Tuesday, February 24, 2009

shufu to you too

Chapter test #1, Japanese, is tomorrow night. Gabe has been a bit remiss in memorizing a short list of college majors and careers, so I made a study help--clip art of the various things, labeled with the Japanese word. The shufu illustration was especially chosen to reflect my feelings about the word. Yesterday we were reviewing: Shufu I say. Um...office worker? Gabe guesses. No, I say, housewife.

You’re sort of a shufu, says Gabe. No, I absolutely am not I assert. Shufus do not write fiction. Shufus do not install tile and hardwood floors. Shufus are not the only people in the house who can fix your computer. Shufus do not jump-start cars and fix bicycles. And shufus do not learn Japanese.

But you’re sort of a shufu, Gabe insists. Sort of NOT, I doubly insist. It is a detestable word, in any language.

As such, my clip art shufu is watching soaps and ironing--neither being an act I commit if I can help it. Further, I submit that even the word is an anachronistic concept in today’s society anyway. There are people of all ages and genders whose lives don’t necessarily revolve around standard salaried employment, and I’m quite certain you would not accuse them all of being shufus, and I utterly decline the designation along with them.
But still Gabe. Learn the English translation. It might be on the test.

The pc, meanwhile, is (as I’ve alluded to,) in need of serious help. It’s a phenomenon how much crap can drift through the net-ether when one browses anime and fan fic sites. Downloading spyware removers has added burrs to hair-knots, and I’ve resolved--at this point--to learn to live with protection-racket software. We will try Kaspersky. It’s on its way. In the meantime, once the pc--now reinstalled from scratch--is reloaded with the usual line-up (Firefox, Windows Media Player, Guild Wars of course...) I will try to make a ghost of it on an external drive, possibly (but not definitely,) reducing the size of the headache the next such episode gives me.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Cellar dwellers

Sometimes the isolation wrought by organic brain syndrome is the specter you host, like it or not, on a drop-in basis. Actually, it’s always there, but sometimes it contents itself with living in the basement where you can sometimes sort of ignore it like that whiff of eau de kitty litter box. Other times it wants to hover in the kitchen, radiating its mood-deadening vibe into the shared atmosphere.

Warning: Do not watch movies such as P.S. I Love You, Love Actually, or even Mamma Mia when the specter is living upstairs. Back to the Future or anything Harry Potter are acceptable.



Clarence the muse and I have been having a little trouble finding time to get much accomplished. It’s my fault this time--I can’t pin it on Clarence. I like this Japanese stuff, see, and am doubling up on the books. The basement job is there and wants doing. (If it’s more orderly maybe the specter will stay down there? Doubt it.) And getting up at 5:15 a.m. puts me in afternoon nap mode. Hence, Clarence rarely can get any of my freshest brain time. Perhaps reality can catch up to my good intentions. We don’t want Clarence moving into the basement.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

sandwich

My daydreams are taking me to weird and unfair places. Well...unfair in that I could never go there by making the right choices.


Lunch was at Panera, with Helen and 5 year old Belle. (Who can spread her own cream cheese on her bagel, thanks.) We talked about “comfort food...,” specifically, is there anything from childhood that is a true keeper, in the comfort food arsenal? Apart from the fact that I think of tunaroll cassafish (the kind made with soup and egg noodles,) with fondness, it seems that my segue from a standard American to mostly veg diet a couple of decades ago has rewritten my comfort food roster.

I love: grape leaves (dolmas,) hummus, udon noodles in miso broth, excellently-seasoned tofu, and Indian flatbreads with lentil dal. Foods that make me smile. So much for American classics. (with the caveat that I am truly enjoying the pickle they serve with sandwiches at Panera.)


In messy little blurts of indentured servitude in which the kitchen timer is boss, I’m getting the basement sorted. Jeff may be going to see Fallingwater with Helen in April. I may yet have my best chance to call junkbusters before summer.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Oh no...

I just had this thought which is both horrible and exquisite. What if Clarence isn't named after the angel in It's a Wonderful Life? What if he's actually more of an incarnation of Clarence the cross-eyed lion from Daktari?

And yet, I'm comforted in the quirky way that is characteristic of that which tends to comfort me. Large visually-impaired feline or Henry Travers...whichever...it's so helpful to live in a nebulous world where one is no longer alone in one's creative pursuit. Clarence and I--we keep each other accountable.

Fuzzy Lenz's real name is Gary Lenz. I know, because I wrote him a check to kick off the (lovely, as it's shaping up) patio out the back door. I tell Jeff. "Fuzzy's real name is Gary," I say. Now, every day, we have a conversation very much like this:

"Okay...so it's Michael," says Jeff.

"What is?"

"Fuzzy's real name."

"No," I say. "It's Gary."

"Ok, good," says Jeff, walking away. "Robert."

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

If Clarence just had Freddi's spunk...

I was chuffed to have stumbled upon Elizabeth Gilbert’s very recent TED.com talk on “a different way to think about creative genius.” What an excellent way to differentiate oneself from one’s failure (or success in her, or others’ cases,) as a writer. Or person of other creative bent.

Gilbert's notion is to revisit the old Greek way of thinking about creative genius as being that which visits you in a gift of inspiration, rather than the pre-existing condition, or nature of the artist/writer/creator. A separate persona, iow, which is either on the ball or isn't. I’d been claiming all along that it is not really my fault that a possibly psycho directive to write was coupled with Clarence the crappy muse being assigned to my case. (Clarence borrows his name from the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. I cannot predict whether this name-sharing foreshadows eventual “success” or is merely a dumb name for a muse.)

Still, it’s sort of reassuring, in a sanity-soothing way, to imagine that it’s no aberration if “calling” and inspiration do not coalesce in this lifetime. At least I showed up for my part. Three silly books in ten years can’t be the worst record ever. Perhaps my frustration and hiatus of the last little while have corresponded with Clarence being busy with some CE credits. Maybe they’ve helped him. I just can’t worry about that.

Fuzzy and his helper are laying down gravel out the back door, in prep for concrete, which will provide the foundation for eventual slate and brick and something other than mud to walk onto when we exit kitchen rear. So, for now at least, there are no back steps, which means that we need to discourage Freddi’s wish to fall on her face out the back door. Instead, she’s issuing urgent staccato woofs, just so everyone is fully aware that she’s got the thing under surveillance. Thanks Fredfred.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

end of a day blather.

When I got my distance-vision only glasses in January, the optometrist advised me to hang on to last year’s progressive lenses even though I don’t love them. He was right. It doesn’t work to wear distance-only glasses in Japanese class or the grocery store, but they are excellent for driving at night. Luckily, the honking-big case that came with the new ones holds both pairs.

I fret. Should I visit Beacon--the tiniest little college ever, in Leesburg Florida--with Gabe because it might, as an LD-specific school, have the highest chance of not flunking him out? Will a mainstream school-with-LD-program work? Will he still like Japanese when he has to start reading...in Japanese? Cola-nut? Uncola-nut? Can you choose wisely? (If you can, please let me know...I could use some input here.)

It was a day of too much to do. To Georgetown, through arduous D.C. traffic first thing in the morning for a hefty dose of poking, prodding, and brain-straining (Jeff,) and a lot of time sitting in a chair or looking out the 7th floor window of the hospital room at snow flurries, while trying to entertain my ADD mind with a combination of Japanese practice, scarf knitting, and playing with my Centro’s online functions to make sure Baltimore County Schools weren’t closing early. (me.) Luckily, they did not. Close early, that is, and we had time to chomp down a Chipotle burrito, get home, let the dog out, snag Gabe from carpool, run home to use the bathroom, and take him to drum. I recognize that there is nothing unusual about having little time to alight at home and achieve that settled feeling for most people, but I am grateful that our most pressing task for tomorrow is to return the Odyssey’s license plates to the DMV so we can stop insuring it.

I imagine that one day I may need a job, to extend the time until I need to rely on eggs and nests and stuff like that, and I imagine that I will work at Trader Joe’s, or similar. And I will not mind it. Probably. Because, the people seem nice enough, and besides--there is rarely a brilliant career opening for someone who: reads several languages somewhat, writes tolerable but unmarketable fiction, and is (or will be) fifty-something. So, it will be one of those jobs for people whose more interesting features are not highlighted by their vocation.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

I am not watching the Superbowl

My brain is about to stretch to the point of flipping inside out. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy studying Japanese. Indeed, it is pleasing me in a way that I had not anticipated. But the process has evoked a couple of minor seismic shifts in my thinking.

See...I was a little concerned about how I sort of know some French, and I sort of know some Spanish, but neither one--when push comes to shove--is going to allow me to converse fluently at the drop of a hat. At all. At all at all. I can merely take comfort in the notion that if I’m unexpectedly airdropped into Lausanne, or maybe Bolivia, I will be able to combine my base of knowledge with the total immersion experience such that I may become conversant in a relatively short time. But my internal argument went something like this: Why add a language? Why not, instead, improve at the ones I already know? And now my answer is this: Because I can’t. At least not much, short of the aforementioned airdrop. Hence, why not expand my base of places where, if airdropped, I will have the framework on which to build?

So, ok. I’m apparently not that hard to convince, because I’ve completely bought that argument. But I’m still left with this concern: I enrolled for Gabe--so, unless I succeed in helping him succeed, I will have failed. So I wave my annoying little wipe-off board drills in his face, and leave Word docs on his PC with phrases to translate before he launches 
“Kitty-face Girl,” or whatever the heck animes he watches. He is immensely tolerant, thank goodness, but not--I observe--as quick a study as I am. It seems. So I have to remind myself: a) the kid has LDs. b)I bested Eric Winter in the NSA language-translation qualifying exam, where they give you an invented language and you have to figure out the rules. Eric Winter, otherwise, beat me in the “It’s Academic” qualifying trial.
c)I am obsessive like Hermione Granger. And then, just as I’m feeling ahead of the game, Gabe throws a few anime-derived expressions at me, about whose meanings I’m clueless, and I say “no fair! It’s not in the book!”

And, to be sane about it all, we have not had a chapter exam yet. It is perfectly plausible that class expectations are lower than my self-expectations. So let us wait and see.

And yay--I just looked it up, and it turns out that AACC does offer 4 semesters of Japanese, so I can go on and on and on...and then maybe reactivate my German synapses which went into hibernation after the one year of German they offered when I was in high school. From which I retain the following: Oje, der schwamm ist nicht nass. This is a very useful statement that you might employ any time you need to inform someone that the sponge is not wet. But I think it needs beefing up with a few additional expressions.

Last night, in the interest of further cultural enlightenment, Rachel, Gabe, Jeff and I went to Joss Japanese Bistro in Annapolis. Yum. In general. Once we got Jeff straightened out so that he was holding both his chopsticks right-side-up he did just fine. And even had this to add to tonight’s exchange of Japanese phrases: “Hoots man, be thrifty.”