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Thanks to a cascade of deadlines, I got a-Pei to teach me some useful Chinese words for “super busy”, 瞎忙 (blind busy) and 忙到晕头转向, (along the lines of “so busy my head is spinning). Sadly they don’t have the Japanese 忙殺 (murdered by busy-ness).
I’ve been trying to catch up on DW comments, but I think there are some older posts I meant to comment on that have vanished into the ether… oh well.
Thinking of sending my New Year’s postcards out soon. If I’ve sent you a card before and your address/etc. has changed (or you’d rather not get one), please let me know; likewise, if I haven’t sent you a card before but you’d like one, please send me an address and preferred name!
A couple of little things that tickled me. There is/was a Japanese law officially called the Omnibus Decentralization Act; it just means “decentralizing a bunch of things,” but it sounds like privatizing the bus system.
Also, a small joke that requires a lot of explanation. Most of the students at the nighttime junior high school nearby are middle-aged to elderly ladies of Korean background, quite a few native Korean speakers who are also fluent (if not necessarily fully literate) in Japanese. The English teacher at the nighttime junior high was, God knows why, teaching them the English Zodiac words; when he got to “Gemini” and its phonetic pronunciation, one or two of the ladies cracked up, and eventually managed to explain to him why it was funny. In Korean the word for “uninteresting” is 재미 없어 chaemi-opso, where the “opso” part is the “un” negative. “chaemi” sounds like the first half of “Gemini” in English, and if you translate “opso” into Japanese, you get ない nai, which sounds like the second half. So for a bilingual speaker of Korean and Japanese, “Gemini” sounds like “boring”… I was tickled by the pun, and also by the code-switching skills required to make it in the first place; the ladies may not have their junior high school diplomas but they know a lot more than many.
My Yuletide fic is finished and posted, phew; I have a couple of treats in mind which I really want to write, except I’m not sure I can actually pull them off at the length they want to be in the time remaining. Ten days should be enough to write 10 to 15K, right? oh dear.
Photos: An assortment from the last month, mostly autumn leaves, a two-colored morning-glory (brunch-glory?), and a cat at night.
Be safe and well.
I’ve been trying to catch up on DW comments, but I think there are some older posts I meant to comment on that have vanished into the ether… oh well.
Thinking of sending my New Year’s postcards out soon. If I’ve sent you a card before and your address/etc. has changed (or you’d rather not get one), please let me know; likewise, if I haven’t sent you a card before but you’d like one, please send me an address and preferred name!
A couple of little things that tickled me. There is/was a Japanese law officially called the Omnibus Decentralization Act; it just means “decentralizing a bunch of things,” but it sounds like privatizing the bus system.
Also, a small joke that requires a lot of explanation. Most of the students at the nighttime junior high school nearby are middle-aged to elderly ladies of Korean background, quite a few native Korean speakers who are also fluent (if not necessarily fully literate) in Japanese. The English teacher at the nighttime junior high was, God knows why, teaching them the English Zodiac words; when he got to “Gemini” and its phonetic pronunciation, one or two of the ladies cracked up, and eventually managed to explain to him why it was funny. In Korean the word for “uninteresting” is 재미 없어 chaemi-opso, where the “opso” part is the “un” negative. “chaemi” sounds like the first half of “Gemini” in English, and if you translate “opso” into Japanese, you get ない nai, which sounds like the second half. So for a bilingual speaker of Korean and Japanese, “Gemini” sounds like “boring”… I was tickled by the pun, and also by the code-switching skills required to make it in the first place; the ladies may not have their junior high school diplomas but they know a lot more than many.
My Yuletide fic is finished and posted, phew; I have a couple of treats in mind which I really want to write, except I’m not sure I can actually pull them off at the length they want to be in the time remaining. Ten days should be enough to write 10 to 15K, right? oh dear.
Photos: An assortment from the last month, mostly autumn leaves, a two-colored morning-glory (brunch-glory?), and a cat at night.
Be safe and well.
