OK, I really don't know what gives here. Reading along in 1Q84 I find him using a kanji as a verb, but not at all the obscure verb the Wordtank gives. So I reach for the translation to see what they make of it, and find two sentences in the English version that don't exist in the Japanese. It doesn't look like there are variant versions of the ( Read more... )

1. solaas and avalonjones/ kagenami, your Christmas cards came. Thank you so much, and A and K, thank you for the dragon stickers. Year of the dragon again. The last one must have been 2000, which was before I dragoned; before I Saiyukied, in fact, at least before August. A good year: may we have a repeat in 2012.
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Am having one of my Christmas marathon reads, aided by minimal hours at work and much phthisic languishments on sofas still. But because I'm a visual reader my mind is the most unholy stew of fragments and moods in consequence. Moods partly because I read Gene Wolfe's There are Doors in a day or so, where the narrator's dreams and his reality have ( Read more... )

It's pleasant, waking up from dreams, for the reason Li Bai adduces up there in the subject line. For all the mindful 'be where you are' Buddhist teachings, one must admit that where one is has a certain dull sameness to it. Same house, same job, same city, same me. A dream is a trip to elsewhere, a view outside of one's narrow reality. So I ( Read more... )

One of those Buddhist self-help books I've been reading all year posed the question 'What is the color of happiness? The sound? The smell? The taste?' Not so easy to answer all of those, but the smell of happiness I knew at once: woodsmoke. My spirits lift automatically whenever I encounter it, which isn't often, air pollution rules being as they ( Read more... )

Still in point form because, well, see #1 ( Read more... )

Morning: Woke from a dream about going to Shoujocon, or some Shoujocon, set long ago and far away in my brother's old bedroom in the family house. A lot of making last-minute hotel reservations while someone insisted on trying to upload their dancing and singing Sailor Moon .gif on my technology-challenged computer (possibly the one I had in 1987 ( Read more... )

1. Severed tooth was essence of no big deal. Mid-afternoon I was thinking 'This is a doddle, maybe I'll go hang out with some babies.' Then it started to hurt, but half a tylenol-3 (= two over the counter tablets, a dose I regularly take anyway) put it to sleep again. Great strides in the science of tooth extraction since 2003, of which all I ( Read more... )

A winter coat, to start with. Was looking what prices Walmart had on machines and wandered by accident into Winners, as one does. Came out with cheapish plastic/ vinyl/ something jacket, figuring oh it will do now that my best beloved black cloth coat is ten years old and fraying badly. It more than does. It's waterproof. It's warm. The silly ( Read more... )

I really shouldn't have started reading Snuff. I should have saved it for after Thursday's tooth extraction, when it would have distracted me from the discomfort as efficiently as Handel's Messiah did that Irishman at the first performance. He had a toothache as well.

Oh well. I shall just have to reread Thud for my tooth.