Tasting Sounds . . . .

Rather like not consuming, but to the contrary I have been consuming life in large quantities this month. Big, thick drafts of sweet life: full of variety and pleasant old friends. For instance, my car got released from the shop two weeks ago. It had been in there for three weeks and I was starting to forget it's brilliant copper color, but there it was on the driveway when I was driven home for the last time by a Gracious Parent. Gumiho, I named it right there on the spot. I've been trying to call it Ali Lee all year, since that's what her license plate spells out, but for some reason when I saw her there on the driveway I knew her name was Gumiho. A gumiho (literally, nine-tailed fox)  is a mystical beast native to Asian folk lore. Gumiho is the Korean name for it, and yes, the Korean fox is a malevolent, carnivorous beast. The thing that makes it perfect is . . . well, do you remember Pokemon? Yeah, one of my favorite Pokemon was a Vulpix, which evolves, of course, into Ninetails and is, quite coincidentally, a gorgeous fiery red.


Moving on.


Having a car again made the literal tasting portion of this month much easier. It was at just such a tea tasting event last year that I got my foot into the doorway of teas, and I've managed to keep it pretty wedged in there over the past year without going in or coming out. I've been drinking a lot of tea at work, though, because it fits my need for something melodramatic and mysterious. Despite my burnt mouth (I'm very rarely without one in the winter), the three teas we sampled all had wonderful depth of flavor, being brewed to a perfection that I usually only get to imagine. Let's see, we had Oolong, Puerh, and a Yellow tea – which I had never even heard of before – and they were all delicious, with varying notes of earth, and spice, and barley, and honey.

On Friday I drank in, not hot beverage, but clear, cool, sound. I went to a performance of the Nordic Voices and loved it. I'm not of a temperament to love listening to classical styles of music all day long, but give me a bit to sit and listen to, eyes closed so the rises and falls of the melody can paint with delicate brush strokes a scene upon my mind, and I'll be in raptures. It's not so much because I can fully appreciate it, but because it seems so new and mysterious. It helps that the first half were Latin songs drawn directly from Jeremiah – I've been in the Old Testament prophets for what seems like an age now, and their powerful, visual language does beg to be put to verse. But I'll readily admit my favorites were the happy Nordic songs they sang for the latter half of the evening. The things they did with their mouths were astonishing. The first Norwegian song they preformed, which they said had been written to emulate a sunrise – all misty at the outset and then light and "dancing" at it's end – opened up with eerie, new aged moans which perfectly mimicked a day cloaked in clouds. There was even the sound of fog horns. And later they did something similar with – not groans, no, but not humming either – some stranger application of voice then, that makes it an instrument of wind and sinew distinct from the ability to vocalize. This they pared, at times, with the most controlled whistle. A whistle so high and sweet, but so full of tones, that you would think a flute had been secreted in their robes.


Not that they were wearing robes.




To top the bliss off, this Monday I got a taste of Shoe-fever:

Aren't they a dream?  They were practically free. Practically, since I went there only to buy sunglasses and came out with quite a bagful of goodies (including four Olivia Newton-John records. I don't remember ever listening to her before outside of my one encounter with Grease, but I burned two of them on my computer yesterday and loved them). I'm chocking the expense up to the sunglasses and treating my other purchases as promotional freebies.


My accounting practices might be a little shady.



Anyway, that was February in a bite sized sample. I have some pretty big plans brewing for  March, which hopefully y'all will be a part of. Don't die of shock if you hear from me before April.

"I put my French heels on and I pretend, pretend, pretend I'm twenty-one!"

Endeavor Lives

"Achievement, n. The death of endeavor and the beginning of disgust"

            -- Ambrose Beirce, The Devil's Dictionary

A rather late welcome to 2012! Wanna see what I've been doing?

It's a rather motley collection, I'll grant you. There was Nanowrimo (an additional 6,000 words added to an already established story. I aim high), then there was tea buying, yarn shopping, and, of course, ebay browsing. Oh yeah, I've been producted. Productive.

Ahem.


The knitting above is destined to be Rebkahjoy's version of Hewn. There is something really magical about knitting a pattern with modifications that a complete and total stranger emailed you. I now know the attraction of a cult, and it's driving me towards actually finishing this little bolero. Of course, I'm not going there particularly fast. This project has already become a little comedy of errors. First, because I didn't read the pattern all the way and began by increasing an extra two stitches every knit row. I didn't realize how wrong this was until I had increased the back stitches to the desired 88 and was  trying to figure out how the thing was going to fit me (I have no spatial skills at all, so my blind trust is as necessary as it is dangerous). I had a little wrestle with myself over whether the seven additional side stitches would be noticeable, but I'm proud to say that Sense won out and the poor thing was ripped back to practically the beginning. I've been knitting at it ever since, but going slow as silly putty. And then, there was that five day hiatus while I waited for my knit pick order to come and replace the number four I had accidentally sat on and broke. Maybe I should move to metal needles, huh?


 As for the colorful sticky notes .  . . . That's my Japanese study. Yes, I'm still pulling that goal out every now and then. If we don't exercise our dreams, you see, they'll atrophy away. This time has been really fun because, despite all the text books I've borrowed from my sister, and the grandiose ambitious plans I've worked out with colored pens, I've basically done nothing but what I want to do, which is read Natsume Youjinchou. Natsume is my all time favorite anime. It's about as eventful as a drying room, and sweetly sticky as if the substance on the walls were honey and not paint. I adore it. And so I jumped at the chance to buy five whole volumes of the series. Yes, five little comic books, each with three or four "episodes." I've had these since a little before Christmas and I'm still on the very first of the very first story. Reading a single page can take an hour, and requires every resource I can scrounge up. I usually read with my Japanese-English dictionary, which I got at a second hand store in Japan. The more I study with it the more obvious it becomes that it was meant for people learning English, and not the other way round, but I love it all the more for that. It is, however, inadequate to the task. So I've added in my dad's iPad, on which he has kindly let me put Jdict. Jdict is free, which is right in my price range, and allows me to look up kanji - and thus, ultimately, words  - by drawing them on the screen. Yes, that's right, I scrawl a few lines, press search, and voila, it gives me five kanji it thinks are close. I usually have to try a few times, and the more complex kanji have a way of making it quit, pouting no doubt, but it still works really, really well for all that, and it comes with a radical* search as well, which I've often resorted to.

 
              When these two dictionaries fail I usually turn to Denshi Jishou, conveniently accessible on the iPad. But sometimes the problem is grammar related. In these cases I turn to  Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, one of those books I borrowed from my sister, and  Barron's Japanese Grammar pocketbook, which isn't as good but has things the first book doesn't have. Not to mention the later book makes it much easier to find what you're looking for, bad romaji aside.
             A lot of people who take their Japanese Journey online emphasis memorization and having fun. I'm too poor of a student for the former, and the latter for me must be weighed against my competitive nature. I can give up on a sentence ending (nowa, nanto, etc.  These have no good translation avaiable to them in my dictionary, though I could probably find some if  I really looked online), but giving up an entire word often feels too much like admitting defeat. Now that I've hit a panel that is completely unintelligible I'm having to weigh my desire to understand with my desire to progress.


Anyway, this and tea drinking have been really the only productive things I've done so far. Oh, and I wrote this post. In January. It's a humble sort of achievement, I guess.



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*Radical: I can't say this word with a straight face. It's just so . . . so . . . radical.