Off the Cliff

So if my birthday book is correct, yesterday was joasakura's birthday and today is stanking's, and I hope both your years are better than the last ones.

The new Phantom Moon Tower ep took only two readings before I had most of what happened straight. It's the hairdoes that screw it up. These A/U Taishou/ Shouwa hairstyles make all the women look alike, grumpy grump. Worse- there are two or possibly three business-running females in this one and when someone says okami-san (different kanji from god FTR) I never know which okami-san they're talking about. Was young dork's mother the former boss of the Phantom Moon Tower or does it just look like that's what the evil money lender's saying?
( General Ima-ish thoughts )

There was slim parcel between the doors when I got home. Had it contained something in colourful wrapping paper I'd have waited till Monday to open it but it didn't and I did and---

I never thought to be saying this in all sincerity but now I am. (clears throat) incandescens, it's lovely. I shall treasure it always. What is it?

That's a general what, of course, meaning who and what's his background if any and etc etc. But I love it to pieces. What is it? (And do you think it's safe to scan it?)

Many years ago a friend was moving apartments- this was in the days when people moved every year or two: ah, Youth! Her Czechoslovakian boyfriend- this was in the days when there was a Czechoslovakia, so you know we're going back here- looked at the thirty odd boxes of books and said morosely, "This is the dark side of literacy."

All those people who say 'I never throw books out' or 'Oh no I could never throw a book away no matter how battered it is.' Those people? They haven't been buying books for 40 years and they haven't spent a good chunk of their inheritance on impulse book buying and they especially have not had someone wish ten UPS boxes of manga on them. I have. I did. The results are not pretty.
( House taken over )

I first read the bulk of 100 Demons in the warm greasy fall of 2004, and memory says I read a lot of it between shifts at the new daycare centre. I do remember the ugly fluorescent lights on the ugly yellow walls as I sat reading on the lumpy purple futon in the pre-school section while kids slept in the next room and outside the undistinguished grey rain fell.

I'm reading my wide-han copies wherever I can, which means coffee shops and restaurants by day and the living room sofa by night when I have nights ie when there are no meetings till 9 pm. But this afternoon with three hours to kill I found myself alone, up on the third floor in the tiny staff lounge under the eaves of this once-was-a-house, sprawled on a very comfortable futon nestled under the slanting ceiling and reading the Sangoro's Pond story in the bright cold westering sun of early December. Reading 100 Demons is always an indefinably happy making experience, and views to the western sky are a rare pleasure these days (I so miss the tree-fringed western skyscapes that I grew up with)-- so reading Ima Ichiko on a sunny frozen afternoon, and drowsing a little afterwards, and considering possible ideas for possible fics, all constituted an interim moment of exquisite happiness that I note here for future reference.

Remember this entry, written on Monday, about amazon.jp having sent off my books that day? What's waiting for me on the door when I come home today, Thursday? Yup. Wormholes, I tell you, they use wormholes.

For those inclined to be envious, however, this time Canada Customs' radar caught my three big-assed wide-han manga volumes. The delivery is COD and they want $8.75 from me. Having received the 8 am Dolorous Phonecall twice this week I intend to stay in tomorrow to be there to pay them in person.

Nov 1 I emailed Kinokuniya about ordering the autumn Ward. Heard nothing. Saturday I emailed them again. No we never got your email but we've ordered it for you now. Great sigh of relief. I shall have the autumn Ward-- somewhere around Christmas.

Nov 15- which is to say last Wednesday, yes?- I ordered 100 Demons 14 from amazon.jp and a used copy of Five Box Stories from some secondhand dealer in the country. Nov 16 received the usual notification of we sent it out/ expect 3-4 weeks for delivery. Which I do: amazon.jp can't keep tossing things into the wrong box forever. What's waiting on my door this evening? 'We attempted to make a delivery' from amazon's shipping company.

Five Boxes really will take 3-4 weeks because other people use mail, not the space warp amazon.jp does. Nothing- *nothing*- takes five days from Tokyo. Nothing.

It is so nice to have extra money these days. Means I can buy books, and sometimes safer books than the latest Ishiguro, which I still haven't finished. ( Let me count my countless blessings one by one )

I. Am. Canadian! And consequently I don't talk politics because politics bore me. I prefer talking about the weather because, while both politics and the weather are outside my control, the weather at least is interesting. However this indicates, if nothing else a huge yawning chasm between cultures.
( Politics and some culture )

Read the first Temeraire book on the train back. It's sweet and pleasant and I cried like a drain but I think the second one is much better. I'm also suffering twitchy 'I'd have written this differently' flashes. That's a change from most of my fantasy English reading, which is usually 'I wouldn't have written this at all and I rather wonder why you did,' but still. My perfect contentment is marred, grump grump.

Stunned to find Zero-Sum waiting in my mailbox when I got back. It came out last Thursday. And went to Vancouver and crossed the country and arrived here on Monday-- no, I don't believe that's possible at all. If it comes out on Thursday *Hong Kong* gets it Friday. That Toronto gets it Monday (no weekend mail delivery) is a miracle. Iwase usually takes ten days to two weeks to deliver.

I now have limited-edition Saiyuuki gels from Zero-Sum's Comiket booth, courtesy of abyss_goat, in lovely glowing colours, which I may iconize when I finish gloating over them. But you can't put gels in the window like I want to. The light bleaches them.

( And that old joke about giving Manhattan back to the Indians? What a good idea )

Am currently having pre-trip pre-flying jitters in the form of three year old tantrumming about having to Dress Like A Gurrl. ( Cut to save sensibilities )

I was counting on my fingers, and unable to remember whether the 15th was a Friday or a Saturday; but it was a Friday and today is the 19th and hence nojojojo's birthday. Then I read her lj entry. Turns out she's a scant 34. Oh-go-away. And come back next year. These days the 20's are no more than the end of adolescence and life *begins* at 35.

(Takes aching middle-aged self off to bed. At 9 flipping 30. And uses winter icon to reinforce the point.)

Yesterday was too much cleaning in the morning, too much gadding about in the rain in the afternoon, and too much gin in the evening. The result today is an aching slow-moving bad-tempered me who's accomplished nothing at all except to replace the gin she drank last night, and who currently wishes she was one of those 'I had to get up to pee at 3 am and when I saw my compy I sat down and wrote these three stories and here they are. Now I'm going back to bed. Dated 3:45.' Because authors like that- authors with no internal editor- clearly never need to go back over a passage to get it right, probably never even think about a story before they write it, and certainly never find themselves stuck trying to get through even the little distance from point A to point C. They're the Mozart writers to us Salieri ones- you know, the ones who *suffer* while writing?- and I hope they die as per the script-- young, indigent, and convinced they've written nothing of any real worth yet.

(Possibly the codeine's started to work, because I don't really want anything of the sort. I've written stories that wrote themselves, without any pain at all, and it felt like being a secretary taking dictation. I had no input into the thing at all and no pleasure of creation. So fine, I'll go on wrestling with balky stories that refuse to co-operate. The devil you know...)

In the Onmyouji manga, I believe, Hiromasa thinks to himself, after being introduced to Mitsumushi (mysterious insect), 'Sounds itchy.' This is because her name sounds like mizumushi (water insect), the Japanese version of athlete's foot. Japanese versions of Stuff Here come in two varieties- infinitely more delicate, as with daffodils, maples, and daphne, and indescribably more gross, as with cockroaches and cicadas. (Japanese cockroaches- gokiburi- are two inches long, have wings with which to fly, and are attracted to light. OTOH they're actually kind of pretty in their shellacked-back fashion. Cicadas- semi- are louder there- much much louder: like miniature buzzsaws- and I miss the sound of them. But oh my God yuck are they BIG and UGLY in the flesh.) (Am reminded of the woman who said she'd never seen anything to resemble Japanese insects, even after living in Tanzania for three years.)

And so with mizumushi. I'm convinced I picked up a systemic case of it there because it flares up here periodically when I forget to dry between my toes with a hair-dryer. It laughs at western fungicides and it drives me nuts. I am currently being driven nuts. Just FYI.

(OTOH the labels on the fungicides make me blink. 'Use twice daily. Effective within 4 **weeks**.' Huh? It was three days in my youth. Global warming and fungicide-resistant athlete's foot. The world is entering its latter days.)

So I did buy a mailbox yesterday, in anticipation of either ZeroSum or Le cortège des cent démons, whichever came first. A big black plastic thing, the only one in the shop capable of holding a phonebook. I didn't have the masonry bits to put the hooks into the brick wall but I propped it up on the chair by the front door. I figured the letter carrier would see that it was clearly a mailbox: it's a big box with a flap that opens and written on the side in white letters are the words 'pirate ship' 'mail.'

I came home from work and looked in my letter box and found a delivery notice: Can be picked up at Hanin Drugstore after 1 pm tomorrow.
( Stupid bloody post office )

When the tilers finished with the tile Monday morning they said The plumber'll be coming tomorrow to put the toilet in. Good, thought I, no more slop buckets.

Only of course he didn't come.
( Read more... )

There was a welcome back barbecue Saturday for shiny_monkey out west a ways, and casting about for good bus reading (assuming I'd be able to read on the bus) I took my last unread Brust, Orca. Turned out to be an inspired choice. How brisk and business-like Brust is, even when doing his sometimes confusing braided narratives. I'd put off reading Orca from some confused idea that it was one of the non-Taltos narrated ones that don't work nearly as well as the I-style. (Brust has this in common with Mary Renault, by and large. The Paarfi ones I call pastiche and don't count.) But someone having a hissy fit about the unfairness of authors keeping secrets from their readers, the swine, cited Orca as a possible instance of same: and the possibility of having a secret revealed gave me the incentive to read. I like authors who keep secrets from their readers, as long as we find out what the secret is eventually. If they keep a mysterious silence, like John Fowles, I'm tempted to write them off as fakers and/or pretentious teases.

The change of TO scenery was welcome, and the change of reading material more so, because I'd been reading Graham Greene.

I read a bunch of his novels in hospital in France, they being about the only English books the French bookstores had, or perhaps the only thing my cousins thought I might want to read. (I'd been travelling with War and Peace, and Greene was indeed a pleasant change.) I remember nothing of them now, but that might be due to, well, reading them in hospital flat on my back in traction. The only impression I retain is an odd kind of strangling claustrophobia.
( Voice from the past )

They're coming to redo my bathroom on Tuesday.

AAAAAAUGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

I don't even know what colours I want. Not bright white tile like now that blinds me in the morning April to September. Not dark designer colours that will make the place a cave from October to March. Pale coloured tile shows the grunge. Dark coloured tile will turn the room into a broom closet. I hate neutrals. I don't have the funds for an upscale job.

If only the damn room didn't face east I'd go for honest bathroom black and white. But it does, oh it does.

Spent yesterday translating, which left me exhausted as translating will. Slept badly with twinging body parts and woke today with the concrete neck o' doom, which isn't quite concrete enough to take a muscle relaxant for; achy shoulders, twinging elbows (perennial and nothing works on them: maybe it's tendonitis after all) and general blahs. I am a baby-hefter, not a desk-sitter. I should go heft some babies to get things back in order.

But instead I'm contemplating the Twilight Zone feeling of another Vanishing Review. Years ago paleaswater lent me a manga about a bunch of, uhh, architect detectives, wasn't it? I remember writing a review of it. She remembers reading my review of it. There is no trace of a review to be found anywhere on my computer, which has everything I ever wrote . ( And now it's happened again )

Hm well. I am considering this while in the midst of apocalyptic despair/ allergy season asthma (I know I'm fated to die by, as Sabina has said, basically drowning in my bed, a prospect that leads among other things to me bicycling without a helmet. Helmets are over-rated anyway.) The exercise produces certain thoughts. ( To wit )

A long weekend (I *will* not work Monday, I *will* not- and other famous last words.) Third week of headcold now moving into lungs, provoking (again) spasmodic coughs and dynamite sneezes; heavy, logey, head hurts hurts hurts. What to do? What can anyone do?

Why, translate Yumemakura, of course!
( God, why me? )