nnozomi

Daily life: Supermarket math: do I want to buy two sixths of a hakusai, or one fourth and one sixth? (It's kind of the opposite of spinach: it looks meek and small in the store, and then you chop it up and it takes over.) Also, which octopus has the most promising tentacles? (Nothing untoward: I want to make お酢の物, octopus, seaweed and cucumber with vinegar.)
Minor work struggle for the week: transcribing Khmer and Lao names from Japanese transliteration to English. If they were famous people it would be easy, but they're ordinary college kids, and I don't have the linguistic background to make educated guesses; so I've been hit-or-miss googling a lot and trawling baby name sites, which are mostly depressingly inauthentic. Figuring out "Sreyleak" was kind of a triumph, though.

Music: Tchaik Five, as we used to say, on the radio. I’ve performed this symphony twice (three times?), and I’m always glad to be rid of it after six months’ rehearsal—it’s not like Brahms or Schumann where I feel like I could play them for years without getting bored—but then it turns up after a while and I start thinking wistfully of playing it again. Can’t say it’s not fun. A few years back I saw the Tokyo University orchestra (as elite as non-conservatory student orchestras get) perform it; the second movement starts with a very Romantic, exposed, extended horn solo, and between movements I could see how tense the first horn player was, pushing up his glasses and putting a hand to his chest. Not surprisingly he bobbled the solo, and I felt very bad for him (it happens! especially to horn players!), and also curious to read (or write) the story that would give his stage fright context.

Books: Rereading Sage Walker’s The Man in the Tree, one of those rare books you pick off a bookstore shelf at random that turns out to be fantastic. Basically a murder mystery set on an asteroid/generation ship about to leave Earth; the writing is a weird combination of clunky (it can be very male-gazey, which is weird, as the author isn't a man) and graceful (a huge amount of scientific/technical information delivered so that even a reader as non-scientifically oriented as me wasn't confused or bored). More setting than character, but still characterized and plotted well enough that I really care about the people in it (including the minor ones, Nadia Tay for possibly obvious reasons, the virtual-football enthusiasts, the linguistics scholar who sells delicious samosas so he can collect bits of developing dialect from his customers). Quibble: no Japanese-speaking parent ever named their kid Masaka. Masaki or Masako, you bet, but masaka, like solma in Korean or nandao in Chinese, means "surely not!". I mean, maybe you would give it to the child of an unexpected pregnancy, but I hope most parents wouldn't be that unkind... . The author has only written one other novel that I know of, Whiteout, a very loosely related prequel; interestingly, that one is very much dystopian and this one very utopian (in setting rather than philosophy, anyway), and I wonder if she did that on purpose. Good stuff.

Chinese: Two very silly Chinese things. A-Pei taught me how to say Brussels sprouts, on account of we both happened to cook them on the same day: 抱子甘藍 (baoziganlan), which I ended up memorizing as “Wei Ying ^{子, sort of} embraces ^抱 his sweet ^甘 Lan ^藍.” I don’t think Brussels sprouts with sesame oil and salt would break any rules of Gusu Lan cuisine…?
Also, I just barely managed to speak Chinese while asleep and dreaming. In this dream I found Zhu Yilong helpfully vacuuming the carpet at a venue where he was about to perform (??), and tried to take the vacuum off his hands; his dog (???) came and played with me, and I said “可愛! 名字呢?” (how cute, what’s its name). What even is my brain.

Writing: All the notes from my kind beta readers are in, and I'm still glooming over revisions. Maybe I'll do what I did for my graduate thesis: write down all the major plot points/themes/character motivations on slips of paper and spread them around me on the floor until I figure out what shape they should connect in and where the holes in the pattern are.

Some nice soothing trees of various kinds, a building that deserves better, a bridge that wavered terrifyingly in the wind, and a cat that really did not appreciate being looked down on.