This message was originally posted on Laura Matsumoto’s personal blog.

It looks like 2009 is finally here, and, frankly, this girl couldn’t be happier to be saying goodbye to stupid old 2008. I say “Good Riddance!” to twelve months filled with pathetic, creepy little men and their disgusting sexual hang-ups. Men who were not fit to lick my shiny black combat boots. Men who were disturbed in the head. Men with some serious issues.

I’m a bewildered-looking androgynous half-Japanese woman and I’m sick of all these fanboys who want to have sex with me just because I look like their favorite video game character.

I suppose I should have learned my lesson a long time ago, huh ladies? It’s the same routine every time with these freaks. I’ll just be minding my own business, browsing the manga section at Forbidden Planet or Tabletopz, when I catch a cutey in zipper pants staring at me from across the store. He finds his way over to me from the figurine section with a couple booster packs of Magic: The Gathering cards in his hand and says something jaw-droppingly sweet about how I don’t look like the busted-face girls he normally sees in the store at this time of night. I’ll giggle and give him my digits and just like that we’re suddenly off to the races.

It’s not until it’s too late when I realize this guy has some warped fantasy of dressing me up like Cloud or Ash or who-the-eff-ever and having his way with me on a bed peppered with hentai he photocopied at the library. I mean, how would you guys feel if someone was only interested in you because he or she learned to masturbate to a digital image that only slightly resembles you? It hurts. A girl wants to feel like she’s special – not that she looks like someone special.

I can already see my comments section filling up with disparaging remarks. My friends, my parents, my co-workers – they all think that this is somehow my fault, that I invite these men into my life.

I can’t help that my father is Japanese and my mother is American.

I can’t help that I have childlike features and porcelain skin.

I can’t help that my body is proportioned in a way that is neither masculine nor feminine.

I can’t help that I enjoy carrying around oversized weapons, or that I look best in trench coats, or that my default expression is one of wide-eyed bewilderment.

I was born this way, people!

Ever since I turned thirteen I’ve made a tradition out of going to Comicon with my close friends. This year, I finally had to give that tradition up because I was sick of being approached by greasy-faced dorks who think I’m LARPing. Why would I be role-playing eating a cheese pizza with my friends in the lobby café? What character in lore spends his or her time browsing through signed Justice League lithographs?

It’s time to make a change in my life; if there was ever a time to make it, this would be it.

So this is my New Year’s Resolution: from here on out, no more meeting boys in comic book stores, internet forums, or Best Buy. No more brushing off an interested party’s seemingly casual references to Final Fantasy, Sailor Moon, or World of Warcraft. Kick any boy to the curb if he has more than one Brady strategy guide or a subscription to both EGM and Animerica.

From here on out, this bewildered-looking androgynous half-Japanese woman is doing things the old fashioned way: putting on a slutty dress and dancing by myself at the local dive bar until I meet a man that will treat me with dignity and respect.

Wish me luck!

<3 Laura <3

Current mood: Hopeful
Current music: Linkin Park