いらっしゃい!

forewarning: this personal page is about six months or so out of date. so who is this "nekojita" person anyway? what does "nekojita" mean? well, the second one is relatively easy. nekojita is a japanese word, the kanji for which you can see on the right-hand side of this page. its literal meaning is "cat tongue", but it's really an idiom which in japan refers to someone who can't eat or drink hot food. since just about everyone in japan drinks their miso while it's still boiling, this makes a nekojita pretty strange, as well as chotto gaijin.

since yours truly is rather sugoi gaijin, this isn't so unusual, but... there's somewhat mundane story behind it. when mari and i first began dating, i nearly scorched the roof of my mouth off drinking her tea once. she found this fairly amusing, and mumbled "nekojita". when i managed to pry out of her what it meant, i was too amused myself to be insulted, and the nickname stuck. as for the first question--who i am--well, that's a little more difficult to pin down... demo ganbarimasuzo! here are the raw factoids: name: brandon bannerman nicknames: nekojita, catspaw, catsy email: nekojita@ayashi.net dob: 3/7/74 locale geographica: seattle, wa line of work: isp tech support (note: i do NOT do tech support on my personal email) favorite anime/manga: ayashi no ceres, fushigi yuugi, mononoke hime, rurou ni kenshin, martian successor nadesico, card captor sakura, mahou tsukai tai, laputa, a~! megamisama, boku no marie, armitage iii, and many more. nice, eh? that's me in a nutshell... and at the same time, it isn't me. the picture's accurate enough, but i cut my hair in mid-april (which came as a surprise to no one who's seen my last two attempts to grow my hair out). my name is brandon, but the only people who commonly call me that are my family and my ex-wife. to my friends, i'm catsy... to people online, i'm catspaw or nekojita... and to mari, i'm either brandon-kun or anata. (or, alternatively, sono bakana henjin ^v~ ) i've had so many email addresses over the past two years that i've lost count. temporal age is a rather trivial matter which often has no relevance to the person in quetsion. i live in seattle only in the sense that i have a legal residence there--most often, i'm staying with mari in white center, or with my best friend miran in burien. actually, if you judge where one 'lives' by where they spend the most time, then i either live at the isp where i work, or on seattle's glorious public transportation system. want something more current? here's some recent pictures of myself, mari, and friends. too much information? hey, you're the one who browsed to a personal web page. ^v^ in addition to the obvious, my other interests include art--in all its various expressions. my friend miran and i form part of the band obsidian dream, the home page for which hasn't been updated much in about two lifetimes. (i'm working on that...) miran's also an incredible poet who has been a great source of inspiration to me. in addition to writing music, i also enjoy drawing, although i don't do it as much as i used to (nor as much as i'd like to). i love foreign languages. my preference for japanese is probably obvious, and was influenced in no small way by a longstanding fascination for anime. i studied russian when i was in elementary school, american sign language in junior high, and took two years of high school french. to this date, if i combine my amassed knowledge of all three languages (sentence by sentence, respectively), i can compose the following: "good morning! my name is brandon. would you go to bed with me later?" although semantically the three languages mesh well enough to pull this off, it never quite seems to have the desired effect. i began studying japanese on my own time in november of 1998. although i was able to mutter nani and most of the rest of the same anime-induced phrases that just about any otaku can, i owe the entirety of what useful japanese i've learned to mari, whom i started seeing in late january of 99. sensei ga hontou ni jouzu da ze! (incidentally, she drew the picture of herself on the right) although i worshipped yuu watase's fushigi yuugi for quite a long time, recently that obsession has been supplanted by a new one: ayashi no ceres, the latest shoujo manga series by watasesama. i won't reiterate the premise of the whole series here, as there are plenty of other pages out there with general series information. essentially, a young girl named aya mikage is tested by her family on her 16th birthday, and finds that she has the ancient power of a tennyo within her. faced with a family who wishes her dead, a twin brother who has become her gravest enemy, and a mysterious man who weaves himself in and out of her life, aya lives with the aogiri family and searches for the lost hagoromo, which she hopes will permit the tennyo named ceres to return to heaven and let her live her life in peace. if you haven't already, check it out. the series is currently running biweekly in the japanese manga magazine shoujo comics. as each volume is finished, they are published by flower comics--as of may 1999, there are ten volumes. (if you want the ISBNs for ordering purposes, check here, here, and here.) more to come as i think of more things to say. i'm rather opinionated, so if you like, check out my section for miscellaneous ramblings and rants. cheers!