Me Time Is Free Time

Phew - Mr Danny finally said that he's putting a full stop to this thing. I always love major incidents in my life like this one - I can rank up on my The Fool Social Link! Well, The Fool is supposed to be the self in its growing period. So I guess I learned a thing or two from this, and thus grew a rank! I mean, this is reality. There's no Midnight Channel or Dark Hour, so we gotta, like, grow from these in-life travails. I guess ... um ... my blog can be back to normal now? My point is, constant serious posts are not really my cup of tea. Or my cup of coffee, since I prefer coffee over tea. Tea is luxurious and elegant, but coffee is what I favor for the noir feeling it imbues. I love Boss coffee, exclusive from Suntory. Um, does Williew ever turn down Japanese products? Heh, I guess not. Talking about Japanese culture, let me introduce free schools to my Malaysian readers who are in the dark.

Technically, free schools do not originate from Japan. Nevertheless, there are quite aplenty in Japan. Free schools are schools for people of all ages who for some reason of their own are unable to attend normal schools. They are not necessarily people with special needs. They may be NEETs (Not currently engaged in Education, Employment or Training), social outcasts, asocials, or traumatized of education. The education system varies depending on the country the free school is in. Classes are all optional. Students have the liberty to choose whether or not to attend. Free schools focus on building all the inner qualities of their pupils. Once the students are back on track, they can choose to go back to normal schools or stay. 
Public examinations are still available, of course. There are manga libraries, video games and such in free schools (in Japanese ones, at least). I've been reading two shoujo series that both focus on life in free schools: Cat Street and The Wandering Class. Cat Street is more popular but the latter's more into the free school thing. If there's one thing I like about shoujo manga, it's that I get to take a break from all those battle-oriented shonen manga and get more self-development. I don't think that shoujo manga is exclusive for girls - that's sexual discrimination. It's the same, the other way round. There are plenty of girls who are into shonen. Most of the Noise where I live in are just ignorant (Noise, of course, refers to humans I see as foolishly foolish foolhardy fools who do foolishly foolish foolhardy acts in this world that should be foolproof ... and yes I know I am speaking like Franziska von Karma). Anyways, while chasing a runaway problem student, the main character who is a teacher at Kirihito Gakuen (the free school) stops to talk with the director mid-chase. The director gave a very insightful description of free schools during the talk:
D: Can I ask you one thing?
T: Fo sho.
D: Am I a guy from the lower-class?
T: Huh? What're you talking about? Of course you're from the higher-class!
D: Really?
T: Why do you ask me that?
D: Because of what you said. Last time I was also a school dropout (the runaway's a dropout).
T: What!? But you're a doctor (he's both the school director and a doctor) right?
D: Yup. I didn't go to high school (for all the ignorant Noise, your Forms 1, 2 and 3 are junior high grades, yeesh, so stop saying 'high school'!). But I did the entrance exams and made it to university. Because your education was complete, and you are are surrounded by the same type of people, you must have been in the dark ... that in this world, there are many people who can't reach their destination directly, but stop somewhere first. Even though for those who see from afar they look like they're lost, actually that's an important moment for them. When they decide to return to return to mainstream, they can leave Kirihito Gakuen. So isn't it good that there's at least one school that reach out to them and say, "Feel free to linger around first."?
I felt really bewitched by that speech. If there were free schools around, I would definitely study there. The school standards doesn't matter - you really just need that moment of tranquility in life and recuperate. You gather yourself together, and go back out to the battlefield. So isn't AMGC (Anime Manga Game Cosplay) beneficial for us? Schools may teach us academic stuff, but AMGC teaches me both academic and personal things. I grow a lot from AMGC, while there's really only growth in knowledge and physique while in school. Last year, a lot of the boys have problems understanding 'mode' in Maths. But even in elementary school
I already know what modes are, since the Indonesian translation of the Doraemon manga used the term once to replace 'trends'. So last year I immediately knew that mode is used in the context of trend, like the trend of certain statistics, so it really helped me to understand. Due to my EHEM (Evil Housing Estate Manager) Memory, I can remember all those important things in AMGC, so it's no big deal. Of course, I will explain what EHEM Memory is. Probably in the next post. This time I feel too lazy to make a long post, so I'll end here.

p/s: I translated the dialogue from Indonesian, which  was translated from Japanese! I did mention I bought a whole box of tankobons while in Jakarta, right? And Michael asked me about my desktop wallpaper, so here it is:

TWEWY, the characters featured are Beat, Rhyme, Shiki, Neku and Joshua; clockwise from top.