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"So, Sufjan is totally sold out, huh?"
"Oh yeah."
That is at least as dispiriting as not getting to see Hamlet last year, but this time I could have got tickets in time; I just put off the buying, even though of the three notables who are coming, he is the one who excites me the most.
Anyway, I bought an Andrew Bird ticket and the newer Final Fantasy album. Among my other means of coping I have been reading and rereading a lot of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
My beard needs trimming. I don't know if this happens faster than it used to because the hair is grown more resilient or because I've just got less tolerant of length.
"Oh yeah."
That is at least as dispiriting as not getting to see Hamlet last year, but this time I could have got tickets in time; I just put off the buying, even though of the three notables who are coming, he is the one who excites me the most.
Anyway, I bought an Andrew Bird ticket and the newer Final Fantasy album. Among my other means of coping I have been reading and rereading a lot of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
My beard needs trimming. I don't know if this happens faster than it used to because the hair is grown more resilient or because I've just got less tolerant of length.
Breaking inertia
Jul. 28th, 2006 01:02 amI have had the entry block. I guess I can talk about music.
I have a ticket to see Final Fantasy the violinist at UBC in September, which is in the drawer with my yen (I'm specifying that not for you guys but so that I'll remember where it is). In the month following that, both Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens are coming to town, though I've just read that the Sufjan tickets might be sold out. I hope that isn't true; I actually cried out in horror.
That was not much talking about music! That is what comes of the entry block.
It has been too hot, which I suppose comes of the summer. Dubious season, I've always thought, except I like the smell and the happy way people dress. The summer has made me realize that I'd really like to be swimming, but I'm not sure where. I like to do my swimming outdoors. All my houses previous to this one have had pools, either in the neighbourhood complex or, in the case of the Dollar Road house, in the very backyard; that pool was not worth that house (indeed I didn't use it nearly as much as I'd like to now), but this house would be even better with a pool nearby.
One of my bedposts has ceased supporting the bed, so that the frame slides about and the headboard tilts back alarmingly. This has been Pronounced Unsafe, so I staggered downstairs with my mattress and am sleeping in the lower living room there for the meantime. I will need to clean up my room enough that a bunch of us can squeeze in there and figure out if it's fixable.
I have been reading a lot of library books. Recently: Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon; Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys; Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn; Ken Macleod's The Sky Road; some other things I forget at the moment. Currently: C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen.
I have a ticket to see Final Fantasy the violinist at UBC in September, which is in the drawer with my yen (I'm specifying that not for you guys but so that I'll remember where it is). In the month following that, both Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens are coming to town, though I've just read that the Sufjan tickets might be sold out. I hope that isn't true; I actually cried out in horror.
That was not much talking about music! That is what comes of the entry block.
It has been too hot, which I suppose comes of the summer. Dubious season, I've always thought, except I like the smell and the happy way people dress. The summer has made me realize that I'd really like to be swimming, but I'm not sure where. I like to do my swimming outdoors. All my houses previous to this one have had pools, either in the neighbourhood complex or, in the case of the Dollar Road house, in the very backyard; that pool was not worth that house (indeed I didn't use it nearly as much as I'd like to now), but this house would be even better with a pool nearby.
One of my bedposts has ceased supporting the bed, so that the frame slides about and the headboard tilts back alarmingly. This has been Pronounced Unsafe, so I staggered downstairs with my mattress and am sleeping in the lower living room there for the meantime. I will need to clean up my room enough that a bunch of us can squeeze in there and figure out if it's fixable.
I have been reading a lot of library books. Recently: Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon; Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys; Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn; Ken Macleod's The Sky Road; some other things I forget at the moment. Currently: C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen.
"Nonsense! One would fall off."
Jul. 11th, 2006 03:19 amAnd came down in Marilee's birthday party.
Yesterday, the 9th, since that was her birthday, as well as Caduceuskun's, Leonard Richardson's, and that of moderately younger Windsor House person Fiona. The party was split into a formal dinner and a wandering-in-the-park; I skipped the former in favour of the latter, which proved to be a bit of a tactical misstep, since several people I hadn't seen for a while and would have liked to spend more time with came to the dinner and left immediately afterward. Although I knew many of those remaining, together they constituted a crowd that I didn't know, and I was aware of understanding about half of what was going on. Nonetheless, I enjoyed myself pretty well.
When the party broke up, Andrew and I set off in the same direction as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spookyfish's car, and so we were nearby when, after driving for about twenty feet, it died and wouldn't start again. We approached, and asked if they wanted us to push; I think we both thought that we were joking, but, marvellously, we were actually enlisted in the effort, along with most of the passengers. The hope was that the car was only out of gas, so together we pushed it about 11 blocks (9 north, 2 west) to the nearest gas station.
I had never pushed a car before, and it was far too much fun. It was much lighter than I would have expected, at least with three people at a time and downhill, and we indulged in silly affectations like actually stopping at some of the stop signs. We would push for a while, and then hop up and ride on the outside; mostly on the back bumper, but I once ran ahead to spend about ten triumphant seconds sitting up on the hood. I felt like Akio.
The lingering euphoria of that activity was probably useful in helping the group maintain our high spirits when, having completed its goal and with a relatively full tank of gas, the car still wouldn't start. This persisted even through an exhaustive consideration of the engine and the educated support of a passing motorcyclist with a spanish accent ("These old cars, they are my specialty"); eventually, Spookyfish called the BCAA, and the rest of us walked or bussed our separate ways. I do not know what since became of the car.
And went up. And came down to David's house, today, which was also fun, but I'm tired enough to close the entry without elaborating further.
Yesterday, the 9th, since that was her birthday, as well as Caduceuskun's, Leonard Richardson's, and that of moderately younger Windsor House person Fiona. The party was split into a formal dinner and a wandering-in-the-park; I skipped the former in favour of the latter, which proved to be a bit of a tactical misstep, since several people I hadn't seen for a while and would have liked to spend more time with came to the dinner and left immediately afterward. Although I knew many of those remaining, together they constituted a crowd that I didn't know, and I was aware of understanding about half of what was going on. Nonetheless, I enjoyed myself pretty well.
When the party broke up, Andrew and I set off in the same direction as
spookyfish's car, and so we were nearby when, after driving for about twenty feet, it died and wouldn't start again. We approached, and asked if they wanted us to push; I think we both thought that we were joking, but, marvellously, we were actually enlisted in the effort, along with most of the passengers. The hope was that the car was only out of gas, so together we pushed it about 11 blocks (9 north, 2 west) to the nearest gas station.I had never pushed a car before, and it was far too much fun. It was much lighter than I would have expected, at least with three people at a time and downhill, and we indulged in silly affectations like actually stopping at some of the stop signs. We would push for a while, and then hop up and ride on the outside; mostly on the back bumper, but I once ran ahead to spend about ten triumphant seconds sitting up on the hood. I felt like Akio.
The lingering euphoria of that activity was probably useful in helping the group maintain our high spirits when, having completed its goal and with a relatively full tank of gas, the car still wouldn't start. This persisted even through an exhaustive consideration of the engine and the educated support of a passing motorcyclist with a spanish accent ("These old cars, they are my specialty"); eventually, Spookyfish called the BCAA, and the rest of us walked or bussed our separate ways. I do not know what since became of the car.
And went up. And came down to David's house, today, which was also fun, but I'm tired enough to close the entry without elaborating further.
(no subject)
Jul. 4th, 2006 01:04 pmThree people on my friends list (two of them Americans) wished a general happy Canada Day on Saturday, and I was surprised to find how nice that felt. In that spirit, then: Happy American Independence Day!
Also, happy birthday, mom and Keri.
Also, happy birthday, mom and Keri.
Since her birthday party (around the beginning of June), my sister has had a couple of helium balloons hanging around the ceiling of her bedroom. They're the sort that is a kind of flattened shape, rather than the more traditional rounded one, and both have happy face motifs; one has a whole crowd of faces, and the other, the one I'm concerned with today, has just one large one on each side, bordered by generic busy party colours. Until today, they've seemed quite content to stay there, mostly motionless, very slowly deflating.
Tonight I was heading back up to the kitchen after briefly being downstairs -- I was going back to prepare myself some iced cream, if you must know, since right now we have the unusual luxury of having both iced cream and waffle cones in the house -- and that balloon was there, hanging driftily about the living room landing, at right about my eye level. "That's kind of creepy," I said, but, since I wasn't expecting a reply and was expecting shortly to eat iced cream, continued upstairs without much further consideration.
Perhaps thirty seconds or a minute later, I glanced over in that direction and saw that it was climbing the stairs. Well, okay: to be accurate, it was drifting up the stairs. Slowly cresting the stairs; I could already see its eyes and all its smile. When I saw it on the landing I could have sworn that it wasn't perceptibly in much motion at all, but now it clearly had a firm momentum in my direction.
I hesitated, and went over, and grasped it by its tassle, and led it back down to my sister's room. It made no overtly hostile motions; its expression remained unperturbed. Her door was shut, and she hadn't noticed that it was gone. She says that it got out before, though, earlier today; the dog was barking at it.
I'm really not sure we can trust that balloon.
Tonight I was heading back up to the kitchen after briefly being downstairs -- I was going back to prepare myself some iced cream, if you must know, since right now we have the unusual luxury of having both iced cream and waffle cones in the house -- and that balloon was there, hanging driftily about the living room landing, at right about my eye level. "That's kind of creepy," I said, but, since I wasn't expecting a reply and was expecting shortly to eat iced cream, continued upstairs without much further consideration.
Perhaps thirty seconds or a minute later, I glanced over in that direction and saw that it was climbing the stairs. Well, okay: to be accurate, it was drifting up the stairs. Slowly cresting the stairs; I could already see its eyes and all its smile. When I saw it on the landing I could have sworn that it wasn't perceptibly in much motion at all, but now it clearly had a firm momentum in my direction.
I hesitated, and went over, and grasped it by its tassle, and led it back down to my sister's room. It made no overtly hostile motions; its expression remained unperturbed. Her door was shut, and she hadn't noticed that it was gone. She says that it got out before, though, earlier today; the dog was barking at it.
I'm really not sure we can trust that balloon.
My accommodation with summer
Jul. 2nd, 2006 02:12 pmI don't like the heat; longtime readers and acquaintances have probably heard me remark before on my wimpiness regarding non-temperate temperatures. This was probably instilled in me by Vancouver, and it's certainly one of the reasons I appreciate it here, because as hot as I am, I would almost certainly be hotter in just about any of the places I've traveled to. Nonetheless it is too hot. I've started sometimes wearing shorts in public, even though I'm convinced that whenever I wear shorts I basically look like the hit men in the latter part of Pulp Fiction.
I do like the way it feels to step outside at 9:00 at night and have the sky still be light, like it's on my side. I'd forgotten how nice that is. And I like the leftover warmth of the air, in the early nighttime, when the sun is finally down.
I wanted to write something in response to this long and interesting post by Jo Walton, but I've put it off for a while, and now I can't recall everything I wanted to say. My own background is that I have no talent for lying, but I used to do it habitually, anyway; this stopped feeling necessary when I came to Windsor House and my environment stopped being hostile, and so I was able to gradually phase most of it out, the same way I worked my way free of the habit of lashing out at people physically. There's still the occasional inclination left over, to simplify an explanation unnecessarily, or to pretend I don't understand something when I do. (I'll bet that gets annoying! If it's any consolation, I sometimes really don't understand.)
One nice thing that having been a habitual liar does, at least for me, is to provide a firm residual habit of keeping track of what I think is actually true. This doesn't mean that I'm incapable of deceiving myself, but I'm at least able to make it difficult, and to correct myself early if I notice myself saying something that doesn't seem accurate.
Ms. Walton's main reason given to avoid being a liar is what she after Shakespeare calls the 'tangled web', the way that, having lied, it is necessary to maintain that lie, and to keep track of it, and to shore it up with others, and to let people be invested in it, all of these things, if you don't catch it immediately and you don't want to lose anyone's trust. And that's very stressful, and it can often lead someone to tell the sort of lies that are really harmful, because they hurt or attack someone. I agree that that's a good reason. It's a matter of responsibility to oneself; your quality of life gets a lot better, at least in my experience, when you're mostly describing what you really think is so.
What I think I wanted to talk about is that I think we have a responsibility to each other, too; Jo Walton doesn't really touch on this, and maybe she'd even disagree. The thing is that lying is a prisoner's dilemma: the same way that it makes our lives better to feel like we can safely go around telling the truth, it makes our lives better to have those around us doing the same thing -- and, conversely, if we're being honest but nobody else around us is, we're probably even worse off than we would be otherwise. So it seems to me that at least as important a reason to be truthful is to create an environment where it's safe for other people to be truthful, which is a useful environment to have for the obvious reasons that it makes it a lot simpler to communicate with words, or to cooperate to solve problems. (And, in addition to and tangled up with that, there's just my visceral sense of justice.)
Neko Case is playing in Vancouver, tonight; I'd really like to see her (Zulu says it's not sold out yet), but I probably can't justify it. It's getting into the July birthday run, and I am relatively broke.
I do like the way it feels to step outside at 9:00 at night and have the sky still be light, like it's on my side. I'd forgotten how nice that is. And I like the leftover warmth of the air, in the early nighttime, when the sun is finally down.
I wanted to write something in response to this long and interesting post by Jo Walton, but I've put it off for a while, and now I can't recall everything I wanted to say. My own background is that I have no talent for lying, but I used to do it habitually, anyway; this stopped feeling necessary when I came to Windsor House and my environment stopped being hostile, and so I was able to gradually phase most of it out, the same way I worked my way free of the habit of lashing out at people physically. There's still the occasional inclination left over, to simplify an explanation unnecessarily, or to pretend I don't understand something when I do. (I'll bet that gets annoying! If it's any consolation, I sometimes really don't understand.)
One nice thing that having been a habitual liar does, at least for me, is to provide a firm residual habit of keeping track of what I think is actually true. This doesn't mean that I'm incapable of deceiving myself, but I'm at least able to make it difficult, and to correct myself early if I notice myself saying something that doesn't seem accurate.
Ms. Walton's main reason given to avoid being a liar is what she after Shakespeare calls the 'tangled web', the way that, having lied, it is necessary to maintain that lie, and to keep track of it, and to shore it up with others, and to let people be invested in it, all of these things, if you don't catch it immediately and you don't want to lose anyone's trust. And that's very stressful, and it can often lead someone to tell the sort of lies that are really harmful, because they hurt or attack someone. I agree that that's a good reason. It's a matter of responsibility to oneself; your quality of life gets a lot better, at least in my experience, when you're mostly describing what you really think is so.
What I think I wanted to talk about is that I think we have a responsibility to each other, too; Jo Walton doesn't really touch on this, and maybe she'd even disagree. The thing is that lying is a prisoner's dilemma: the same way that it makes our lives better to feel like we can safely go around telling the truth, it makes our lives better to have those around us doing the same thing -- and, conversely, if we're being honest but nobody else around us is, we're probably even worse off than we would be otherwise. So it seems to me that at least as important a reason to be truthful is to create an environment where it's safe for other people to be truthful, which is a useful environment to have for the obvious reasons that it makes it a lot simpler to communicate with words, or to cooperate to solve problems. (And, in addition to and tangled up with that, there's just my visceral sense of justice.)
Neko Case is playing in Vancouver, tonight; I'd really like to see her (Zulu says it's not sold out yet), but I probably can't justify it. It's getting into the July birthday run, and I am relatively broke.
Mostly books
Jun. 29th, 2006 04:21 pmSometimes I listen to a song in isolation, and a few minutes later I realize that the tune now running through my head isn't that one, but the one that would come up next on the album. I like it when that happens. (Sometimes 'the album' is one of my mixes, or one of my friends', so then it's cooler still.)
I have been reading a lot. I read Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan, as recommended, and liked it much better than I was worried I might. I took a collected edition of The Fionavar Tapestry with me on my Maritimes trip last summer, and found it difficult to read; there was something about the writing style that I really collided with. I don't really have the memory of the experience, anymore, so much as the memory of my impression of the experience, but my recollection is that it seemed to be at the same time florid and perfunctory; like I was having someone relate to me the plot of their planned fantasy epic, instead of reading the finished product, so that I was constantly running into the gaps where they hadn't yet filled in the characterization, or the details of a scene.
I was still struggling with it when I got home, so I looked up some discussions on the internet in which people I respected had taken part, hoping to find a place where they said, "Yes, it does all of those things clumsily, but I think that it's worth it for this and this and this reason". I couldn't find anyone who'd said that; in fact, I couldn't find anyone who seemed to have had my experience at all, and the general consensus seemed to be that the prose and the characters were lovely and approachable. Daunted and bewildered, I gave up somewhere in the second volume, and since then I've been very hesitant to try any other Kay, though people keep recommending it, in case it turns out that this author in whom so many people easily find worth is totally lost on me.
So I am pretty relieved to have enjoyed and been engaged by The Lions of Al-Rassan, and felt like it was a complete thing with characters who were people, etc., not least because it means that I can go read and probably enjoy some of his other more recent books. Some of the prose still seemed mildly overwrought, but this didn't prevent it from keeping my interest. There was something about the style of presentation that was very familiar to me, not from anything I'd read recently but from vague memories of things I read when I was younger; a taste of pulp high fantasy, done well. I can't really explain what it was that gave it that feeling, though -- it certainly wasn't the content of the plot, which contained no magic and a lot of medieval politics. I suppose the best thing I could point to would be the manner of the sex and the death scenes.
Before that, I read Brust and Bull's Freedom and Necessity, which I also really liked; I suppose that everyone else on the internet knew about Steven Brust before I did (I haven't read any other Emma Bull, though maybe I should). After (after Lions), I spent a couple of days not quite starting either of the two other books I had out from the library and then suddenly picked up and read through Robin McKinley's Sunshine. I guess I needed a reread.
I have a pulled muscle in my ankle, and it hurts. Stop hurting! (So far, it holds resilient despite my admonishments.) I had a dream last night in which I did a whole bunch of things I've been meaning to do, including posting in my livejournal, like, three times, and it was very discouraging to wake up and realize that I still had to do those things after all. Hopefully this particular disjointed entry will assuage me somewhat. This has been a paragraph where I complain.
I think that a neat project would be to go through the Daily Dinosaur Comics archives and send the author (a Mister "North") one e-mail with the predefined subject line from each strip, making that subject line relevant. Now that I think of it, though, someone is probably already doing that.
I have been reading a lot. I read Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan, as recommended, and liked it much better than I was worried I might. I took a collected edition of The Fionavar Tapestry with me on my Maritimes trip last summer, and found it difficult to read; there was something about the writing style that I really collided with. I don't really have the memory of the experience, anymore, so much as the memory of my impression of the experience, but my recollection is that it seemed to be at the same time florid and perfunctory; like I was having someone relate to me the plot of their planned fantasy epic, instead of reading the finished product, so that I was constantly running into the gaps where they hadn't yet filled in the characterization, or the details of a scene.
I was still struggling with it when I got home, so I looked up some discussions on the internet in which people I respected had taken part, hoping to find a place where they said, "Yes, it does all of those things clumsily, but I think that it's worth it for this and this and this reason". I couldn't find anyone who'd said that; in fact, I couldn't find anyone who seemed to have had my experience at all, and the general consensus seemed to be that the prose and the characters were lovely and approachable. Daunted and bewildered, I gave up somewhere in the second volume, and since then I've been very hesitant to try any other Kay, though people keep recommending it, in case it turns out that this author in whom so many people easily find worth is totally lost on me.
So I am pretty relieved to have enjoyed and been engaged by The Lions of Al-Rassan, and felt like it was a complete thing with characters who were people, etc., not least because it means that I can go read and probably enjoy some of his other more recent books. Some of the prose still seemed mildly overwrought, but this didn't prevent it from keeping my interest. There was something about the style of presentation that was very familiar to me, not from anything I'd read recently but from vague memories of things I read when I was younger; a taste of pulp high fantasy, done well. I can't really explain what it was that gave it that feeling, though -- it certainly wasn't the content of the plot, which contained no magic and a lot of medieval politics. I suppose the best thing I could point to would be the manner of the sex and the death scenes.
Before that, I read Brust and Bull's Freedom and Necessity, which I also really liked; I suppose that everyone else on the internet knew about Steven Brust before I did (I haven't read any other Emma Bull, though maybe I should). After (after Lions), I spent a couple of days not quite starting either of the two other books I had out from the library and then suddenly picked up and read through Robin McKinley's Sunshine. I guess I needed a reread.
I have a pulled muscle in my ankle, and it hurts. Stop hurting! (So far, it holds resilient despite my admonishments.) I had a dream last night in which I did a whole bunch of things I've been meaning to do, including posting in my livejournal, like, three times, and it was very discouraging to wake up and realize that I still had to do those things after all. Hopefully this particular disjointed entry will assuage me somewhat. This has been a paragraph where I complain.
I think that a neat project would be to go through the Daily Dinosaur Comics archives and send the author (a Mister "North") one e-mail with the predefined subject line from each strip, making that subject line relevant. Now that I think of it, though, someone is probably already doing that.
Paper Bird Sestina
Jun. 25th, 2006 02:38 pmcaduceuskun challenged me to write a sestina and post it in my journal, so, since I have, indeed, written a sestina since then, I suppose I ought to follow through. Cola provided me with the keywords; he insists that 'paper bird' should count.I've been fascinated by the sestina form ever since I first learned about it; this is the first one I've ever finished, but I expect others to follow, which is good because I'm kind of underwhelmed by it. It has rather more plot than it has poetry.
( Six one five two four three )
Shortest night
Jun. 21st, 2006 11:58 pmHere is a poem of little consequence I wrote in April, and here is a sonnet I wrote this past fall.
I don't know whether I've been going through one of my periods of social withdrawal, or if my life is just in one of its summer-patterns where I'm not liable, in the normal course of things, to encounter socializing without actively working for it (which I've been distracted from doing). Clearly I haven't been feeling called to write in my journal, which may or may not be a clue. The lack is starting to itch a little, though.
I don't know whether I've been going through one of my periods of social withdrawal, or if my life is just in one of its summer-patterns where I'm not liable, in the normal course of things, to encounter socializing without actively working for it (which I've been distracted from doing). Clearly I haven't been feeling called to write in my journal, which may or may not be a clue. The lack is starting to itch a little, though.
Okay, fine.
Jun. 13th, 2006 04:11 pmRachel probably wants me to do this. For each person who comments in this entry, it is supposed that I will reply in the following ritual manner:
1. I’ll respond with something random about you.
2. I’ll challenge you to try something.
3. I’ll pick a color that I associate with you.
4. I’ll tell you something I like about you.
5. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you.
1. I’ll respond with something random about you.
2. I’ll challenge you to try something.
3. I’ll pick a color that I associate with you.
4. I’ll tell you something I like about you.
5. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you.
Last night, I finished The Dubious Hills, which was the only book left by Pamela Dean that I hadn't yet read. I am therefore qualified to observe that in every one of her published novels there is at least one instance in dialogue of the phrase, "I cry you mercy". I don't know if she considers this a running joke, but I've started to grin when I see it.
(I'm glad that Pamela Dean, as well as the other three women that I usually think of as my favourite authors these days, are still alive and writing, so that my having finished out one of their catalogues doesn't mean that I'll never again read a book by them that's new. Ms. Dean also has some short fiction that I haven't hunted down yet.)
I got a ride home from Cody after Elise's concert on Saturday ("Elise's concert", I say, as though there weren't fourteen other people on stage with her, including, surprisingly, Devon Bates, and a whole other band, afterward, which I liked a lot more than I expected to; but affection grants prominence). At one point, as we were driving down some major street that I'm not very familiar with, I saw a building with a sign that said: Ambrozia.
"'Ambrozia'," I repeated out loud. "Yeah, you just go on putting a 'z' in whatever words you feel like."
By which point we had passed it, and the first place on the next block was called Enthuze.
(I'm glad that Pamela Dean, as well as the other three women that I usually think of as my favourite authors these days, are still alive and writing, so that my having finished out one of their catalogues doesn't mean that I'll never again read a book by them that's new. Ms. Dean also has some short fiction that I haven't hunted down yet.)
I got a ride home from Cody after Elise's concert on Saturday ("Elise's concert", I say, as though there weren't fourteen other people on stage with her, including, surprisingly, Devon Bates, and a whole other band, afterward, which I liked a lot more than I expected to; but affection grants prominence). At one point, as we were driving down some major street that I'm not very familiar with, I saw a building with a sign that said: Ambrozia.
"'Ambrozia'," I repeated out loud. "Yeah, you just go on putting a 'z' in whatever words you feel like."
By which point we had passed it, and the first place on the next block was called Enthuze.
My photographs from the trip
May. 31st, 2006 02:32 pmThey're (almost all) up here, hosted by a gracious codepoetica. (I thought that I was going to be getting a flickr account, but it turns out that they only let you upload 20 MB a month unless you pay them.) Still missing, for most of the photographs, are names or descriptions; I'm adding those, slowly, but I thought that some of my readers might like to see pictures of Japan as soon as possible, even if they are only able to guess at what is depicted. Here you go, those readers.
Eventually more people from the trip will upload their photos, and then I'll link to those, which will probably be more satisfying in many respects because A) I'm not a very good photographer, and B) there are significant gaps in my pictures -- including especially anything after my camera stopped working in Tokushima and any picture of me that is not an arm-length self-portrait -- which the more prolific in our company will no doubt have done much to fill. A few of Marilee's are already up.
Eventually more people from the trip will upload their photos, and then I'll link to those, which will probably be more satisfying in many respects because A) I'm not a very good photographer, and B) there are significant gaps in my pictures -- including especially anything after my camera stopped working in Tokushima and any picture of me that is not an arm-length self-portrait -- which the more prolific in our company will no doubt have done much to fill. A few of Marilee's are already up.
Stephen Harper eats babies
May. 29th, 2006 12:47 pmI don't have a great deal of faith in Stephen Harper as a leader; back when he was leader of the opposition, I thought that most of his arguments were outright bizarre, and I've never heard of an important political position making someone saner. I remember, though, in my Canadian Politics and Government class, learning that Prime Ministerial hopefuls have a tendency to campaign to curtail the enormous power of the office, and then, when they get in, completely forget to do that, because the power is much too useful. So it's pretty impressive that he actually seems to be doing it after all.
("I worked with Stephen Harper for five years and never once did he, in that time, eat a baby," he told the newspaper.)
Yesterday passed through, got late and ended much sooner than I've been used to, all of the reasons for which are probably variants on "I'm back from Japan". I'm jet lagged, and recuperating; I got up later than I have been, and didn't have any larger schedule of the day to conform to; I'm in an environment that doesn't require a great deal of consideration or concentration for me to interact with. Here are some things I ought to do before much more time surprises me by passing:
("I worked with Stephen Harper for five years and never once did he, in that time, eat a baby," he told the newspaper.)
Yesterday passed through, got late and ended much sooner than I've been used to, all of the reasons for which are probably variants on "I'm back from Japan". I'm jet lagged, and recuperating; I got up later than I have been, and didn't have any larger schedule of the day to conform to; I'm in an environment that doesn't require a great deal of consideration or concentration for me to interact with. Here are some things I ought to do before much more time surprises me by passing:
- Finish my Buddhism reflections journal, two very short essays, and a website showcasing pictures of animals, so as to properly complete the academic portion of the Japan program.
- Start looking for a job.
-
Shop some more for my sister's birthday.Actually, I did that yesterday. (In addition to which I brought her a stuffed Totoro from Japan.) - Start partaking of the advantages home has over abroad (other than my own computer), especially including the company of people I know here who aren't in my family. I miss you guys!
I'm back.
I saw Keely the Friday before I left, by happenstance on Commercial Drive; she had just come back from Cuba, and she was really tanned, which may have predisposed me to think about this in terms of tans. I have not physically tanned this trip, but I have a tan of the mind, a strange cultural surface colouration that will take a while to fade. It will be at least a day or two before it feels natural to thank someone for a service in english, without bowing.
I thought that there would be more of that; that the not-Japan in Vancouver would be more sharp and shocking for me. But the plane ride provided a kind of liminal decompression, a ritual transition, so that by the time I was here the familiar shapes, colours and language seemed almost natural. Here I am, then. It's the first time I've ever come back to my city from a place that made it look drab.
My moustache is too long (though not unsightly, just uncomfortable), and my mind and prose are stumbling a little from the lack of sleep, and I haven't listened to music of my own choice in three weeks, and I kind of smell. I'll correct all of these, eventually, as I grow generally less tanned.
This trip was huge; I feel like I only wrote about the barest outlines of it, here. There wasn't time; the rest wouldn't fit. I feel like I should apologize for that. I wish I could have given the whole thing, in exacting detail.
There will be pictures.
I saw Keely the Friday before I left, by happenstance on Commercial Drive; she had just come back from Cuba, and she was really tanned, which may have predisposed me to think about this in terms of tans. I have not physically tanned this trip, but I have a tan of the mind, a strange cultural surface colouration that will take a while to fade. It will be at least a day or two before it feels natural to thank someone for a service in english, without bowing.
I thought that there would be more of that; that the not-Japan in Vancouver would be more sharp and shocking for me. But the plane ride provided a kind of liminal decompression, a ritual transition, so that by the time I was here the familiar shapes, colours and language seemed almost natural. Here I am, then. It's the first time I've ever come back to my city from a place that made it look drab.
My moustache is too long (though not unsightly, just uncomfortable), and my mind and prose are stumbling a little from the lack of sleep, and I haven't listened to music of my own choice in three weeks, and I kind of smell. I'll correct all of these, eventually, as I grow generally less tanned.
This trip was huge; I feel like I only wrote about the barest outlines of it, here. There wasn't time; the rest wouldn't fit. I feel like I should apologize for that. I wish I could have given the whole thing, in exacting detail.
There will be pictures.
ドア は しまります。
May. 25th, 2006 02:40 pmWe spent two days in Koyasan, which is the name of a mountain and also of the village on that mountain, which is a holy place -- there's a temple every five buildings or so -- established by Kobo Daishi, the monk who founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism. He chose it because the mountain is surrounded by eight other peaks, which resembles the eight-petaled lotus flower, which is a symbol for enlightenment. It is considered a pure-land-on-earth.
(There's a bit of an interesting tension there, because one of the benificent characteristics of the traditional Pure Land, the western Buddha-land of the Buddha Amitabha, is that it's absolutely flat, so that it's never necessary to walk uphill. There are a lot of lotuses there, though.)
Kobo Daishi really was here*, and this is where he died; you can go to the place where apparently his body is, though not actually close to or into the building that houses it. He is said to be in a state of eternal meditation, and to grant boons like a saint; people light lanterns for him, and the monks bring offers of food and clothing to symbolically sustain him. To get to where that is, you pass over three bridges; the first bridge takes you from the village to the World of Death, the second from there to Purgatory, and the third from there to the World of Enlightenment, where Kobo Daishi is (and the temple for his offerings, and some burial mounds belonging to emperors from the Edo period). From the World of Death onward, the whole thing is actually a huge graveyard, the path winding between long dense clusters of ornate burial markers, Buddha statues, and huge evergreen trees, similar in kind to but much older and larger than anything we see in Vancouver, so that it didn't feel so much like home as like some mythic and magnified version of home, our land as the gods know it.
(* This is worth mentioning because we walked three of the eighty eight temples -- #3, #5 and #6 -- on the Shikoku pilgrimage route, when we were in Tokushima. Kobo Daishi is also said to have been the first to walk that, but it's historically impossible for him to have done so, at the time it was credited.)
That wasn't the only beautiful thing on Koyasan, though it was the most striking. On a purely visual level I think that it's my favourite place we've been.
Now we're back in our hostel in Osaka, where I am on the tenth floor using internet that costs ￥100 for 15 minutes. That's a dollar. (A Canadian dollar -- no easy conversion for my American friends. Haw!) All the first times of this trip are melting into this string of last times -- the last place (here) that we'll be, the last time (yesterday) that we'll go formally as a group to some educationally relevant place, the last time (today) that I'll need to do laundry. My flight home is in two days; I'll get there at 11 AM, which will be 3 AM for me, which will be Interesting. I'll be happy to be home for a lot of reasons, but I'll miss this place, and its beauty, and the wonderful cultural idiosyncracies, and the people in our group.
I spent, like, three dollars to write this entry. I hope you like it.
(There's a bit of an interesting tension there, because one of the benificent characteristics of the traditional Pure Land, the western Buddha-land of the Buddha Amitabha, is that it's absolutely flat, so that it's never necessary to walk uphill. There are a lot of lotuses there, though.)
Kobo Daishi really was here*, and this is where he died; you can go to the place where apparently his body is, though not actually close to or into the building that houses it. He is said to be in a state of eternal meditation, and to grant boons like a saint; people light lanterns for him, and the monks bring offers of food and clothing to symbolically sustain him. To get to where that is, you pass over three bridges; the first bridge takes you from the village to the World of Death, the second from there to Purgatory, and the third from there to the World of Enlightenment, where Kobo Daishi is (and the temple for his offerings, and some burial mounds belonging to emperors from the Edo period). From the World of Death onward, the whole thing is actually a huge graveyard, the path winding between long dense clusters of ornate burial markers, Buddha statues, and huge evergreen trees, similar in kind to but much older and larger than anything we see in Vancouver, so that it didn't feel so much like home as like some mythic and magnified version of home, our land as the gods know it.
(* This is worth mentioning because we walked three of the eighty eight temples -- #3, #5 and #6 -- on the Shikoku pilgrimage route, when we were in Tokushima. Kobo Daishi is also said to have been the first to walk that, but it's historically impossible for him to have done so, at the time it was credited.)
That wasn't the only beautiful thing on Koyasan, though it was the most striking. On a purely visual level I think that it's my favourite place we've been.
Now we're back in our hostel in Osaka, where I am on the tenth floor using internet that costs ￥100 for 15 minutes. That's a dollar. (A Canadian dollar -- no easy conversion for my American friends. Haw!) All the first times of this trip are melting into this string of last times -- the last place (here) that we'll be, the last time (yesterday) that we'll go formally as a group to some educationally relevant place, the last time (today) that I'll need to do laundry. My flight home is in two days; I'll get there at 11 AM, which will be 3 AM for me, which will be Interesting. I'll be happy to be home for a lot of reasons, but I'll miss this place, and its beauty, and the wonderful cultural idiosyncracies, and the people in our group.
I spent, like, three dollars to write this entry. I hope you like it.
Reconnecting
May. 17th, 2006 06:38 pmToday my sunscreen came open in my backpack. Most of my stuff weathered the storm surprisingly well, but cleaning the bag itself will not be fun.
Have you heard of Tenrikyo？ It's a fairly young Japanese religion which has its Mecca and Salt Lake City in Tenri, where we spent three days. I had previously known nothing about it, so I had only barely just realized what was going on by the time that, an hour or so after we got off the train, we entered the sprawling and beautiful temple which surrounds the spot that, according to Tenrikyo, humanity was first created. We've visit a lot of holy places, but I haven't felt the wonder and humility of being an accidental pilgrim quite so strongly anywhere else as I did at that moment.
Tenrikyo is interesting. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Mormonism, though all my reasons are superficial enough that I doubt Rachel would see it: its youth (it was founded in the mid-1800s by a housewife-become-prophet), its active missionary effort and boasts of worldwide membership, its everyday overtness, its monotheism. (Though theirs is not the God of Abraham.) Unfortunately, it also shares a difficulty I encounter with a lot of evangelistic religions, which is that when its adherents are talking about it, rather than ritually practising it, it tends to sound a lot more like advertising than like sacredness. It gets glossy and white-smiled, and I get cool and wary. Say what you will about Buddhism, but not once on this trip have I felt like it's trying to sell itself to me.
The second day, we went to Horyuji, which temple is supposedly the oldest wooden structure in the world. It was built by a guy named Prince Shotoku, who I thought sounded pretty awesome. (On the morning of the third day, we visited another very old temple - Asukadera, which was, I understand it, actually the first outpost of Buddhism in Japan - which turned out to have been constructed by this guy who eventually assassinated Shotoku (and his son) in a bid for power. (We also visited that guy's probable tomb - he was himself killed, shortly after, by a pair of dashing young partisans of the aristocracy.) Obviously our prince was dead, but I didn't expect him to go quite so violently; it was a little shocking to me, like having your favourite character killed off unexpectedly part way through the movie. This parenthetical is totally out of control. I'd better start a new paragraph.)
After Horyuji we went to Nara, where there are incredibly tame deer wandering everywhere; I pet one, which is another in the long list of things I got to do for the first time while on this trip. In Nara is a temple called Todaiji; the name means 'big eastern temple', which really doesn't prepare you for how big the temple is. I mean, you might think that it's a long way down the road from your house to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to Todaiji.
Okay, now we come more properly to the third day. After we'd seen Asukadera and some old, proto-Shinto structures built from boulders*, and eaten lunch, we went to this big shinto shrine whose name I totally forget. (* Larry, in his most authorative teacher-voice: "Okay, so, that's something that was made by... People... Back before they realized that you don't really have to do that.") It's a shrine to the semi-mythical first emperor, and thereby very important in Shinto. In order to enter the sacred inner courtyard, we underwent a ceremony of purification for our 'outer body'; we bowed our heads, and the priest, a very composed and articulate man, waved a sort of spirit-duster around us, a stick dense with white cloth or paper fronds, all immaculately clean. Then we all approached the home of the kami (the emperor and his wife), and stood in a line as he led us through a ceremony of greeting and respect for them.
Then, before leaving, we went through a ceremony of purification for our insides, which involved taking a sip of ritually prepared sake. I'm not sure whether I would have gone through with this, had I known about it before we began the ritual at all. As it was, because I had already begun, because the context was so religious, and because it was such a small quantity, I decided that I would.
The taste was remarkable; I can only imagine what sort of bulge-eyed face I made at the miko conducting the ceremony. I had sort of imagined that it might just be like some strange and exotic juice, but it was awful, in that sickly-sour way that the smell of alcohol also has; and, just like in fantasy novels, once it reached my throat it seemed to be converted into fire, which I could still feel for some time afterward, travelling slowly down my esophagus. I guess that alcohol in general is an acquired taste that I have never acquired. Afterwards, I felt sort of cautiously off-balance, which I decided was probably psychosomatic (Marilee confirmed this afterward; she says that a whole orange has more alcohol in it than what we drank. Not so concentrated, though, I'll bet).
That was the sacred side of our time in Tenri. Allow me also to mention that we did our grocery shopping at one of the largest supermarkets I have ever seen. It had several mini-restaurants, including a Baskin & Robbins, for which I was inordinately grateful; there is iced cream everywhere here, but it's all vanilla or green tea, and that was the first place I've been able to get chocolate. It had groceries, of course. It had toiletries. It had an alcove full of UFO catchers. It had video games, including FFXII, and Mother 3. It had wacky Japanese t-shirts with their peculiar english. It had music. It had manga. It had one place where you could buy a Famicom for about 15 dollars (but I didn't). It had basically no walls at all between these things. Also, the music: unlike the banal
And that was Tenri. I am now in Tokushima, Tokushima, the city so nice that they named it 'Tokushima', where the local university has put us up in a really nice hotel (we all have single rooms) but where apparently it's going to rain a whole bunch more. (We're actually catching the edge of a typhoon.) I have taken a significant time to write this, and now I'm very hungry, so I'm off to have dinner.
The trip is halfway done.
Have you heard of Tenrikyo？ It's a fairly young Japanese religion which has its Mecca and Salt Lake City in Tenri, where we spent three days. I had previously known nothing about it, so I had only barely just realized what was going on by the time that, an hour or so after we got off the train, we entered the sprawling and beautiful temple which surrounds the spot that, according to Tenrikyo, humanity was first created. We've visit a lot of holy places, but I haven't felt the wonder and humility of being an accidental pilgrim quite so strongly anywhere else as I did at that moment.
Tenrikyo is interesting. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Mormonism, though all my reasons are superficial enough that I doubt Rachel would see it: its youth (it was founded in the mid-1800s by a housewife-become-prophet), its active missionary effort and boasts of worldwide membership, its everyday overtness, its monotheism. (Though theirs is not the God of Abraham.) Unfortunately, it also shares a difficulty I encounter with a lot of evangelistic religions, which is that when its adherents are talking about it, rather than ritually practising it, it tends to sound a lot more like advertising than like sacredness. It gets glossy and white-smiled, and I get cool and wary. Say what you will about Buddhism, but not once on this trip have I felt like it's trying to sell itself to me.
The second day, we went to Horyuji, which temple is supposedly the oldest wooden structure in the world. It was built by a guy named Prince Shotoku, who I thought sounded pretty awesome. (On the morning of the third day, we visited another very old temple - Asukadera, which was, I understand it, actually the first outpost of Buddhism in Japan - which turned out to have been constructed by this guy who eventually assassinated Shotoku (and his son) in a bid for power. (We also visited that guy's probable tomb - he was himself killed, shortly after, by a pair of dashing young partisans of the aristocracy.) Obviously our prince was dead, but I didn't expect him to go quite so violently; it was a little shocking to me, like having your favourite character killed off unexpectedly part way through the movie. This parenthetical is totally out of control. I'd better start a new paragraph.)
After Horyuji we went to Nara, where there are incredibly tame deer wandering everywhere; I pet one, which is another in the long list of things I got to do for the first time while on this trip. In Nara is a temple called Todaiji; the name means 'big eastern temple', which really doesn't prepare you for how big the temple is. I mean, you might think that it's a long way down the road from your house to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to Todaiji.
Okay, now we come more properly to the third day. After we'd seen Asukadera and some old, proto-Shinto structures built from boulders*, and eaten lunch, we went to this big shinto shrine whose name I totally forget. (* Larry, in his most authorative teacher-voice: "Okay, so, that's something that was made by... People... Back before they realized that you don't really have to do that.") It's a shrine to the semi-mythical first emperor, and thereby very important in Shinto. In order to enter the sacred inner courtyard, we underwent a ceremony of purification for our 'outer body'; we bowed our heads, and the priest, a very composed and articulate man, waved a sort of spirit-duster around us, a stick dense with white cloth or paper fronds, all immaculately clean. Then we all approached the home of the kami (the emperor and his wife), and stood in a line as he led us through a ceremony of greeting and respect for them.
Then, before leaving, we went through a ceremony of purification for our insides, which involved taking a sip of ritually prepared sake. I'm not sure whether I would have gone through with this, had I known about it before we began the ritual at all. As it was, because I had already begun, because the context was so religious, and because it was such a small quantity, I decided that I would.
The taste was remarkable; I can only imagine what sort of bulge-eyed face I made at the miko conducting the ceremony. I had sort of imagined that it might just be like some strange and exotic juice, but it was awful, in that sickly-sour way that the smell of alcohol also has; and, just like in fantasy novels, once it reached my throat it seemed to be converted into fire, which I could still feel for some time afterward, travelling slowly down my esophagus. I guess that alcohol in general is an acquired taste that I have never acquired. Afterwards, I felt sort of cautiously off-balance, which I decided was probably psychosomatic (Marilee confirmed this afterward; she says that a whole orange has more alcohol in it than what we drank. Not so concentrated, though, I'll bet).
That was the sacred side of our time in Tenri. Allow me also to mention that we did our grocery shopping at one of the largest supermarkets I have ever seen. It had several mini-restaurants, including a Baskin & Robbins, for which I was inordinately grateful; there is iced cream everywhere here, but it's all vanilla or green tea, and that was the first place I've been able to get chocolate. It had groceries, of course. It had toiletries. It had an alcove full of UFO catchers. It had video games, including FFXII, and Mother 3. It had wacky Japanese t-shirts with their peculiar english. It had music. It had manga. It had one place where you could buy a Famicom for about 15 dollars (but I didn't). It had basically no walls at all between these things. Also, the music: unlike the banal
And that was Tenri. I am now in Tokushima, Tokushima, the city so nice that they named it 'Tokushima', where the local university has put us up in a really nice hotel (we all have single rooms) but where apparently it's going to rain a whole bunch more. (We're actually catching the edge of a typhoon.) I have taken a significant time to write this, and now I'm very hungry, so I'm off to have dinner.
The trip is halfway done.
Today it woke me up by raining, hard and loud; since it's our day off, it would have been a perfect time for it, except that Hayashi-sensei was to take us to a forest full of monkeys, were the weather better. We are all very disappointed not to have seen the monkeys.
I lounged around the hotel all day, though, which I probably really needed; hopefully, anyway, this will lead to my feeling refreshed and ready for adventure tomorrow, rather than breaking the flow of industrious energy that has carried me this far. Knock on (one of the many) wood(en buildings in this city). I read two books, anyway (the first two of Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy; foolishly, I neglected to acquire and pack the third), which makes me feel better about my decision to bring eight.
Yesterday we took some classes as guests at a local university, including a class on the history and philosophy of haiku, which I enjoyed as much as most of you no doubt expect (I got in an interesting argument with the professor). After that and the others we met up with some Japanese students and did an exercise where we tried to communicate with them. My very little Japanese availed me very little, and because I was nervous and rusty I kept making elementary mistakes like forgetting the past tense. This is, if you're looking for one, a good way to feel like an idiot.
My partner was very friendly, though. Actually, everyone is very friendly, both among my traveling companions (who are seriously almost absurdly nice) and the Japanese. It is possible that the Japanese are just being polite.
We are leaving Kyoto tomorrow, so I have no idea when I'll be on the internet again.
I lounged around the hotel all day, though, which I probably really needed; hopefully, anyway, this will lead to my feeling refreshed and ready for adventure tomorrow, rather than breaking the flow of industrious energy that has carried me this far. Knock on (one of the many) wood(en buildings in this city). I read two books, anyway (the first two of Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy; foolishly, I neglected to acquire and pack the third), which makes me feel better about my decision to bring eight.
Yesterday we took some classes as guests at a local university, including a class on the history and philosophy of haiku, which I enjoyed as much as most of you no doubt expect (I got in an interesting argument with the professor). After that and the others we met up with some Japanese students and did an exercise where we tried to communicate with them. My very little Japanese availed me very little, and because I was nervous and rusty I kept making elementary mistakes like forgetting the past tense. This is, if you're looking for one, a good way to feel like an idiot.
My partner was very friendly, though. Actually, everyone is very friendly, both among my traveling companions (who are seriously almost absurdly nice) and the Japanese. It is possible that the Japanese are just being polite.
We are leaving Kyoto tomorrow, so I have no idea when I'll be on the internet again.
One day forward, eight hours back.
May. 10th, 2006 09:52 pmThis keyboard is wrestling me for control; the button that turns on the katakana is very easy to hit in place of the space bar. Also, I cannot find the apostrophe, so I suppose that I will have to avoid contractions or possessives.
I have been in Kyoto, which for years has been at the top of my list of places to visit that I never yet had, for two full days now. I want to talk about that, but it is difficult to figure out how. There is so much that is just experience; I cannot break it down into words yet. It is, as prophesized, very likely the most beautiful place I have ever been.
Our temple schedule has been very intense. We visited something like six yesterday, and passed countless more as we walked between them. By the end of the day, our eyes were glazed and our legs sore (I personally was also dehydrated). Today we did less, and did more bussing than walking, but my legs were already primed to soreness. I did see the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, which surprised me by being beautiful, not in an abstract or intellectual way but in a very accessibly visceral one. It really does look like islands.
There are a lot of Japan-things, most of which are what you would expect. They have a mascot for everything, down to the garbage cans, which display proudly on the sides a pair of egg people whose greatest joy is apparently to sweep up litter. Schoolchildren, especially girls, wave and shout, Harro! and, See you! (I cannot find the quotation marks, either.) The vast majority of written or spoken warnings and advisories I cannot understand. English shows up in strange and whimsical ways, often grammatical, or almost so, but clearly constructed from the outside. When I hear it, I fall naturally back into my pattern of unconscious comprehension, before recalling with a shock that it is not normal here.
Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner at a restaurant with a vast menu full of tiny pictures that we could not really interpret. (Everyone but me was also going out drinking, but, surprisingly, I did not mind this. I have discovered that if I like someone, there is a good chance that I will enjoy their company even drunk. They get clumsier and inappropriately loud, and laugh at stupid things, and repeat their jokes in case you did not hear, so it is kind of like they all turn into me.) Some of our number had rudimentary or even complex Japanese, but this did not much help; we got into a series of strange and remarkable misunderstandings, which included accidentally ordering three dishes and spending about five minutes cycling through the same dialogue as we tried to indicate that crab was okay. They kept trading out for serving staff who were slightly better adept at English (after the first lady, who tried, just like anyone else dealing with a foreigner, shouting slowly at us in her native tongue); finally we ended up with a guy who asked where we were from.
Vancouver? He had been there. I like (he said) winter sports, and then he turned and did this strange illustrative bum-wiggle, and left. This, for me, was the last straw, and I laughed confused and helplessly for a very long time.
There were more misadventures, before the meal was over, but now I need to get off because a lot of people are waiting, and I have been on way too long. I will try to write more later.
I have been in Kyoto, which for years has been at the top of my list of places to visit that I never yet had, for two full days now. I want to talk about that, but it is difficult to figure out how. There is so much that is just experience; I cannot break it down into words yet. It is, as prophesized, very likely the most beautiful place I have ever been.
Our temple schedule has been very intense. We visited something like six yesterday, and passed countless more as we walked between them. By the end of the day, our eyes were glazed and our legs sore (I personally was also dehydrated). Today we did less, and did more bussing than walking, but my legs were already primed to soreness. I did see the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, which surprised me by being beautiful, not in an abstract or intellectual way but in a very accessibly visceral one. It really does look like islands.
There are a lot of Japan-things, most of which are what you would expect. They have a mascot for everything, down to the garbage cans, which display proudly on the sides a pair of egg people whose greatest joy is apparently to sweep up litter. Schoolchildren, especially girls, wave and shout, Harro! and, See you! (I cannot find the quotation marks, either.) The vast majority of written or spoken warnings and advisories I cannot understand. English shows up in strange and whimsical ways, often grammatical, or almost so, but clearly constructed from the outside. When I hear it, I fall naturally back into my pattern of unconscious comprehension, before recalling with a shock that it is not normal here.
Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner at a restaurant with a vast menu full of tiny pictures that we could not really interpret. (Everyone but me was also going out drinking, but, surprisingly, I did not mind this. I have discovered that if I like someone, there is a good chance that I will enjoy their company even drunk. They get clumsier and inappropriately loud, and laugh at stupid things, and repeat their jokes in case you did not hear, so it is kind of like they all turn into me.) Some of our number had rudimentary or even complex Japanese, but this did not much help; we got into a series of strange and remarkable misunderstandings, which included accidentally ordering three dishes and spending about five minutes cycling through the same dialogue as we tried to indicate that crab was okay. They kept trading out for serving staff who were slightly better adept at English (after the first lady, who tried, just like anyone else dealing with a foreigner, shouting slowly at us in her native tongue); finally we ended up with a guy who asked where we were from.
Vancouver? He had been there. I like (he said) winter sports, and then he turned and did this strange illustrative bum-wiggle, and left. This, for me, was the last straw, and I laughed confused and helplessly for a very long time.
There were more misadventures, before the meal was over, but now I need to get off because a lot of people are waiting, and I have been on way too long. I will try to write more later.
