nnozomi

・I’ve actually been doing some Japanese reading for a change: finished a non-fiction book of essays about the city where I live, very relatable in their delight in city walking and wistfulness about never quite belonging to any given city or neighborhood, and wrote the author a fan email (I don’t know him, but one of his colleagues helped examine me for my MA back when). Now reading a more academic book about Chinese bildungsroman (what’s the plural of that word anyway) written by women, introducing me among others to Chen Hengzhe (Sophia Chen) and her remarkable life. I’m only a couple of chapters in so will probably report more later. (It annoys me, in passing, that the book gives Japanese readings for all the Chinese names, perfectly useless for looking them up in Chinese or English. Otherwise I’m liking it, though.)

・My veranda plants are growing like gangbusters, the tomato plant is doing that thing where I look away for two minutes and it gains two inches. Not many actual fruits yet but it’s still early. The two pansies I picked up from a tray marked “Free, help yourself” in the laundromat are blooming again, yellow and purple, and even the strawberry plant has a couple of bright pink blossoms. Also this thing called eau de cologne mint? bergamot mint? which I thought was more minty than it is, please tell me what to do with it before it takes over my whole veranda?

・I took an (old) HSK4 practice test online and got about 85/100 allowing for writing; however, I think that says more that I’m good at test-taking than anything else. I guess it’s a start. Unrelatedly, watching one of Liu Chang’s livestreams and talking back to the screen thus:
LC: 我在吃什么？我在吃蓝莓。(What am I eating? [a question from a viewer] I’m eating lanmei.)
Me: lanmei???
LC: Blueberry!
Me: 谢谢你看我心里，畅弟！(thank you for reading my mind, hon!)
So now I know a new word.

・I don’t think I’ve been listening to much new lately, but here’s Makoto Ozone doing jazz things to Chopin. My father did it better, but he was pre-YouTube (and probably wouldn’t have cared for it anyway), and I do like Ozone’s work.

・My original thing has been horribly in arrears, mostly because of demotivation due to persistent very minor ill-health—not “I don’t feel well enough to work on it,” more “I’m discombobulated mentally and I don’t want to concentrate,” you know how it is. The health thing might be getting better, or not, but anyway today I said I would write 500 words and I did just that, let’s see if I can write it tomorrow too. I learned something about a particular folk religious belief that I didn’t know that might come in handy, anyway.

・Photos: Some variations on white and pink. A little victory of nature over artifice in the middle of the city. Train pantagraphs (I can never spell that word). A cat by a stream, in two lights. A bird under a bridge.