nnozomi | Entries tagged with orchestra

Once again I went to get a corona shot with a headache and now I have a worse one, ugh ugh ugh. Not actually as bad as it could be, but still, I can do without this unholy alliance between the vaccine and the fucked-up back of my neck, sigh.
So I am distracting myself with a bunch of little tiny things here.

Writing thoughts: I have realized that in original stuff, at least (not sure about fic but maybe that too), I specialize in people NOT having relationship talks of any kind, just kind of figuring out unspokenly what’s happening between them and leaning into it (the more successful the relationship, the more so). Not sure a) if this is realistic or b) what it says about my tastes.

There’s a Chinese song I like a lot called 我怀念的; I’ve listened to it in various versions, Stefanie Sun’s original as well as covers by JJ Lin, Li Hao, and Liu Chang (responsible for introducing me to it in the first place, bless him), and there’s one line that I heard every time as “And baby, [something something].” It’s not at all unusual for c-pop songs to throw in bits of English in their lyrics, especially something along the lines of “love,” “beautiful,” etc. (although see also the Cantonese romp 一格格, which randomly drops the English words “cream cheese” in), so I took this for granted until I finally looked the lyrics for that line up: “狼狈比失去难受,” lángbèi bǐ shīqù nánshòu… Well, now I know.

Other Chinese stuff: a pleasing phrase acquired from fic and presumably a back-translation from English, 打不过就加入, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em. New farmboy words: 拖沓, dilly-dallying, laggard; 孽缘, an ill-fated relationship; 攀比, the urge to compete regardless of actual reality; 梅开二度, pulling off a success twice in a row.

The little

senzenwomen community I run (pocket biographies of women in Japan active between 1868 and 1945) reached its one-year mark a little while back, and now has about fifty subscribers which seems like quite a lot given the circumstances; I am learning new things every week and still enjoying working on it, although man, I’m still only up to women born around 1870, with HUNDREDS left to go.

I haven’t signed up for Yuletide yet but I am planning on it. I nominated a bunch of obscure book fandoms and am wondering whether to request ONLY those and see what the hell happens or throw in a few other things as well; we’ll see what happens.

I got through my first orchestra concert on the bassoon—not unscathed, I made one really stupid mistake where it showed, where I’d practiced a lot, because I was so nervous, but otherwise more or less not disgracing myself. (I did realize that I was less tense than I might have been because I’d practiced the music so much more than I ever did when playing the cello…). Dumb joke for the day, reminding myself to look up something in the score when I got home, “must put Liszt on the list.” Really the best thing about the bassoon is the low notes, C and B and Bb below the staff—a huge column of vibrating air which starts in your mouth and feels thrilling.

Just a couple of photos: Jiji-chan out for a stroll, accompanied by her reflection in a puddle, and my blended family of morning-glories, which have completely taken over the veranda.

Be safe and well.

So A-Pei and I were talking about chocolate chip cookies, and I had cause to ask her for the Chinese word for “pecan.” She said 胡桃, which horrified me, since in Japanese that means “walnut.” Come to find out that (I think) in Taiwan 胡桃 is pecan and 核桃 is walnut, while on the mainland 胡桃 is walnut and 山核桃 is pecan…give me strength! [Then again, as long as neither of them ends up in my chocolate chip cookies I’m okay—cookies should be warm and melty and goopy, not crunchy.]

Reading Naomi Mitchison’s short autobiography You May Well Ask, which is all kinds of entertaining: a couple of things about her early writing that I found very relatable.
“The Conquered, my first book, came out at white heat and, what is more, I wrote all the best bits, the juicy bits, first, the bits that were most exciting and satisfying to write, like the very end. Then I filled in the rest, but I enjoyed that too.”
“I got a great many letters about The Conquered. This is something writers need, and a phone call isn’t the same; you can’t pick it up and look at it again years later, when you are exhausted and unhappy.”
Also, I know where I’ve heard of that book before! “She had time to…wonder what she would do if They said nothing could be done, her hand must come off, and produced block and chopper, and hacked—like Meromic in The Conquered--with dunking in hot tar to follow.” It delights me that Nicola Marlow has read Naomi Mitchison. [For the non-Forest readers, nobody chops Nicola’s hand off, she gets it stitched by the one character of color in the whole series, a cricket-loving Pakistani doctor, and recovers sufficiently to win a cricket match a few weeks later.]

Listening, not for the first time, to an old mixtape [now a mixCD] of my father the classical musician’s favorite pop songs. “Once upon a time I drank a little wine, was as happy as could be. Now I’m just like a cat on a hot tin roof, baby what do you think you’re doing to me,” to which my mind immediately appended “—Lan Wangji, probably.”
Also, on the Brazilian side, I don’t think I’ve posted Se todos fossem iguais a você before—another of my very favorite Jobim songs, very singable and very loving, with the irresistible Portuguese plural of iguais for igual. (Link goes straight to the song, but just listen to the whole album, it’s about the best full album ever recorded in any genre).

I’ve read Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life so many times I can recite good chunks of it from memory, and even so—and reading it in Chinese yet!—the climactic scene still grabs me so hard I missed my stop on the train. Comical and thrilling and quietly numinous and upsetting, all at once.
The Chinese translation is terrible, even I can tell, flat and inconsistent and inaccurate, but you take what you can get. ”And he needs us like he needs two left legs,” Bernard remarked, jerking around in the hammock as he tried to eat a jelly comes out as “我们对他来说就像左膀右臂。“伯纳德从吊床上一跃而起，去拿冰淇淋, that is (I think) “And according to him we’re the staff he depends on,” Bernard said, sitting up in the hammock and going to get an ice cream.” [The ice cream, at least, is a source text difference.] And that’s just one thing. Between the “he needs us like…” and the stocks and shares and the name, it suddenly occurs to me that Bernard might be Jewish. Neat.. When Chrestomanci tells Gwendolen “Stay here and learn how to do it [use magic] properly,” it comes out as 留在这里学学怎么做人吧, stay here and learn to behave properly. I like 做人 as a phrase, though—be a mensch. Translation faults aside, I will say it cracked me up that when Cat yanks the silver handcuffs off, Chrestomanci’s “Ow!” comes out as 哎哟！.

Still rehearsing the Brahms violin concerto in orchestra—I love this piece so much, especially but not uniquely the first movement. Last week was our first time with the solo violinist.

interpersonal grumbling

I was low-key infuriated the whole time for reasons unrelated to the music—I’m sitting inside first stand this time around, meaning that the person on my left is the first chair = leading the cello section. At this rehearsal a younger guy was asked to substitute for the usual first chair, and IN SPITE OF not being totally sure of the music he didn’t refuse when he should have done, so I spent the whole rehearsal mentally snarling that’s a tricky entrance, if you don’t come in properly with confidence no one else can either! or pizzicato on the OFF-BEAT wtf is your PROBLEM and so on, on account of if he didn’t get it right, I had to be the one responsible for doing so. Which was not ideal at the first soloist rehearsal, when it really matters to be able to follow the conductor and get it right.

That aside, it was a wonderful experience anyway. The soloist (a professional violinist) was a smallish, mild-mannered, fortyish guy from Hiroshima with a big wide lush tone, very secure. Going through the concerto without stopping felt like setting off on a life-or-death adventure, exciting, knife-edge, important, heartwrenching. The best thing about rehearsing a piece for six months is that you get to know not just the parts you hear in concert or on a recording but also all kinds of little things in your own part and others—there’s a place in the violas near the end of the first movement (around 23:27 in this recording), for instance, just a little three-note motif under the solo line that absolutely moves me to tears every time.

Zhu Yilong doing his usual thing, behaving like one of his own frequently whumped characters (I wish somebody would explain to him that putting his health at risk also means putting his career/his work at risk, then he might listen?) and still somehow managing to look absurdly beautiful.

Photos: The beauty salon cat having a nice outdoor bath in the sun, another cat glaring at me, geometric creepers (?), a village lane in the middle of the city, a rose, a camellia (either tsubaki or sazanka but I can’t tell the two apart to save my life).

Be safe and well.

· I’ve been in end-of-fiscal-year mode all month, ie not “when is my next deadline” but “how many deadlines do I have today,” meaning I don’t think I’ve commented anywhere on DW to speak of, apart from daily Chinese study; very sorry to be so unsocial, I have been reading my f-list faithfully and have a list as long as my arm of posts to comment on once things settle down. Starting by posting here instead, which does not seem really fair, but I don’t want to deal with machine tools, 1960s experimental films, 1940s laws on education, or the anthropology of baby teeth any more today. Sometime next week I will sit down and comment all over the place.

·A little bit of 自画自赞, very sorry again: at my Saturday volunteer gig I was scheduled to work with Umi, an eighth-grader I hadn’t tutored before. She was talking to Ai (a classmate of hers who has been around since she was a cheeky ten-year-old), saying something like “but she’s foreign, I’m gonna be too embarrassed, I’m too shy.” “No worries!” Ai said cheerfully. “She’s funny and she’s really nice.” So that gave me something to live up to, but it was good to hear.

·Listening to bits of Guardian as background Chinese while I work, and episode 21 is no good because I have to stop and watch the 黑袍大人好！scene every time. Shen Wei’s face, and Zhao Yunlan cracking up in spite of himself, and Shen Wei’s straight back as he apologizes to Chu Shuzhi, and Chu Shuzhi’s “No matter what, I support you unconditionally”—the way the mood flips around to this steadfast devotion from the silliness of the greeting, emphasizing both—and Zhao Yunlan defusing the intensity of the moment, and the way the corner of Shen Wei’s mouth tightens because he can’t quite not smile.

·Something I was looking up for work: the anthropologist Mary Douglas, on purity and taboo in 1966: “I am personally rather tolerant of disorder.”

·Something I was looking up for writing purposes (I wanted grammatical moods for magic, so far I have alethic and deontic), found on Wikipedia: “While not a mood in English, expressions like like hell it is or the fuck you are are imprecative retorts. These consist of an expletive + a personal pronoun subject + an auxiliary verb.”

·Listening to Porgy and Bess a lot, not linking because I can’t find a version I like unreservedly, but it’s so damn good. (Years ago I heard a wonderfully vicious rendition of the “I hates your guts!” scene on YouTube, but I can’t find it now; they all take it too fast.) Along with the resonant, poignant, gorgeous emotion of “Bess, you is my woman now,” the music shows you Bess unable to resist Sportin’ Life, the flowing Impressionist delight of all his lines to her. And so much else, all the choral stuff in half a dozen different idioms.

·Back to orchestra today for the first time in half a year; it’s complicated, I feel I’ve failed there in a lot of ways, both musically and interpersonally (is that a word?), but I still enjoy being part of the ensemble in musical terms, plus there are a few people I like and trust, and quite a number who said “hey, welcome back.” This is cello playing; separately, I’m still tooting away on the bassoon every day and making disgracefully slow progress, but I'm not bored with it yet. Maybe in another six months or a year I will have reached the point where I can find a beginner-level orchestra that wants a bassoonist.

·Comforting and amusing myself by reading Miura Shion’s latest essay collection; she’s always funny and relatable (“I’ve started buying e-books because otherwise I’ll have to give my apartment over to the manga volumes and take a sleeping bag out onto the veranda”; “The problem with potted plants is that it’s inconvenient when I don’t know their names. I end up saying ‘hey you over there, the second from the right, do you need more fertilizer or what?’”).

·Photos, today’s 梅通信 in five variations on plum blossoms, plus a decorative bridge railing.

Be safe and well.

・An interesting day last week for the orchestra second generation. I’ve known Y-ko, the daughter of my fellow cellist T, since she was a gawky amiable four-year-old; this week she got accepted (very early!) to art school and I’m delighted. (Maybe she’ll end up a famous mangaka? She is a Yuri on Ice fangirl among other things, and I’m still hoping to get her into Guardian one day.) At the other end of the kid range, our player-conductor H brought his two-year-old Yu-chan up to the podium with him during rehearsal. Yu-chan waved a pen around (“Which conductor should we follow?” from R in the trombones, very drily), hung onto his dad’s leg, walked in circles, rattled the fire extinguisher on the wall (everyone in the front row stops playing: “Yu-chan, no!”), and sat down on the podium edge to gaze earnestly at M the concertmaster (I see your point, kiddo, he’s a fine violinist with beautiful eyes). Possibly not conducive to concentration during rehearsal, but very entertaining.

・Oh dear, I suspect part of my Yuletide requests this year will fall under “cdrama weird antagonistic side characters edition.” I mean...nobody actually said I can’t (separately) request both Huo Daofu from LTR and Wang Shi’an from The Rebel...? (I’m not really under the impression that anyone is likely to write Wang Shi’an fic, but I remain so fascinated by him that I might as well go ahead and make the gesture.)

・Some very kind person went through and left kudos on, I think, every single one of my Guardian fics, even my poor unregarded Lin Jing one, which was a very nice boost. I keep meaning to be better about kudos and commenting, oh dear.

・Rereading Jane Langton’s The Astonishing Stereoscope, which has to be one of the most, well, astonishing children’s books about religion ever written. It’s funny (“’The whole thing is just chemistry,’ [Aunt Alex] mumbled to herself, running her finger down the recipe. ‘Simply a matter of applying heat and cold to various compounds to achieve a change of state. Now what on earth does “cream the butter” mean? I’d better look it up. I hope it’s in this dictionary of Pictish and Proto-Saxon.’”) and painful (Eddy’s and Eleanor’s guilt is so, so well described), and it uses the most straightforward of vocabulary and phrasing to evoke the numinous with incredible vividness, without ever pinning itself down to any one faith. “This party of four is hereby declared free citizens of day and night, and of the top and the bottom of the infinite firmament, and it shall therefore be accorded all the rights and privileges belonging thereunto.”

・laireshi reminded me that the Chopin Competition is happening now, and so I’ve been listening to Chopin all week. I don’t have a very good ear for distinguishing between pianists, just occasional moments of “wait, no, why would you pick that phrasing” or “ooh that’s nice, that’s just how I like it,” but it’s an education. They also interviewed a previous winner, my pianist-crush Seong-Jin Cho, who just seems like a very low-key, likable, thoughtful guy as well as a stunning musician. I liked this idea of interpretation, with regard to writing etc. as well:
E.B.: What is your attitude to Chopin’s music today? Has it changed in the six years since the Chopin Competition?
S.J.C.: I think, I haven’t tried to change my interpretation, but with interpreting music it is like with a face: you don’t recognise that you’re getting older, but other people tell you, that ‘Oh, you’re changing’. I didn’t intend to get old, but it is what it is... It is the same with an interpretation.
And (reposted from elsewhere because it still makes me laugh), this Z1L-esque earnest missing the point:
E.B.: If you could advise or wish something for the young pianists who are participating in this Chopin Competition, what would you say to them?
S.J.C.: I’m still a young pianist, I could participate again. I don’t have any such advice for my colleagues, but Warsaw in October was colder than I expected and I was a little dismayed at the beginning. So it may be a good idea to take many warm clothes for such cold weather.

[Is this entry annoying to read in terms of length, by the way? Let me know if I should put in a cut somewhere.]

Photos: ( Green )

Be safe and well.

Daily life: The Internet provided a Greek cabbage-and-rice dish as a way to use up excess cabbage; I smushed together two different recipes and cheated by cooking the rice in the rice cooker instead of the pan, but it turned out both simple and delicious.

Music: I'm still a little bit high from getting to conduct at orchestra rehearsal today, for the first time since pre-corona days. I really love it, and in order to get the chance I basically had to say repeatedly "I want to do this, you should let me do this" and then make sure I could actually put my money where my mouth is, none of which was easy. I am by no means expert but I'm good at reading a score and translating that into directions in rehearsal, and when it goes well it's exhilarating.

Books: More online than in book form, although the latter also exists, but I've been revisiting Nagomuru City (https://imgmap.chirijin.com/), which is basically a super-detailed, professional-quality map of a city that doesn't exist. This guy Imaizumi Takayuki started inventing this map when he was ten years old and drawing freehand; now he does it in beautiful Illustrator images, complete with neighborhood names, railway and bus lines, discussions on the possible history/geology/urban planning of the city as suggested by the map (luzula, I wish it were in a language you could read because I think you'd enjoy it) and so on. It makes me long for the required skills and background knowledge to make a whole mapped city of my own.

Chinese: The Grammar Wiki Anki deck is so great, I'm enjoying it a lot. (I need more active vs. passive practice too, but it's a start.) Also I've been using it for tone practice; my memory works best for text, so I'm basically memorizing the pinyin as it appears card by card. Even if I can't hear or pronounce the damn things properly, I can at least have a clue what they're supposed to be. (I still kind of wonder how tonal languages work as song lyrics, since obviously they do.)

Writing: I have an outline-after-the-fact and a list of what to change/expand on/emphasize where in it, which is a big step forward. I feel like there's one unanswered issue which is both thematic and related to plot nitty-gritty, but let's do this one thing at a time. I'm tempted to let off steam along the way with bits of fanfic, we'll see.

Photos: ( The flowers that bloom in the spring )

Be safe and well.

because the actual name of the chocolate-company-sponsored Japanese event celebrated today sounds absurd anywhere else.
Daily life: I've been trying to do situps a couple times a day, counting them off in Chinese for 一石二鳥; this has the added benefit of making me feel like Wu Xie doing pushups (only without the fasting and fainting parts). In related non-fasting news, a little shop selling tasty "American cookies" has opened within walking distance, requiring some self-control.

Music: We had a full orchestra rehearsal today for the first time in over a year (with precautions according to the protocol the professionals have come up with). Knock wood we'll be able to continue for a while, who knows. It was tiring but comforting, and while I think Tchaikovsky 2 is a lot more repetitive than it needs to be, the development section in the last movement is a delight, positively 20th-century.

Books: I have a large backlog of quotable Mass-Observation entries (British diaries during and just after WWII); have a few amusing ones. ( Faithfully! )
Chinese: I've been downloading some Anki stuff thanks to helpful advice from tinny and falkner; I found an Anki deck made from sentences on the Chinese Grammar Wiki! Yessss. I'm still very tentative about Anki in general, but it's a good resource.

Writing: A lot of thinking about revisions based on advice from kind and helpful beta readers; I don't think I've had anyone do a close reading of anything I wrote since grad school (this is where I confess shamefacedly that my fanfic gets posted unbetaed), and it's a very illuminating process. Also I can kind of see the themes and the plot structure as they should be sort of hovering at the edge of my vision, but I am not smart enough to pull them together. You know those dreams where you're reading this fabulously satisfying novel, but you can't remember it when you wake up...?

Photos: ( They're not really called basketball fruits )

Be safe and well.

real life I went to my first orchestra practice in...eight months? Lots of social-distance protocols, based on the professional orchestras. It was good to be back playing properly and to see people--K, my unofficial big sister, M&A the violinist couple I've had a crush on forever, and so on--but it felt extremely unreal, like one of those very realistic dreams where all the details are just a little off. I feel as if a lot of my internal reaction buttons have been reset in very weird ways this year.

writing Revising is such a pain oh my God. I changed one vaguely plot-related thing, and I think it's actually more interesting and makes more sense this way, but now I have two scenes to rewrite, and this was supposed to be one of the easier changes. Brain not cooperating.

fannish Lost Tomb thing: It seems to have become a widespread view by now, but man, I love Liu Sang so much, tough and fragile and messed-up and aggressively competent; as I said at some point before he has his own agenda and he owns it, whether it’s petty obfuscation or incredibly selfless courage. Nice work Liu Chang (the actor) for making all that complexity come across with comparatively few lines and little screen time; no wonder he seems to be in love with Zhu Yilong, master of the art. (His character song has also ended up as one of the few songs on my Chinese songs playlist not featuring ZYL himself, an honor extended previously only to Bai Yu…).
(I wonder what it says about me that my tendency in encountering new canons lately—or at least Chinese drama canons—is (apart from ZYL stuff) to fall for the somewhat morally ambiguous but basically good secondary characters who survive but aren’t necessarily thrilled about it. Lin Jing, Jiang Cheng, Liu Sang…).

all of the above So I wrote a while back about translating a paper on translations of the word "cultivation" in educational philosophy? Well, via Kaibara Ekken, one section actually gets into qi and dantian and straight-up cultivation to immortality (in a footnote, complete with instructions: meditation, breathing, diet, sex, and good deeds), just as in xianxia. I am seriously tickled that having read a ridiculous amount of Untamed/MDZS fic is leaving me better equipped to do my job.
(The topic also gave me a sudden inspiration for much later on in my original fiction thing, which has nothing to do with xianxia and very little with China, but it fits into various threads so neatly that I’m not sure I’m going to be able to resist.)

Be safe and well.

So even though almost all my fannish thoughts and activities are in book fandoms (plus the occasional manga), I have somehow become obsessed with this Chinese live-action urban fantasy drama.

( Why Guardian gets to me, and other ramblings )

( Notes on episodes 1-10 )

Thoughts on the 4th symphony and related issues:

1. This is silly almost to the point of blasphemy, but it cracks me up: there's a line of melody in the first movement, woodwinds and later violins, that has been reminding me of something else for a while. "Not classical..." "it has lyrics..." I thought vaguely, and then one day on the train it came to me. "Celia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence, baby..." So now I grin to myself every time we rehearse that point, and have now privately christened it the Cecilia Symphony, which is only appropriate homage to the patron saint.

2. Listening to the 2nd symphony on the radio the other day was a strange experience; they're both wonderful, but it's the gap between comedy (in the classical sense) and tragedy. I kept thinking, oh, right, Brahms does have happy endings sometimes, it's not all leading to the stalwart recognition of despair...

3. I'm still waiting to hear a rendition of the flute solo as good as the one I heard at sixteen, although our flutist is not bad. It needs to be completely three-dimensional, not a melody line, a whole melody plane...

4. The third movement, unlike the others, is more satisfying to listen to than to play. Not sure why this is; maybe because the cello line is comparatively simple and accompaniment-esque compared to the others; the violins get most of the excitement. I am dissatisfied with the way our first violins (of whom I'm normally a big fan, what with one thing and another) are handling the sweet second theme; not singing enough.

5. The second movement doesn't give me quite the same sense of the numinous as the second movement of the second symphony does, but it is still utterly amazing in the emotional range it covers, the polyphony, the variety.

I think that'll do for now. Oh dear.

Been listening to our last orchestra concert and the one before that (inadvertent 2-CD set, long story). I think honestly we're pretty good, for an amateur group with three hours' rehearsal time a week. There are occasional slips in the winds, but when they're good they're good, and the strings have it better with several of us on each part, and just enough good players scattered through the parts that the weaker sisters, like me, have something to hold on to.
"Like me" is partly true and partly disingenuous, I guess. We don't have a standout cellist, but T and S are very solid, and Y, K, and Little K average out to around as good as me--not spectacular, but hanging in. (We just started the new music last week, and I was shamefully delighted when T, our first chair, said to me "N, come and sit next to me, you're the best sightreader by a country mile" or words to that effect in Japanese. Trouble is, I sightread well but don't move on much from there...) Anyway, so our cello section is not brilliant but solid, and T's good-natured, slightly goofy energy seems to motivate all of us.
The violas are damn good (no viola jokes here), second violins and basses adequate, and the first violins have M...the concertmaster and human tuning fork on whom I have a longstanding hopeless crush...his wife A, cute as a button and also an excellent violinist, and the other K, a pianist at heart but still a good concertmistress. So on their good days they kick ass.
As for the winds, there's N the oboist (another longstanding hopeless crush, I've always had a weakness for oboe players), there was Iz the horn player except he's gotten divorced and moved away (but his solo in the Stravinsky "Kiss of a Fairy," you should've heard), there's his ex-wife playing trumpet, there's K the concertmistress' ex-husband on trombone and his current girlfriend KM on clarinet...sorry, I couldn't resist the soap-opera-yness of it all but it's a fact. And other good players, all in all.
The orchestra is honestly one of my biggest reasons for not wanting to move anywhere else, even though I would have a much better chance of finding the kind of job I want in Tokyo. I mean, you can't throw a stone in Tokyo without hitting an amateur orchestra, but it wouldn't be the same people.

Last week was hanami with the orchestra--sitting under a blossoming cherry tree in a local park, theoretically admiring the flowers, in practice eating and drinking and chattering. Even with a group of people I'm relatively at ease with, like the orchestra folks, it's hard for me to spend a long stretch of time in a large group--I never know what to say, who to talk with, how to move around among clusters of people, what I should be doing or saying. So as often before, I solved the problem by assigning myself childcare duty. T, another cellist, was the organizer of the party, and his wife Y was also there with their two kids, Yuka and Nao.
Yuka just started third grade; she's tall for her age and skinny, with a wicked grin and a habit of perpetual motion, good at drawing. Nao, a year and half younger, is on his way into second grade; he's more compact than his sister and much quieter, on the autism spectrum. I think his parents deal with this as well as any family could. They don't (as many families in Japan still do) try to ignore it--"How dare you say my kid's autistic? He's just very individual! He's perfectly normal!" This attitude, among other problems, means the kid doesn't get the help he or she needs. Nor do they make a big family tragedy out of it--"Oh how awful this is, it's shameful, it's terrible, we'll never have a normal life again." T and Y just say, well, Nao is autistic and that's part of how he is, we'll get him the special care he needs and in the meantime have a happy, ordinary family life. And this seems to be getting the best results it could--Nao is obviously a smart kid, very affectionate with his family and communicating with them, even willing to let an outsider like me cuddle him occasionally. I see him probably once every couple of months, and at first he's always standoffish, but after a while he'll hold out a hand for me to take.
I know things aren't as easy as T and Y often make them look--I've heard T talking with an older woman who also plays cello with us, who has a daughter in her twenties with agoraphobia. "We worry about when Nao's grown up, when we're getting older, if he needs taking care of and we can't do it. If we might end up in a family suicide..." Me, with my love for happy endings, I like to think, well, Nao's gotten so much better even since he was three or four, and he's bright and he's not completely uncommunicative, he'll be okay, won't he? Nobody knows, of course. As the fond outsider, I like seeing the love in their family, and want to think it will add up to love and stability in the future.

I'm too tired and frazzled to write anything of real moment, as it were, so thought I'd quickly record two small things from the last couple of days which made me smile.
This week's orchestra rehearsal was a full weekend, out at a freezing-bloody-cold lodge in the middle of the Banshu Plain, struggling mightily with Mahler and his quintuplets and other musical aggravations, but lightened by good company and good playing. One orchestra couple, bass and violin, had brought their son--maybe two years old? I'm not good with kids' ages, but just about old enough to toddle around independently, though not speaking much. I amused myself with him, finding a mirror in the lobby and showing him his own face in it; he sat plop on my knees in front of the mirror and considered himself thoughtfully, letting me rest my chin on his head.
Today at school I looked into the seniors' classroom in passing: they were working on the yearbook, cutting out and arranging photographs. At opposite ends of the classroom sat R--a tall, very handsome soccer player bound for Korea, alternately brusque and sweet--and B, the bumbling Baptist I've mentioned here before. Both were busy with the photos, both were wearing earphones, both were singing Korean pop songs under their breath in an inadvertent tenor-and-bass duet. I was charmed.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Michel Petrucciani