Two Impossible Things

[flemmings]

There are two things that regularly happen to me that can't possibly. I've learned not to think about them but I still get antsy when they do.

One is that I catch on things. If I tried to get the side strap of my backpack around the front door's knob, do you think I could? If I tried to get my bicycle's seat caught in my coat pocket when I'm walking the bike down the steps, would it be possible? No, of course not. But it happens all the time.

The other is that the text of books changes on me. It happens so often that I wrote a story about it once. I try to persuade myself that it's just me remembering incorrectly what book the thing I'm looking for is in. In the one case where I finally found the missing text, that's what happened. The story of a wastrel son that I remembered being in Tales from a Ming Collection was actually in An Anthology of Chinese Literature. I've never succeeded in finding the story of the girl who elopes but leaves herself at home, that I remember being in the same Tales.

And now feliciter mentions a poem and I go, oh yeah, that one, where the king decides his deposed rival has been entertaining subversive agents because he talks about the east wind visiting him at night, how could I forget that? It's in Poems of the Masters, I remember reading it four years ago in winter in my bedroom one evening, because someone gave it to me for Christmas.

Well, I read it four years ago but it's not in Poems of the Masters. I've been all through it- English text and Chinese text and no it's not there. But I don't have any other anthology with facing page text and translation and notes. Particularly the notes, because the notes are what I remember.

I hate these black water moments- the impossible seeping into the possible- I really really do.

Comments

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I should be asleep...but boy has decided he wanted to chuck up dinner, so I find myself doing laundry (otherwise everything will smell horribly tomorrow and reading lj) *sigh* if it isn't one thing it's another...

and hey those blackwater moments happen to me all the time.

Thank you for the link...I loved that he quoted Andrew Lang! from his fairy books!

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the translation!

(Just the other day I was convinced of the existence of a paper on phaeochromocytoma in the Lancet between September and November 2007. Irate juniors informed me that the only article they could find on same subject by same author was in 2005. Then I found it in the November 2007 issue of our most popular specialty journal, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, where they had neglected to look.)

Alternately we could all be living in constantly shifting and crossing alternate timelines where Fan Li and Fu Chai formed a happy menage a quatre with the High King of Yue and his lovely queen after the peaceful incorporation of Wu into Yue

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Glad I can entertain your late night housework.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Well you *said* it was The Lancet.... (Wish I had minions to do my looking-up.)

we could all be living in constantly shifting and crossing alternate timelines

In all seriousness, that's my crawling anxiety. But hey, if it gets me happy menages a quatre with Gou Jian everyone's bitch including Ya Yu's I won't complain. (But I read that poem not once but *twice*, the second time a year or two later. Where is it why can't I find it oohhhhhhh....)

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...(actually the article, which I had at home but which they could access online, was for their edification - the terrifying funny thing is that I quoted more or less word-for-word a specific phrase on the use of beta-blockers in managing phaeochromocytoma, but my mind's eye saw it in the typeface of the Lancet, which is quite different from the JCEM >_>)

clearly we must find a way to rectify the timestream (it will probably turn up sooner or later! that's what happens when one does *lots* of reading ^^)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I quoted more or less word-for-word a specific phrase on the use of beta-blockers in managing phaeochromocytoma, but my mind's eye saw it in the typeface of the Lancet, which is quite different from the JCEM >_>)

And that's the sort of mind trick that drives us batty. Having been through Poems of the Masters yet again, and identified one of Du Fu's that I'd painfully deciphered back when I began painfully deciphering Chinese verse so *yes* it must be this book- it occurs to me that maybe that poem *isn't* in the classic collection. So maybe I have another book with a pale beige cover, and need only find it...

If I can rectify Woxin's time stream I won't complain about my own. Unfortunately the DVDs remain unrectifiable and as I continue my pulling-nails-out rewatch, Gou Jian keeps on making the same mistakes and Fu Chai never says what I want him to say ('Look, Chancellor, who's the king here?') and ohh what a messy mess it all is. Argh.

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

I catch on things too! Backpack straps, sandal straps, bra straps -- if it's a strap it'll probably catch. Argh.

I don't think I've read those two stories before. They're so lovely and melancholy, thanks for linking.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

if it's a strap it'll probably catch.

I'm relieved to know I'm not alone. Some of the bits that catch-- there's no *way* it could happen naturally, since it takes so much time to figure out how to get them uncaught.

Welcome. Thanks for reading.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

Ah, I get that thing with the books (and other items) all the time. It is terribly upsetting. I ~ fear becoming slightly unstuck in the universe. Losing sight of time and date for a start is worryingly easy. Ho hum, must stay pragmatic; the other way lies tiresome paranoia and talking to people who don't exist.

The stories are lovely -- catch that feeling.