Last night I ended up watch­ing the last few episodes of an anime series called Card­cap­tor Sakura, which by my reck­on­ing is at least ten years since I watched it all the way through as a kid.

At the time, I sup­pose the main character’s relent­lessly chirpy atti­tude had quite an effect on me. I watched a lot of sim­i­lar stuff around that time, and some­how the idea that being some­what self-sacrificing and being con­stantly happy at peo­ple would Make Every­thing Okay got stuck in my head.

Actu­ally it seemed to work pretty well when I was that age, but that atti­tude prob­a­bly got stuck for rather too long — case in point, here’s me still spaffing Card­cap­tor Sakura song lyrics on my Live­Jour­nal at age 19. Of course, approach­ing life with the atti­tude of a fic­tional, supernaturally-chirpy 10-year-old girl didn’t really sur­vive first con­tact with Uni­ver­sity life, and cer­tainly not with fatherhood.

But watch­ing the series again still makes me happy, both to see the char­ac­ters fall in love again, and to remind myself how glad I am that I am no longer that naive.

And kind of con­fused that, despite the first time I watched Card­cap­tor Sakura seem­ing so recent, it was nearly half my life­time ago.