I doubt that I will ever enjoy an anime, in totality, as much as I have enjoyed Blood+. (I will say that Elfen Lied comes very close.) Episode 50 airs tonight at 1:30am Pacific time. I started watching Blood+ almost one year ago. Blood+ opened up the world of anime for me. Much like the first time I listened to Miles Davis my senior year in college back in 1991, I was turned on to Jazz, completely blown away by the text of the music and carried away by the emotion of it all.

I was lucky enough to catch the very first airing of the first Blood+ episode First Kiss. Like the first notes of Jazz, Blood+ carried me away with the totality of its plot, storyline, dialogue, and subtext. Had it not been for that very first episode, I would not have taken the time to watch other [as] contemporaries such as Trinity Blood and Ghost in the Shell, or purchased DVD sets such as Elfen Lied, Blue Gender, and Basilisk - shows unlikely ever to be aired on basic cable or direct tv. And while for every Ghost in the Shell, there is an Eureka Seven...for every Wolf's Rain and Darker than Black, there is a Bleach and a Gantz: hits and misses. But that comes with the territory. And even with each successive 'miss', I remain willing to give the next anime a shot. And while I feel a little nostolgic, I am thankful for being proven wrong and thus becoming more open and willing to set aside my preconceptions. Anime, good or bad, is much more than I had thought it was.