| Words! Words! |
[09 Nov 2009|08:49pm] |
how Yonmei sees me:Beer, backrubs, books... Coffee; chocolate.
(Or, if the above is too pedestrian: kindness, Japanese, writing, Tarot, dreams.) I allowed this meme she was participating in to give me a reminding sort of poke, to return here and write a bit. (Larger world: actually pretty okay, some distractions from combined guest visits and special events at school, which aren't distressing at all, just eating up my focus on longer term projects like this journal.)- beer - the irony is, I detested beer until well into my 20's. But my first beer drunk with enjoyment and intent was a Belgian one, consumed right here in Belgium, in fact. It was a really hot summer many years ago, what was then a very surprising thing. (These years, we all just seem to brace for a hot one, and heave a sigh of relief when it turns out to be more "normal".)
- backrubs - this one is rather easy, from the standpoint of why yonmei would associate it with me: at the World Science Fiction convention in Scotland, the 1995 one that is, we were meeting for the first time, after already having been acquainted with one another in print (we were both in a womens' apa, which would count as regular correspondence, eh?) She mentioned something about her back hurting, and I'd just received a lovely standing massage from the publishing partner of Mr Sweetie, so I told her to turn around, and paid the massage forward, right in front of Mr Sweetie's book stall. Good times.
- books - are such a commonplace in my life that it's a real culture shock to get to know anyone who is not a regular reader. (Some of the guys in aikido, however, are exactly that - non-readers, in any sense of reading for recreation, that is.) But I can remember a time from very early in my reading years, when it was the artifact itself that fascinated me: the covers with their linen fabric surfaces, the little bit of stripy cord at the top and bottom of the spine, and - especially - the revelation of how a book signature was printed, before being folded and cut. *sigh* I can still see it in mind's eye, even though the graphic came from nearly 40 years ago. It was in a kids' encyclopedia. A male printer (well, in those days, they would have been axiomatically male, but luckily, these days I have to actually qualify the gender...) held aloft a large piece of paper, nearly as long as he was tall. On it were numbers, but I could see they were not in sequence. Some of them were also printed upside down, and roughly half of the numbers were printed in a burnt-reddish color; the two groups were not the same, but overlapped about half-way. It took me quite a while to puzzle out, but puzzle it I did, thanks to the text. (My mother was not helpful: "It's the way they print it," without any further engagement on the topic. I suppose I can count myself lucky that she had some life-of-the-mind, as regards books regularly in the house, or I may not have been much of a reader.) Eventually, I understood that the up-side down numbers would be right-side-up when the sheet had been folded. Likewise, the numbers printed in red were the page numbers on the reverse side of the sheet. To test this out, and later just to marvel at the magic of this method, I went through a phase of folding a paper carefully, half, quarter, eighths, and - super hard because of the resulting thickness - 16ths, then unfolding, and carefully marking the resulting areas with their future page numbers, refolding and then - with a lot of effort and nearly never with a good scissors (handling the good scissors was judge too dangerous for a little girl, but no available adult was offering to help me neatly cut the edges of this proto-signature) I would hack through the edged, then cradle the resultant booklet in my hand, lovingly counting 1 to 32... if I got the numbers in the correct places, that is!
- coffee -as with beer, I was not a born-coffee-drinker, but made one through an extreme circumstance. Which, on the whole was a good thing, since I very much like the taste, but have also remained a tea drinker (to the extent permitted by a somewhat uncooperative digestion, that is.)
- chocolate - I always loved chocolate. I would refuse soft-serve ice cream if they only had vanilla and no chocolate. But I learned to adore the special chocolate my dad would bring from the airport after one of his many absences. Without quite meaning to, I think, he started me on the gateway of Toblerone, then quickly progressed to the continental European flavors and qualities, such that I was no longer really looking at a mere Hershey's, except when I was feeling a bit blue and there was truly nothing else available. Eventually, I learned which specialty shop in the mall imported those special chocolate sorts, and despite the clear difference in price, I was directing my pennies towards them, and no one could convince me that I was getting a bad bargain. (They tried, you know. They didn't understand I wasn't buying expensive chocolate for the sake of a "statement", I bloody well preferred the taste of it! Especially the dark stuff.) These years? Hmmm, Leonidas and 99% pure with either a glass of red wine or even a whiskey. It works, it really does! (If you're into those beverages, that is.)
- kindness - me receiving it? Or giving it? It feels a bit odd that someone would associate this word with me, but perhaps not unprecedented. I remember once listenting to intelligentrix as she described me as "forthrightly diplomatic". Not quite "kindness" but I was pleased to see something I strive for coming back to me in that comment - I may want to tell truth, but if I don't have to be hurtful, I don't want to. There is a point when "nice" is what it was supposed to be - remembering the other person in front of you is a human being, too. I don't always do that, and I feel badly when I fail at it, but the point is at least trying. (The most likely provocation leading to failure? Someone failing to demonstrate at least a similar kind of consideration: like when your admired author says the only way to talk to liberals it so beat them up. Definitely a compassion-fail, right there.) Getting kindness, well, that's more or less the well from which I draw when I manage to pass some on to someone else. That's not very big of me at all, in the end.
- Japanese - it wasn't supposed to be this way, taking the courses for a bachelors degree. Back when Japan won the Worldcon bid, all I wanted to do was to be able to read a bit - with the fond thought of attending the Worldcon in my mind, I took seriously the notion of being handicapped without at least some literacy at my command. After that, though, well,... it just growed. There was the rest of my life, and fitting an independent study in between the cracks, then an international move, and... by the time the dust settled, I started looking at alternatives and, well, the rest, as they say, is history. I sound like a very rude five year old with pretensions of politeness. But in the last year, despite my struggles, I can actually pick through a newspaper article, and (with the help of online supports) get the general idea, enough for me to decide if I want to read more deeply. And that is a development I find profoundly satisfying.
- writing - ack! I've hardly done any lately; I feel like such a fake! I still want to, but I think at this moment I'm refilling a well that had emptied rather precipitously. I need to be in a good place to do the inner confrontation out of which the best writing, the stuff that's worth reading, can be produced.
- Tarot - oh really? Not sure where this came from. Sometime just after moving here, I bought a new tarot deck, noting with amusement that the cards were given Dutch and not English names. I decided I wanted them around as a method of randomly generating events and character dilemmas, since they're less cut-and-dried than, say, picking slips of newspaper articles out of a hat. I might not want to write a murder (at least, not right away, but if I pull randomly a card with a man working on the inside of a church interior, talking to two other worthies - with the 3 pentacles cleverly creating the decorative gothic window, well, I can just kind of riff on that...) Mind, there is a story, a longer one about a time in my teens, when I'd given a reading to an entirely labile woman some years my senior; her utter lack of filter when receiving what I had to say in response to the moment of reading these cards prompted me to toss every deck I owned. I did not want that kind of power over another human being. I'm not sure if I'd told this story to Yonmei. (Did I?)
- dreams - wheee, another can-of-worms word, eh? The dreams of our nights? Our woolgathering, "wouldn't-it-be-nice-if...?" daydreams? The "calling of my heart" dreams? I have some doozies of dreams, pre-anti-depressant days, which not only were nocturnal maunderings but managing to illuminate some of my "calling of the heart", although not in any "what's my job" kind of way. Dreams have changed and yet not since I went on this treatment - they seem like they record more pedestrian details, yet invest them with importance that I don't see in waking life. Which might just mean that, somewhere in all this, I must still be having to learn the lesson to pay attention to now.
Which might just be the moment for me to put some shoes on, and go for a walk, breathe some fresh air, admire the evening and our town. Good for you if you read this far - not so good when I don't write for so long and then regurgitate... well, if you want to pass along the joy, just put "words!" in my comments, and I'll do my best to give you some introspection prompts. Many thanks for Yonmei for giving me mine!
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