Off the Cliff

I'm very sorry so many people seem to have had a frightful year last year. I had a wonderful year, in keeping with my habit of having wonderful years in the midst of rampant death, doom and chaos. Last red letter year was 2003 which from an objective standpoint sucked mightily, even for me. But I was writing dragons and almost didn't notice SARS, Iraq invasions, bicycles being stolen and the AC going off for three days in mid-August. Give me enough crack and sufficiently charming young companionship, and I am very happy indeed.
( Thus 2008. )

This is a good time of year to do that 'what makes you happy' meme. Many disked sets of Uncle Ming is a good start, but today it was followed by kickinpants' Christmas package. It contains a Hasui calendar, and I nearly wept when I looked at the plates.
( Reason being-- )

Outside it snows. Inside I huddle in fearful apprehension and shuddering terror. My scars, let me show you them. So I shall meme, thanks to feliciter:

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

Thus I do what I've never done, and natter about music.
( But only because the result was largely so apropos )

My used book-fu was on today. Copped another Holdstock at Eliot's Books. Very satisfying. Also saw dentist and had tooth ground down so I'm no longer biting on it. That it was possible to grind it down is a testimony to how well naproxen works when taken in quantity.

Must note also dramatic cold-weather sunset clouds yesterday evening, purple-black and scarlet-gilt, and bright Tokyo-January cold sun on the bare trees this morning. (Unseasonably cold for TO November, usual for Tokyo January.) See out the corner of the mind's eye uncapturable glimpses of places I knew there. So much of place-memory is things I wasn't really looking at at the time, which may be why it never comes back whole.

Ah. My tooth hurts. The emergency dentist last night said it's an inflammation, not an infection, and prescribed me anti-inflammatories which I'll start once I establish that no, aspirin does *not* work.
( Cut for dental stuff )

Meanwhile I realize that the proper person to turn up to tell a hearty yarn to Dan and Una is Jack Aubrey, but that's a double gainer I'm not going to even try. Pasticheing Kipling's narrative style is possible but pasticheing O'Brian's conversational style inside that is not, or not for me.

About once every twenty years history gets made in a way that feels good. The Berlin Wall, the moon landing, and I wasn't around for whatever came before that. My reactions-- the ones I'll say aloud, that is-- swing between Nicely done and What took you so long. Truly, I really didn't think it would happen. I'm amazed and delighted.

I also remind myself that this is a man whose politics are to the right of Stephen Harper's. Now there's a bucket of next-day cold water in the face.

Keep this up and I'll develop a complex about looking in the mailbox.
( Read more... )

A small not unpleasant melancholy all yesterday, caused I think by going through my Saiyuuki guzu/ freebie files to find properly resonant homoerotic stickers to adorn Tav and Kiro's wedding poem. They come from ancient copies of Animage, mostly, in a 'Yes Virginia there was a time when I had a subscription to Animage and bicycled down to Sanko every month, or every few months, to pick up my copies' way; and there was a time when my main squeeze was an anime that featured prominently in Animage, which consequently offered many posters and postcards and seal sets of the anime version of the guys. All this happened in some sunny far off era, eight years ago, when I still copied my raw tapes for people because there was no other way then to get hold of them. That's all gone now, become infinitely distant and hence dear. I can't even remember when I cancelled my Animage subscription. Probably when shiny_monkey came home in '06 and I no longer had a source for the stuff.

But those little stickers capped from the second season closing credits and all the pre-Kamisama episodes reminded me of what it was all about, way back when.

Here.
Well, *I* laughed.

'They cried, La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall.' Meaning the vampire Torontonian lurgey that's been going the rounds this last month finally got me on Thursday. It's still in the headache and malaise state; I think I shall be positively relieved when it turns into the faucet nose and cough.
( Amusing Pastimes with The Beautiful Lady Who Never Says Thank You )

Work is being work. My work, if you didn't know, is casual and part-time, which tends to mean either not enough or way too much. This week at least is way too much, and I must stagger through two more days of it. But takumashii makes me very happy:

Emily Dickinson doesn't count unless you can recite something from memory. It's not that hard, people, you can sing them all to the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas."

The woman you hear bellowing an up-tempo version of 'Because I could not stop for death' will be me.

(Not *all* of them, BTW-- I Cannot Live With You won't fit at all.)

Is it reasonable, or am I thinking too precisely on the event, when I find myself less than enthralled by Brust's To Reign in Hell because the characters are presented as let-us-say Caucasoid? ( Cut for grumps )
( Cut for thoughts on dragon poetry )

Only an idiot would go down to Chinatown on a Sunday, but I wanted to look for mooncakes and I wanted somewhere to go this aft, so I did. And found that a) mooncakes are not sold in bakeries, they're sold in grocery stores and b) the downtown Chinese groceries all have the same three or four brands, one being some variant on peach and the rest lotus and all exorbitant unless you buy the individual mooncake in a tin, which sets you back four dollars and change. After qwerty and zan and the rest of you lot babbling last year about green tea and cappucino and you name it mooncakes, lotus paste doesn't really cut it. OTOH it's sweet and captivating and I'm glad I only bought one, so I shall now buy no more. Thus I dispose of mooncakes.

However, serendipity, wandered into the Dundas DVD stores and not the Spadina ones-- ( and discovered treasure )

Observe who gets the top step.

Hanh. They're not predicting any rain until Sunday, and then it's only 'light rain.' Yeah, sure. Last Monday was supposed to be 'scattered showers' until the day before when it became 'risk of thunderstorms,' and then day of when it turned into 'severe thunderstorm watch.' In fact it was (downtown at least) extreme deluge. I lay bets that the same thing happens by Friday at least. I crossed Queen's Park on Saturday and saw more than one large standing pool. *That* kind of summer: Queen's Park is flooded.
( Cut for Well-favored Man )

In general I'm underwhelmed by this round of the Olympics. Politics, politics, blah blah blah. Nothing to do with my city having lost the Olympics bid, truly: I'd hate living in a city disrupted all summer by the Olympics, and the Olympics would hate to be happening in the summer TO is currently having. But today's google cartoon makes me very happy:



Go, Goushou!

OK we get it. 2008 wants the Gold for record precipitation. Well, 2008 has it. You can stop trying.
( Whinging in the rain, just whinging in the rain, what a mizz-rubble feeling, I'm sopping again )

Of course I went back to the Blue'n'white to get The First Hundred Hanzi, of which there were three copies the day before yesterday, and of course there were none. OTOH I did write 450 words today. OTOH I keep misplacing my copy of Maskerade because when I take it somewhere to read I find things to do there, like acrostics in the side bedroom and changing the sheets in the front bedroom. OTOH when I took it down to the living room I wound up vacuuming the living room carpet and dusting the furniture, including the very grubby windows. OTOH the vacuum cleaner is still sitting in the hallway. OTOH three days' worth of dishes are in the draining rack. OTOH the dinner dishes are in the sink.

And I want a bath after my hour's walk today. Yay exercise. Not so yay breadloaf feet.

July is a break from the incessant allergies except when spring is late or cool or exceptionally rainy or early or hot or... well, July really isn't a break from the incessant allergies, OK? Nor am I the only one around with the Throat Tickle of Doom or the gucky lungs or the vanishing voice or the absolute inability to wake up completely ever and that's before antihistamines. Thus only a few scattered thorts. ( Ordered so as not to scatter too widely )

This, dammit, is why I hate going outside in thunderstorms. That happened just down the street. Seriously, guys-- quite apart from huge falling branches, now a major hazard in this city of aging trees, when a storm moves in you get the frick inside. It's called common sense. (There's a convenience store just across the street, FWIW, that'd have been much safer as a shelter. It's not like you can't *see* a storm approaching from the hill above Christie Pits.)

In other news, read a good-natured BL manga, loosely titled On the Road with the White Dragon (no dragons, just a possibly pseudo-Buddhist monk with Daoistic powers), by the Hitodenashi mangaka, for once doing a genki uke and considerate seme. Possibly this is why there's no sequel, though there does seem to be another in the Shinsengumi series. (Three years since I reviewed those? Dear god, time flies.)

Damn, what a good book. I thought nothing could replace Vetinari vs Vimes in my affections, but Vetinari vs Moist is a winner.

Only trouble with mainlining these books is not remembering what happens where. Is it in Men at Arms that Vimes arrests Vetinari, or somewhere else?

(Reading in the front bedroom by the window on this humid afternoon while the surprisingly cool breeze blew in and grey argosies of washy clouds floated past, the bit of my brain that wasn't in Ankh-Morpork was seeing forgotten bits of Japan, streets in Ueno or fields in Shizuoka. Must be the repetition of 'moist' that did it.)
( Shoutout to mauvecloud )

It was a week of postal happiness. ( Cut for greed )
It was not of course a week of credit card joy, but really, only the equivalent of three meals out with wine and tip.

And there are people who advocate getting rid of daylight savings? Madness. That would have the sun rise at 4:30 this time of year, which means I'd be up at 4. You know who gets up at 4? Tofu makers. No one else should be awake at that hour except the insomniacs like me who're about to go to bed.

Three days in a row awake before 6, two of them at 5 am. Awake. Unable to get back to sleep because my body says "Light! Look there's *light* in the east! The birds are singing! It's morning!!" Ohh for the wintertime when 5 am was the middle of the night and I got more than 5 or 6 hours rest (it doesn't have to be sleep-- an hour or two's float in the dark will do just as well.) And my eyes weren't too tired to read Japanese the rest of the day.

Because when I'm not too tired to read I can divert myself with ( these sites )

Seattle's weather is currently happening outside my window. Which makes me happy because in two days we'll be having Kuala Lampur's.

And over at fandom_wank there's a threnody thread (one should be able to portmanteau those words-- threadnody?) about Great Unfinished Manga Works. Not just YnM, actually. And much CLAMP bashing.
( Kurotsubaki )