic thing is that we both lived our teenage years as outcasts, and we're accustomed to it. And it seems that we're dooming our kids, through influence of our own interests, to pushing them in that direction as well.
Is this a wail of self-pity, or pity for my kids? Hell no. It's just a bit lonely sometimes, and on the way back from a con that has its own culture attached to it, there's a sense of separation anxiety that can be a bit overwhelming if you dwell on it too much.
In that respect, Anime Boston 2005 isn't very different from Macworld Expo -- it's a similar sensation that's somewhere between post-coital depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
There are a hell of a lot of Windows users out in the sticks, too. Not to mention everywhere else. When push comes to shove, though, I'm just not cut out to fit into the mainstream, it seems.