nnozomi

Thanks to osprey-archer’s reread, I’ve been rereading the Joan Aiken Dido books for the first time in years and years (bless openlibrary and its ilk), including some I never managed to read before at all, for one reason or another. I have to keep stopping or skimming now and then because the tension is SO MUCH, they’re thrillers really, but full of the most bizarre and wonderful (and horrific) flights of imagination. Captain Hughes breaking out of jail by designing the flying craft he's always been obsessed with, Dr. Talisman (whom I kept picturing as Wen Xiaoliu the whole time), the frightening witch antagonists drifting suddenly into wistful, genuinely poignant raptures about going home to the Caribbean, the Birthday League, Dido entranced by her scoundrel father's compositions...and I’ve still got like half a dozen books to go. In particular it occurs to me that Aiken makes Dido immensely brave, clever, funny, resourceful, and caring—heroic, as Captain Hughes says—without ever making the reader draw away from her as they would from a worse written Mary Sue-type.

If you have been blue lately, as which of us hasn’t, and could use a momentary burst of sheer elation, go listen to the ending of this Kapustin piano sonata—the timestamp should take you right there but really the whole thing is a lot of fun. Exhilarating.

I was infuriated and amused by a client comment on the math workbook I had to translate recently: the original question was about averages, “if you have five ミカン (mikan) of the following weights, what is their average weight?” or something along those lines. I translated mikan in the normal way as “tangerines,” and the client commented “The weights given would be too heavy for tangerines, so we should make this ‘oranges’ instead.” First, if they’re too heavy for tangerines they’re too heavy for mikan too! The words are synonyms! What did you want me to do, make it “clementines” like my dad used to call them? Second, who goes and LOOKS UP the average weight of a tangerine? (And where do you even look that up?)

Also vaguely on the same theme: for some reason the English textbook they use at the nighttime junior high, which I think is originally designed for sixth-graders, happened to have Boy A saying “I like math!” and Girl B saying “I don’t!” and I could not stop myself pointing out “you know, that’s not a very good stereotype,” before remembering that the half-dozen Korean-Japanese ladies who make up the class were undoubtedly familiar with sexism in much more straightforward and intimate ways (to start with, among the reasons they had to wait forty to sixty years to attend junior high). Oh dear. They saw the point, though.

I ran across Aoyama Akira in a work project the other day and I just thought he was neat; he was a prewar civil engineer who was the only Japanese surveyor involved with the Panama Canal, and then went back to Japan and built a bunch of drainage canals which prevented deadly flooding. Also he has the rare distinction of looking pretty good with a mustache (in his 1928 Wikipedia photo, at least). He seems to have been a gentleman of integrity: during the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 earthquake, he sheltered Korean laborers from his current construction project in his own home, and when asked by the government during WWII what would be a good way to demolish the Panama Canal, said “I know how to build it but not how to destroy it.” He also enjoyed poetry and Esperanto, gave his daughter a dagger when she got married, and believed women should have technical skills.

For all my ongoing farming show obsession I still remain loyal to Liu Chang and his livestreams as low-key background listening; in one recent one he streams himself playing a video game called What Remains of Edith Finch (I’m not a game person, I had to look it up; it‘s a bit dark for me but very interesting). Not the first game I would have expected to get a Chinese release, but why not? In language-learning terms it’s extremely fun to watch him play. His version of the game has the original English voiceover plus very artistically inserted on-screen Chinese text, and his English is good enough that he picks up the phrases in the voiceover from time to time and responds—“…but I had no idea what was behind that door.” “我也没有 idea!” and so on. Also he reads on-screen English text out loud in English with dates/numbers in Chinese, which seems to be a universal first-language constant (I still count rests in English, for instance). Plus, while he himself is not subtitled, it’s much easier to follow what he’s saying by ear when the visual context of the game is right there.

Latest farmboy words: 卖萌, to act cute (lit. to sell cuteness); 交卷, to hand in a completed test (interesting because it uses 卷, a scroll, although I don’t think many people are taking tests on scrolled paper these days); 刷刷的, smoothly, a breeze; 虎头蛇尾, starting strong and finishing weak (lit. tiger’s head and snake’s tail); 无籽, seedless, as in grapes; 弄巧成拙, to try to do something clever and end up the worse off for it (very roughly, “do smart end stupid”)

Photos: Lots of plum blossoms and assorted local cats. The matched pair live near the nighttime junior high and will let me pet them only at very irregular intervals, I never know when they’ll be in the mood, but the day I took the photo was a lucky one and I ended up with both of them bonking their foreheads into my knees and alternating purrs and meows. The other three I often see (and sometimes get close to) on my morning runs; Kuro-chan senior, a free-range pet (note the extravagantly long fur) who must be quite an elderly gentleman or lady judging by the brown tint; Kuro-chan junior, much younger and sleeker and more skittish; and Miké-chan, usually friendly and amenable (except occasionally when preempted by another cat).

Be safe and well.

I’m gonna have to start off yet again with “I’m way behind on comments but if you’ve posted something I’ve read it and been thinking of you,” which, though true, I feel should only hold a limited number of times. End-of-year busy, away for a night or two, sick for a while, winter hibernating tendencies, no genuine excuses. Posting right now a bunch of accumulated paragraphs because I have too much work to do and I don’t want to do it, so I am pretending I have time to do this… .

New Year’s cards not sent yet; expect them, well, in the New Year. (As noted in my last entry, if you’ve gotten one from me before expect one again unless you notify me otherwise; if you haven’t and you want one, let me know a name/address to use.)

More math workbook translation—there are numerous problems in which two brothers (or occasionally two sisters) leave the house at the same time and proceed at different paces toward the library or the station, and I can’t help wondering why they’re all on such bad terms, why not just walk or bicycle together and get there together? And are the younger brothers(/sisters) old enough to be left to walk on their own? Also, there are problems like “express the relationship of these line segments etc. using symbols,” which always make me want to respond with “AB❤️C” or similar. I mean, it’s asking me about relationships!

A very old friend from college emailed me for the first time in something like twenty-five years to let me know he and his wife were visiting Japan and could we get together for lunch or something, so we did. We had a kind of difficult friendship in college (also I was, I think, unusual among his friends of any gender because I didn’t ever go to bed with him), but we were close and it was really nice to sit down together and catch up on the last few decades, finding out that each of us is doing okay, knock wood, with some shared interests and many new experiences.

I’m still not 100% (I always get sick around New Year’s anyway, it’s just a thing, I’ve decided) but a definite improving factor was a big pot of lentil soup made from, I think, trobadora’s recipe; I don’t know if it was the lentils or the paprika or the feta, but now I’m craving more of it. Also today a bowl of o-jiya for lunch; I like this very simple meal so much I put the recipe into a fic at some point, it’s just rice, tofu, egg, soup base, and sesame oil but so good.

Yuletide fic safely posted before deadline; needs a little tweaking (and a new title and summary) before reveals, but holds together (although for anyone who knows me it might as well have my name signed all over it). I think this is going to be the first year when I just do my assignment and no treats or pinch hits, for the reasons above along with just generally drifting away from fic writing (though not giving it up altogether!). Still, looking forward to all the good reading.
Most Saturdays I go to the free Saturday juku a couple towns over to spend three hours with junior high schoolers and their English homework, which is sometimes fun and often frustrating (mostly not the kids’ fault, they’re all nice kids if wildly varying in ability and effort). Sometimes there’s a gap of time while they’re doing test/workbook questions on their own, and I use it to write in longhand; I got about half my Yuletide fic this year done that way, along with a lot of what I wrote for the Guardian wishlist, and today—with no remaining fic obligations—about 300 words of my original thing, which felt very satisfying. I hate longhand, but maybe I should do it more often. (For the record, my handwriting is so terrible that it serves as an effective cipher no matter who might look over my shoulder.)

Rereading Helen Thorpe’s The Newcomers, an account of a year spent in an ESL classroom at a Colorado high school, with kids from the DRC, Burma, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, and various other countries, which is a lovely piece of writing (Thorpe is a terrific nonfiction writer in general), somewhat similar to another favorite, Brooke Hauser’s The New Kids, about a Manhattan high school serving similar immigrants. So many individual stories worth knowing about. Also makes me think of the nighttime junior high near here, where I hang out in two classes; English for Class E, mostly Korean-born ladies with an average age somewhere in the sixties, many of them Japanese-Korean bilingual, some of them obviously very bright and deserving of the education they didn’t get to have (also one man of similar age with a Japanese name, who may be one of the people born roughly before 1965 with a physical disability who missed out on the special education schools first established in 1977). Also Japanese for Class B, three Nepali teenagers, a Chinese-Japanese kid from Guangdong, and two recently arrived older Korean ladies, none of them fluent in Japanese yet. The Nepali kids in particular (one boy with a bright grin and a mustache, three girls with long hair and little high light voices) are all on the ball and quick to learn, I don’t know if that’s a culturally acquired habit or if they’re just a particularly with-it random selection. Everyone makes the same mistakes we did when I was first studying Japanese, よんがつ for ４月, はいてください for 入ってください。

Not enough farmboy Chinese words accumulated yet to list here, but I was thinking how lucky it is for learning purposes that Chinese isn’t as gendered/socially inflected as Japanese. There are certainly some words the farmboys use that I (as a semi-respectable middle-aged lady) would probably not, but compared to their Japanese counterparts…look, let me give you a couple examples. (Vaguely sociolinguistic waffling follows)

I probably wouldn’t say 贼 as an intensifier or 不 alone as a tag question on the whole (although I could most likely get away with them in casual chat with A-Pei, for instance, it’s not like she hasn’t heard me say 特么 and other minced oaths anyway), but most of the language the farmboys use is something I could use too. Whether it’s me or Farmboy A, we can both get away (I think) with saying something like 我饿死了，吃饭吧 (I’m hungry, let’s eat) without drawing a second glance. On the other hand, Imaginary Japanese Farmboy A, talking to his peers, is probably going to say something like 腹へった、飯食おうぜ (hara hetta, meshi kuō ze) in that context, where I would say お腹空いた、ご飯食べようよ (onaka suita, gohan tabeyō yo). You will notice that although Imaginary Japanese Guy A and I are saying the same thing in the same language, there isn’t one word pronounced the same (kind of an extreme example, but then again I didn’t even put in any pronouns). This is one of the fun things about Japanese in its way, but I’m kind of glad for practical purposes the same does not apply (much) to Chinese… (Or am I wrong? Correct me if so!)

Photos: Seasonal.

Be safe and well.

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.

· Well, I learned the Chinese word for “olive,” 橄榄, which has to be useful somewhere.

· I made a lot of applesauce in the big Mai-san pot, so called because it was a wedding present by a friend of my partner’s of that name, a huge cast iron cauldron; it’s the only option if I want to make more than, like, a serving and a half, apples cook down almost as bad as spinach. On the other hand, there is no shortage of apples, I can make applesauce every other day all winter if I feel like it.

· My veranda plants are having a last hurrah; the morning glories have finally conceded to winter, but the cherry tomato and the strawberry both have a lot of ripening fruits. Knock wood I might actually be able to keep the strawberry plant going through the winter?

· At work, I damn near translated “aerial survey” as “avian survey.” It’s a bird, it’s a plane…

· Middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies singing “Country Roads” at the nighttime junior high—I couldn’t help imagining the lyrics changing “West Virginia” to “Cheju Island” or “Kyongsang namdo” or whatever, a song about wistfulness for home is all too appropriate in a community of immigrants. I don’t know if any of them thought about it this way. On the way back to the station, everyone who passed me was speaking Vietnamese.

· Silly question: what do you have on your desk? (or in/around the space where you write and do stuff). I have a large desk which holds two computers (Mado-chan for work and Rin-chan for personal stuff); a stack of books about Miyamoto Yuriko and Chao Yuen Ren; a clear drawer thing which holds postcards, stamps, clinic cards, all that jazz, with a small monthly calendar on top of it; a mug of pens, pencils, toothbrush for computer cooler cleaning, nail-clipper, scissors; a repurposed Godiva box, brown suede nap, which holds necklaces (the chocolate divisions help keep them from tangling up), memory sticks, and medication, and has a Mucha brooch and a paperweight stegosaurus on top; a small radio on which I listen to the classical programs; a sticker of Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan (drawing by skeptical_lynx, gift from clevermanka); my notebook, a plain A6 ring-bound lined one that holds work deadlines and other lists; and usually my phone and assorted temporary paperwork.

· Rereading Naomi Mitchison’s wartime diaries, immensely relatable. Reading something from the 18th century: “By and bye I found myself sitting crying over my books in the Signet Library, because he was so nice and I could never tell him so, never give him back kindness, only two hundred years away in time, one could get at what he was and what he wanted.” Tearing down Eric Gill: “He says ‘I do not gather that women have, in general, much of an eye for the beauty of their lovers’ bodies…They are not inflamed by images…they do not make or go to or see or buy pictures of men as men do pictures of women.’ The hell he thinks that. … And as to being inflamed by images--! The interstices of my days are full of erotic images. Quite often, of course, I use them as current to turn the mills of the imagination. I am 44 and should know what I’m doing by now. … I should suppose that most women thought rather more in terms of touch and less in terms of vision (or perhaps a writer thinks more in such terms than a sculptor)….”.

· Photos: various moments of autumn, more train bridges, and a restaurant (unfortunately not serving hotpot) that amused me.
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Be safe and well.

・I am just really tired of endlessly unresolved small miserable ailments. I'm still a lot better off than most people, but ugh.

・There's a kind of Japanese ice cream called Pino, a little box containing six little circles of vanilla ice cream (occasionally other flavors as a seasonal special) dipped in chocolate. Yesterday I had the proverbial four-leaf-clover stroke of good fortune, finding not just a crown/star shape in the box I opened but also a heart shape, a super-rare occurrence which is supposed to be lucky? Here's hoping!

・I have been finding Take 6's A Quiet Place very soothing to listen to lately.

・Back at one of the nighttime junior high schools for the first time in ages, a class of about a dozen highly motivated Korean-Japanese ajummas, very energizing: they introduced themselves to me with a rundown of their favorite things, from earrings to kimchi to Tolstoy to that kdrama about the South Korean girl who parachutes into the North...? I'm going to have to work to keep up.

・My mother taught me a new word in passing, "zygomatic." Look it up; I choose to believe it's no accident that the first two letters are ZY.

・Working on Guardian episode 13 for the script project: the moment when Minister Gao fawns on Shen Wei and he and Zhao Yunlan momentarily abandon their angry tension to exchange a glance of mutual wtf?? is always funny. Also, my Lin Jing/Cong Bo thing: the first hand Cong Bo grabs when he’s doing his “you have to believe me!” thing is Lin Jing’s, and Lin Jing promptly invites him to go get some coffee... .

・A little bit more of my nonexistent Zhao Xinci post-canon fic wrote itself today:
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・Photos: lantanas, hydrangeas, roses (I realized that my taste in roses invariably runs in the yellow-to-orange-to-pink range; there's one that reminds me of the "broken" tulips of yore), a while fluffy thing, also a nighttime canal.
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Be safe and well.

・ Someone whose English I correct online was telling me about the source of her fresh chestnuts, a cousin-in-law who owns a (local) mountain. “(People normally don’t have a mountain!)” she added, which for some reason I found absolutely adorable.

・ The other day I walked past one of the local North Korean elementary schools (it’s a very long story), with kids playing to recorded music in the yard, running around in their little color-coded caps. The tune was the Hokey-Pokey, sung in Korean.

・ I was translating a Hayashi Fumiko travelogue about Japan-occupied Indonesia in 1943; charming, evocative, informative, densely colonialist. Wondering whether she genuinely believed all the Japan-banzai stuff she put in, or whether it was there to please the imperialist powers that be (who were responsible for the career boost of sending her to Indonesia etc.). Something seemed familiar about this query...oh yes the Rebel. 哎哟, the more things change.

・ There is a thing that I want that I can’t have, and it really doesn’t matter in the grand (or even the pretty small) scheme of things, and it’s annoying me. (This is not in reference to chocolate but come to think of it THAT ALSO APPLIES.)

・ The above notwithstanding, how old am I going to be before I can stop losing my temper like a spoiled brat? (Almost entirely offline, in this case. I am, on the whole, peaceable in non-work-related online stuff because a) time-delay and b) I can walk away whenever I need to. Offline I occasionally have a hair-trigger snap reflex and I would like to get it under control and be a less unpleasant person any time now.)

・ I tutor a couple of Filipino-Japanese kids weekly for the Saturday juku, and while waiting for them to finish writing their essays, I get out my notebook and write notes to myself about my original thing. Occasionally whole scenes, more often lists of questions and tentative answers which are basically primitive meta. It’s a surprisingly good environment for figuring out what’s going on.

・ I have a ton of unposted photos, have a handful to start with. Purple flowers as usual, a street view with mountains, a cat (actually two cats) standing guard in the soldiers’ graveyard, and what I can reassure you is not a caterpillar.
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Be safe and well.

Daily life: The kids at the weird high school are giving me life, both Japanese and foreign-born. Big chubby irreverent Arapon (nickname), who chats cheerfully all the way through class to all and sundry, teachers included, but also does his homework meticulously in two colors; elegant Nida, Farsi-speaking, Afghanistan-born, Dubai-raised, who wants to practice her English conversation; little bespectacled Kotaro v2 (there are three Kotaros) who asks a string of questions, all starting with 先生的に ("as by you, teacher...") and so on, bless them all.
Also I made the world's best error in a translation project, finding via spellcheck that I had referred to a weather phenomenon as a "typohoon."

Music: Among other things the Good Soldier Schweik Suite by Robert Kurka, yet another composer who died too young to become really well known; a gorgeous jazz-influenced dark-toned wind piece.

Books: Another WWII diary, Vere Hodgson; she has some good things to say. "Irate Mother to daughter in one of the raided towns: 'For goodness' sake put that book down, and listen to the Air Raid!'". "The News shows no sign of improvement, so I am disregarding it. It is against the law to worry, so I just don't think--" . "Mr. Booker was saying that though he hates onions, when once more we can get them he will sit down and really enjoy one. I think we shall go in for onion binges when the war is over."

Chinese: Duolingo says, and my friend P confirms, that it's common to say 坠入爱河, not just falling in love but falling into the river of love. I was trying to think of fictional non-metaphorical examples of this; Peter Grant is the obvious one, and also Prudence from one of my favorite Zen Cho stories. Do any others come to mind?

Writing: A few days stuck, on account of headaches and work, but getting started again now. Finish the current scene and do one, maybe two more and I will actually have arrived at the part where dramatic things happen, I've waited for it so long I'm starting to lose confidence...

Photos: Two views of veranda tomatoes (they taste good, sweet and tart with a nice snap in the skin), and the world's most durable post box.
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Be safe and well.

Daily life: More school stuff: back at one of the night-time junior highs run by the city. This one serves primarily two populations, a) Nepali kids aged 17 to 21 or so who generally speak good English but need a lot more Japanese study for further education and/or employment, and b) Japanese, Chinese and Korean ladies aged 50 or so to 90 (I am not kidding, Mrs. O is 92) who for various reasons never got to go to junior high to begin with. Almost all of them are enthusiastic and inquisitive and have a lot to say.
Also my husband and I bet on the future (no, not that way) by making umeshu, plum liqueur: you put green plums, rock candy sugar and white liquor (I don't know any of the English names) into a very large glass jar, allow it to take up more than its fair share of space in the fridge, and wait a minimum of three months (or up to ten years). We'll see.

Music: Nothing immediately new, but it's a good time to bring up Florence Price and her amazing piano sonata among other works.

Books: Rereading Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I read in preference to actually reading Fitzgerald's novels because I'm strange that way. (Also, if I could write a biography this good of anyone I could probably die happy, knock wood.) A quote from one of the novels: "Prayer should be beyond self, and so Nenna repeated a Hail Mary for everyone in the world who was lost in Kingsland Road without their bus fares."

Chinese: I'll give Duolingo credit: I translated "their wives" as 她们的妻子 (in which "their" is feminine) to see if I could get away with it, and the system marked it as a right answer without hesitation. Right on.

Writing: Well, the above-mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote "Women, if they can, must write novels." I don't know if this is what she had in mind, but I'm trying. There's about one more chapter to go until "everything is quiet and peaceful" suddenly shatters bigtime; I've paused to try and sort out all the threads so far and see what I need to pick up and how.

Photos: ( Only technically the rainy season )

Also, if not already doing so, please see posts by naye and others recently recommending various useful things to do. Be safe and well.

Daily life: Japan is wavering between "let's start the new school year and view cherry blossoms" and "let's have our very own quarantine." Very confusing. My hands hurt from much handwashing. In a rare moment of normality, I went to an orientation session at the weird high school where I volunteer, to interpret for an Iraqi dad who speaks English but not much Japanese; his son, along with four other kids from China, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, will be their inaugural non-native-speaker class...if school starts on schedule. If it does, I'm looking forward to that class, they look like nice, interesting kids. Right now honestly nobody has any idea what comes next.
Even with the Olympics being postponed (knock wood), I still have Olympic-related translation work; I've done enough of it so far that I'm more invested than I thought, oh dear. Also a paper on simulation models for the coronavirus; I almost turned it down because I couldn't face thinking about it, but translation is the only thing I can do, after all, I might as well do it.

Music: Not much new? I've been listening to Florence Price's piano sonata a lot on YouTube; I love it in particular because it reminds me of some of my dad's jazz piano work.

Books: I have the new Natasha Pulley novel, but haven't started it yet; watch this space. For some reason I've been reading fic for The Untamed/MDZS (correct acronym?)--I have never read or watched the canon in any form and have no plans to, but I got interested in one character through osmosis and, well, some of the fic is good? And this is the time for any and all distractions.

Chinese: With encouragement from various kind people in the fandom, I have gone ahead and made a community for the creation of a Guardian-based Chinese learning app here; we'll see what happens. (Also, in the department of thank you, Zhu Yilong: I've listened to his 謝謝儂 song often enough that I was able, text-chatting with my Taiwanese friend, to use 没人懂 in conversation and get complimented on my natural phrasing.)

Writing: I have discovered that there isn't nearly enough plot for the whole middle section. I'm torn between brainstorming a lot and just keeping on writing and seeing what comes out; I think a combination of the two is going to be called for.

Be safe and well.

Yesterday was "experience learning" day, and we took the high school kids to a local art museum in the morning and then, in the afternoon, to a temple to try out zazen, or Zen meditation if you will. Pretty much an ordinary neighborhood temple, with a priest who, like the kids, was third-generation Korean-Japanese. Mysterious concrete Buddhas in a back room, main hall a mid-sized, tatami-mat-floored space with cushions to sit on and about fifty-odd golden Buddhas of varying sizes up front, colorful banners hanging all over the walls. Not austere, you might say. The priest talked away nineteen to the dozen and at some point had us do about ten minutes of silent meditation, complete with smacks on the back from a ritual smacking stick. 
I've had a chance to try zazen before and decided that it's not for me; my mind doesn't like thinking about nothing, as pleasant as such a state seems. So I didn't try to do that this time either. About one-third of my attention went to worrying about K, one of the 10th-graders, who's asthmatic--I wasn't sure the chilly room and the drifting incense and the smacks on the back, such as they were, might not give him an attack. (In the event, he was fine, as far as I know.) The remaining two-thirds of my mind I set to thinking about the mystery I'm still writing, pushing the current scene forward, moving effortlessly along a string of content and images that my conscious mind didn't have before.
Because of the not entirely chronological structure of this volume, I get to jump around and write different things depending on what I'm in the mood for; right now I'm in the middle of an interlude told by a character whom I didn't know from at all only a little while ago. Okay, I knew the absolute basics of who he was and why he was going to do what he's supposed to do, but nothing more, and I couldn't figure out at all what he was going to talk about or how. By now, thanks in part to this helpful interval of meditation, his interlude has more structure and more excitement than anything else that's going on, and I've inadvertently put in a couple of supporting characters whose stories I wish I had time to tell. (They're not even mine to begin with, does that count as plagiarism? Some of them take their jumping-off point from people I know in real life, one comes from a character and an event in another book, but with a different resolution.) And damn it, it's exciting. I almost wish I could get rid of all the external and internal barriers to staying at home all day to write.