(no subject)
I had my first bout with simultaneous translation today. In one ear and out the mouth. It was like a sex position, except I don't find my Chinese co-worker that sexually viable--which isn't a slight against her, I'm just not into Chinese chicks. It wasn't difficult subject matter, just her explaining where she is, what her job entails, and her thoughts about living in Japan thus far, but it was a rush for me all the same, as I imagine most inaugural experiences are.
The weirdest thing was judging where to start speaking. I based it less on the natural pauses in her speech, or the logical places for me to jump in a finish a thought. Instead I thought of the people listening, the rythym of our air blowing past the reeds inside their ears, the pulse of those vibrations, and I spoke in awkward, asymetrical intervals to satisfy what I obsessively pegged as an obsessive craving for routine.
It was so visceral! I was so alive! It was one of the beginnings of the rest of my life!
Afterwards I interpreted a 30-minute meeting from English to Japanese, which was infinitely simpler due to my ability to predict English. I didn't have to wait for the final clicks and closed lips of a consonant cluster; I could anticipate sounds, the words they constructed, the meaning they construed, and their aftermath. It allotted more precious time to undress their words and reconstruct them in a Japanese catapult, firing them defensively (everything I've studied in the bathtub for is on the line!) at open ears. It was wanton destruction, my translation, I had to get it as far away from me as possible. If I made a mistake, I didn't want to know, I just wanted to keep swimming.
So here I am, 6:08pm, tired. I ate a handful of almonds, hummed the lines You always seem to fold at the shirt/I bring it up, you think I'm a jerk to myself, and contemplated taking a bath. But what would I read? How long would I stay in? Do I want to take a bath before dinner? I'm going to eat broccoli again, it has too much calcium to pass up, even though it smells.
--
Application! I have three and a half unaccounted years to, well, account for. Before everything happened the choices I made seemed so obvious, so requisite, so untenable. And now that I look back, I realize the only way I could have determined how deep that cliff was would be to jump right off of it. And here I am, an experiment in self, with a lot more faith in what you can feel over what you can see. That almost sounded emotional. I'm almost back on my feet.
--
Something serene. I took a taxi to the Great Wall of China. After three kilometers we got off the Wall, climbed down the subsequent mountain, and hitch-hiked to Ruoguai on a school bus. You can't get to Beijing from here!, said the bus driver in the only Mandarin sentence I was able to decipher in its entirety. Of course you can! It's OK, we'll take you there, his wife.
For the first time in my life I saw Mao Zedong's corpse before breakfast.
When I came back to Kumamoto I would walk the streets of Western holidays alone, friends in Ireland and Turkey, or at their grandmother's house the next town over. I kept a pack of Red Pandas in the right pocket of the green coat I bought with Sam in Brooklyn, exhuming one occasionally to think about how remarkable it was to smoke luxurious Chinese cigarettes in a town where my picture appears in the newspaper next to a legible column of ideograms. This is the direction my life is taking? Yes. Green tea is full of thiamine, I eat prunes and have had raw beef liver for lunch. My lingering homesickness in Macao was that I love sheets of cold rice with salmon sandwiched in between. The nostalgia I feel now is for people I used to know that are still in my life, people I loved that I couldn't express it to, people that I didn't to whom I became addicted. The only things I learned in college were to respect the physical integrity of my brain, and how to break my own heart with someone else's hand. And to somehow come through something unscathably unscathed--and better yet, not quite as dumb!
--
Yesterday Tazzy confirmed that a beep-beep, pause, beep-beep is indeed an Indian ring tone. When Kolkata is no more, I'll go to the department store--the nice one below the bus station, and buy yams and marshmallows. I'll then put them in a pot, the pot on my stovetop, and candy them. And I'll do it to show someone who reminded me I used to give damns about things how to have Christmas in July in January. Because, in a way, it's an apology for not doing more.
The weirdest thing was judging where to start speaking. I based it less on the natural pauses in her speech, or the logical places for me to jump in a finish a thought. Instead I thought of the people listening, the rythym of our air blowing past the reeds inside their ears, the pulse of those vibrations, and I spoke in awkward, asymetrical intervals to satisfy what I obsessively pegged as an obsessive craving for routine.
It was so visceral! I was so alive! It was one of the beginnings of the rest of my life!
Afterwards I interpreted a 30-minute meeting from English to Japanese, which was infinitely simpler due to my ability to predict English. I didn't have to wait for the final clicks and closed lips of a consonant cluster; I could anticipate sounds, the words they constructed, the meaning they construed, and their aftermath. It allotted more precious time to undress their words and reconstruct them in a Japanese catapult, firing them defensively (everything I've studied in the bathtub for is on the line!) at open ears. It was wanton destruction, my translation, I had to get it as far away from me as possible. If I made a mistake, I didn't want to know, I just wanted to keep swimming.
So here I am, 6:08pm, tired. I ate a handful of almonds, hummed the lines You always seem to fold at the shirt/I bring it up, you think I'm a jerk to myself, and contemplated taking a bath. But what would I read? How long would I stay in? Do I want to take a bath before dinner? I'm going to eat broccoli again, it has too much calcium to pass up, even though it smells.
--
Application! I have three and a half unaccounted years to, well, account for. Before everything happened the choices I made seemed so obvious, so requisite, so untenable. And now that I look back, I realize the only way I could have determined how deep that cliff was would be to jump right off of it. And here I am, an experiment in self, with a lot more faith in what you can feel over what you can see. That almost sounded emotional. I'm almost back on my feet.
--
Something serene. I took a taxi to the Great Wall of China. After three kilometers we got off the Wall, climbed down the subsequent mountain, and hitch-hiked to Ruoguai on a school bus. You can't get to Beijing from here!, said the bus driver in the only Mandarin sentence I was able to decipher in its entirety. Of course you can! It's OK, we'll take you there, his wife.
For the first time in my life I saw Mao Zedong's corpse before breakfast.
When I came back to Kumamoto I would walk the streets of Western holidays alone, friends in Ireland and Turkey, or at their grandmother's house the next town over. I kept a pack of Red Pandas in the right pocket of the green coat I bought with Sam in Brooklyn, exhuming one occasionally to think about how remarkable it was to smoke luxurious Chinese cigarettes in a town where my picture appears in the newspaper next to a legible column of ideograms. This is the direction my life is taking? Yes. Green tea is full of thiamine, I eat prunes and have had raw beef liver for lunch. My lingering homesickness in Macao was that I love sheets of cold rice with salmon sandwiched in between. The nostalgia I feel now is for people I used to know that are still in my life, people I loved that I couldn't express it to, people that I didn't to whom I became addicted. The only things I learned in college were to respect the physical integrity of my brain, and how to break my own heart with someone else's hand. And to somehow come through something unscathably unscathed--and better yet, not quite as dumb!
--
Yesterday Tazzy confirmed that a beep-beep, pause, beep-beep is indeed an Indian ring tone. When Kolkata is no more, I'll go to the department store--the nice one below the bus station, and buy yams and marshmallows. I'll then put them in a pot, the pot on my stovetop, and candy them. And I'll do it to show someone who reminded me I used to give damns about things how to have Christmas in July in January. Because, in a way, it's an apology for not doing more.