What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Despite what my parents were thinking I was really doing, I've been sitting on my thesis situation and figuring out which option is the better of the two. On the side, I've been trying to come up with four positive things about my thesis to cancel out the negative situation. I only came up with two, but that's better than mulling it over like an emo stereotype.

First off, the work I've done so far is the stuff I went to college to do. I didn't want to be an animator or an illustrator, even though I resigned myself and accepted that could very well be a possibility for me. I wanted to create art. Cartoon art. No, Contemporary Popular Culture Art. And all I have done up until this point is exactly what I wanted to do since I started learning how to draw.

Second, I take pride and have a level of self-confidence now that I didn't have before because of my work. Finally, I can talk about my personal interests on a college level and have been applying that interest into readings that are related through the suggestions of others. I wanted to bring the illustrated cartoon out of the kiddie sand box and into an arena of higher thinking. What surprises me even now is just how high a level I can get. Linking Mickey Mouse to Dadaism or being able to point out the hidden sexual jokes in a Saturday morning cartoon never made me feel this way. In fact, it used to make me feel pathetic. While I haven't achieved the level of "otaku" in feeling a prideful patheticness, at least I know now that knowledge can be applied in an academic arena.

Like I said, I'm still working on the other two.

As far as the situation goes, I was never given any indication that what I was doing was weak. Talking to Jack only indicated a failure to communicate my ideas through paper. When you think about it, that's the point of my thesis. Any community built on knowledge will have a failure in communicating these ideas to another community. That's why Murakami said he can't be an otaku and why otakus don't see what makes Murakami's work art when they can find the same characters and figurines buried at the bottom of potato chip bags. It's why some people see comic books as a place where men can draw big breasted women and not as a place of contemporary social commentary that was twice sponsored by the US Government in several public service campaigns. Dare I say, it is also why I believe that my department feels my thesis is weak while I and others I've explained it to feel the idea is a strong one. We can't communicate.

There's the rub. I can't make the lack of communication or understanding the point of my thesis by presenting a thesis paper nobody understands. I have to communicate this lack of communication in a way that makes my work look strong, which I feel it is. Doing so requires an entire rewrite of my paper... AGAIN. The suggestions about organization and commodity fetish do not apply as heavily as social reaction or even basic semiotics. More research is needed, but not in the sense of a different subject matter. Commodity fetish can relate to semiotics. After all, when humans become things through commodity fetish, those things become a signifier for the subculture which are read differently depending on who is viewing them. Not in the sense that what you read as "chair" may be read as "table" to another, but more along the lines of what you see as normal compared to abnormal. Though, in my thesis, it isn't the people so much as it is their actions and knowledge based on their personal interests.

If I communicated that idea clearly here, then please someone tell me! (Preferably Jason or Hugo. No offence Robert.) I don't expect anyone to understand what I just said, because that's the point of my thesis. Much like what makes Damien Hirst's floating shark art, I don't expect people outside of my nerdism to "get it." For all I know, they may see it as nothing but the usual angsty blog entry much like how someone would see the shark piece as just a gross display of a dead animal that is better suited for a science lab than an art gallery.

There's a quote from Murakami that I've been hanging on to since I started this thesis. He said it when he was comparing the art community and the otaku community in how exclusive and difficult it is to be accepted within it.

If you can't discuss its [art] history, you won't be taken seriously and you won't be accepted on their [the art world] turf.

That's pretty much what I'm facing right now. I can't talk the talk, so they feel like I can't do the walk.

I feel I can, though. For the first time in recent memory, I feel confident in my thesis. No, I feel confident in me.

I just need to make my paper so clear the five-year-old across the street can understand it.