Pot
Survived Helsinki. Dadslice was pampering me and threw a bit of monnehs at me. This means I omitted food and headed straight for Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, which is, uh, the biggest bookstore in Finland, basically. It's the size of a department store. And lo, Rumi was found. Um. Yes. Not that I am predictable or anything.
The scariest thing happened when I was about to leave, though. The maternal was late, as usual, looking for some lipliner pen she'd lost or something like that. And I'd been standing outside for about ten minutes or so and got cold and fidgy, and then realised I'd forgotten to pack painkillers. As the folks didn't seem to be showing up any time soon, I went back up AND THE FUCKING COOKER WAS ON. :O I'd left some cauliflower cheese on the cooker and I noticed it was fucking boiling:O Apparently when I'd nipped into my tiny cooking alcove thingy to give Noki some food and water just before I left, I'd somehow managed to nudge one of the knobs on the cooker and it switched itself on. Jesus fuck. So if I hadn't come back for the painkillers, the whole place might have burnt down and/or at least Noki might have suffocated to death from noxious smoke. :O Bloody hell. So I see the maternal's vanity combined with my fidginess and chronic pain seems to have saved me and Noki from a much worse fate. Small mercies, eh?
But bloody hell. This probably tells you how small the cooking alcove is. I can barely turn around in it and keep knocking things off the surfaces all the time. Eep.
As for the Rumi books I got, Akateeminen had a sale! And thus I got Love's Ripening: Rumi on the Heart's Journey and Say Nothing (complete with facing Persian text!) and Love is a Stranger. Not that I am obsessed or anything. Um, they were also all the Rumi books the place had in stock that I didn't already own. .__. He rocks, damn it! Although I do wish the translators would stop going OMG HE WAS NOT GAY FOR SHAMS OMG YOU ARE MISREADING IT, because I highly doubt Rumi would've cared one whit for those kinds of arguments. It's kind of hypocritical of the translators to argue about the colour of the signpost (is it red? Why does this guy say it's 'ochre'? Why does she say it's 'scarlet'?) or the typeface used or the dialect the place name is written in, when it's the direction the signpost is pointing to that matters. It's especially hypocritical when we're talking about a writer whose appeal comes from universality and whose message is about love without boundaries or limiting definitions. He used erotic and homoromantic and heteroromantic and omg-I-love-the-whole-cosmos metaphors, guys, and he used stories of safe sex with donkeys as metaphors of hanging out with God. And that's why his poetry works. Don't go denying the richness of it; it's exactly why this stuff resonates with people eight hundred years later. Denying someone's interpretation of the symbolism as valid, even though the end result of the interpretation is grokking endless love (which is what Rumi was trying to make people see in the first place), is... beside the point.
Anyway. So tirede. My legs are dead. Think I'll flumph for a bit. *flop*
The scariest thing happened when I was about to leave, though. The maternal was late, as usual, looking for some lipliner pen she'd lost or something like that. And I'd been standing outside for about ten minutes or so and got cold and fidgy, and then realised I'd forgotten to pack painkillers. As the folks didn't seem to be showing up any time soon, I went back up AND THE FUCKING COOKER WAS ON. :O I'd left some cauliflower cheese on the cooker and I noticed it was fucking boiling:O Apparently when I'd nipped into my tiny cooking alcove thingy to give Noki some food and water just before I left, I'd somehow managed to nudge one of the knobs on the cooker and it switched itself on. Jesus fuck. So if I hadn't come back for the painkillers, the whole place might have burnt down and/or at least Noki might have suffocated to death from noxious smoke. :O Bloody hell. So I see the maternal's vanity combined with my fidginess and chronic pain seems to have saved me and Noki from a much worse fate. Small mercies, eh?
But bloody hell. This probably tells you how small the cooking alcove is. I can barely turn around in it and keep knocking things off the surfaces all the time. Eep.
As for the Rumi books I got, Akateeminen had a sale! And thus I got Love's Ripening: Rumi on the Heart's Journey and Say Nothing (complete with facing Persian text!) and Love is a Stranger. Not that I am obsessed or anything. Um, they were also all the Rumi books the place had in stock that I didn't already own. .__. He rocks, damn it! Although I do wish the translators would stop going OMG HE WAS NOT GAY FOR SHAMS OMG YOU ARE MISREADING IT, because I highly doubt Rumi would've cared one whit for those kinds of arguments. It's kind of hypocritical of the translators to argue about the colour of the signpost (is it red? Why does this guy say it's 'ochre'? Why does she say it's 'scarlet'?) or the typeface used or the dialect the place name is written in, when it's the direction the signpost is pointing to that matters. It's especially hypocritical when we're talking about a writer whose appeal comes from universality and whose message is about love without boundaries or limiting definitions. He used erotic and homoromantic and heteroromantic and omg-I-love-the-whole-cosmos metaphors, guys, and he used stories of safe sex with donkeys as metaphors of hanging out with God. And that's why his poetry works. Don't go denying the richness of it; it's exactly why this stuff resonates with people eight hundred years later. Denying someone's interpretation of the symbolism as valid, even though the end result of the interpretation is grokking endless love (which is what Rumi was trying to make people see in the first place), is... beside the point.
Anyway. So tirede. My legs are dead. Think I'll flumph for a bit. *flop*