petronia

What happened to my Edna St. Vincent Millay???

I've been trying to get my poems together, they're all over the place. In the process I discovered one of my favorite anthologies as a child was actually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated with photographs of the permanent collection; the funny thing is I spent two whole afternoons there and could swear to seeing 0.5% of this stuff... Also this is making me remember how much I used to hate love songs and love poetry. XD; The "gross out" stage persisted for a long time, well into adolescence in fact - it wasn't that I wasn't personally interested in boys, but any poetic mention of romantic love seemed like the worst sort of emotional diarrhoea.** I liked poems about nature, and sort of imagistic stuff. Robert Frost, Wordsworth's daffodils and Li Bai's... pine trees or whatever. And wordplay. I used to cherry-pick the Romantics for non-love-related poems, that took some doing.

I'm not sure what fixed my stuntedness. XD;; At one point the pendulum swung way far in the other direction and turned into all fin-de-siècle Decadents, all the time. I do get the sense that my taste in poetry is fairly narrow. I seek particular effects and always have, though I appreciate other people's selections - that is, I'm really picky and unwilling to wade. XD;

** Ironically, the last time I can remember having this reaction was listening to "Can't Stand Me Now", sometime in '04. I just remember thinking CHRIST THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING. Lulz. I continue to grow as a person, or something.

Have a canned post. XD

( So it turns out I uploaded these photos for a reason XD )

I made a note of it when T and I finished watching the second season of Honey and Clover, but I can't find the entry or comment and now I don't even remember when that was. ^^; Early August, probably. If you wrote up thoughts on the series after having watched it uhh a year or two ago, drop me a link - I like reading old reviews.

( Cut for excessive length. )

There's the music. It's not so much that the soundtrack is perfect for the series, so much as Umino Chika clearly wrote her story around the songs themselves, to give the emotions evoked by them somewhere to call home. I think this because I do it all the time. XD Sometimes a song is oneself, or someone one knows; failing that it could be associated with a character or a work of fiction. But as often as not one has to imagine the video treatment. I've always thought SPITZ was music that best expressed the sensation of biking on country roads through green fields and small towns; it's uncanny. XD

More props to Umino - IMO Hachimitsu and Clover are SPITZ's and Suga Shikao's best albums respectively (or were when the manga began serialization). They're both focussed, early efforts with snappy rhythms and relatively airy production, less with the compressed pop gloss and orchestral balladry. Not that I have a problem with balladry. XD

( Cut for description of minor injury. )

Two weeks ago I also skinned my knee lightly falling down on the sidewalk for no reason; très sixth grade chic. Though my major ailment right now is a nagging cough that started just before MUTEK i.e. by the standards of my respiratory system has just begun to malinger. Also, hay fever. It's going to be one of those Mysterious Allergy(tm) years.

ONWARD TO BRIGHTER TOPICS: Saint Laurent street fair started yesterday but it was sororial unit's CEGEP convocation and tonight is Ced's documentary shindig, so I won't be able to go until Saturday. Here's hoping for more 1$ CD singles and 5$ sundresses. XD

( Speaking of Marianopolis convocation. )

We've started to toss around the idea of having a Marianopolis Ten-Year Bash (this would be 2009), though saints alone know not everyone is still speaking to each other ahaha. My ten-year mark in online fandom is... this September, come to think of it.[2] X-Files, VampChron, Wheel of Time. *dies* HEY GUYS LET'S THROW ME A PARTY?

Or maybe I should wait for the ten-year anniversary of By The North Sea which is the first fic I wrote that people actually remember ahaha. ~~At least it's finished.~~ Who else here remembers online anime/manga ficcing fandom circa 1998-1999? COMMENTS PLZ.

I have a lot more to say (in short: music, writing, cheesecake) but will make another post for concision's sake.

[1] In the gym, with my butt parked in a Scholar Craft Samsonite 2200. I can't believe I've arrived at the point where I can identify plastic folding chair models on sight. It's kind of the lamest special ability ever.

[2] Thanks to the Marianopolis computer labs' free internet access. In two years the school gave me several very good friends to this day + fandom = pretty much my entire social life, which accounts for the disproportionate space it occupies in my personal mythos.

I mostly didn't put any negative stuff about my Italy trip on the postcards, because who wants to get a postcard full of complaints? ( There was some negative stuff, of course, though vastly outweighed by the positives. )

( A digression on Asian-ness. )

The point isn't to whine, anyway; I'm the kind of person who finds even minor unpleasantnesses interesting as long as they're novel and don't last very long. XD But the point of travelling is as much the bad - or at any rate the unexpected - as the good, maybe. Both planes to and from Rome were filled with aging couples on package vacations, and when I said I was travelling alone and had booked everything myself they always expressed admiration. I hadn't thought of it like that - I had no one to go with me and no one to stay with there so of course I had to arrange everything myself, and I wasn't intimidated or overwhelmed because I didn't let myself be intimidated or overwhelmed. XD; Getting older is helpful in this respect because you can just say to yourself, "Well, you're 26 and if you still can't [get around in a strange city / demand a refund in a loud voice / etc.], there's not much hope for you." And then you do it.

There was that birthday meme going around re: Things I have learnt by the age of..., and one of the major things I've learnt is that if you're going to wait until you feel like a grown-up in order to act like a grown-up you'll wait forever. Nobody feels like a grown-up, it's all acting.

...Speaking of getting around I helped other tourists find their way several times. RL people probably find this funny, but I think I have a leg up on most travellers in unfamiliar cities because I assume I'm lost by default and am unfazed by it as long as I have a map to consult. As Forrest Gump found, people will follow you as long as you look like you know where you're going. XD;

* One of Rome's better points. A lot of her fountains are just potable water founts, usually without any sign they're so apart from the people drinking from them, and one is grateful. ^^; Otherwise I filled a bottle with tap water every morning and refilled in washrooms along the way - it always tasted perfectly fine.

** Remember that controversy about the Filipino-Canadian kid who was punished for table manners at school, and the très pur-laine principal was like, who's ever heard of eating with a fork and spoon? I may have wept a little for humanity.

*** Though "Ciao, bella" from potentially any male between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five wasn't what got me, what got me was that "salve" is still a word. Seventh-grade Latin textbook flashbacks ahaha.

( Pretension. This will probably make people paranoid, knowing human nature, but please don't take it that way if at all possible. )

ON A RELATED TIP: if you've friended me recently (i.e. within the last several months), please say hi and tell me what you're here for! If you haven't yet and feel like it, anyway, it's not a demand. XD

Which is absolutely just as well. This week has been wretched and not even fic is working, because (as Charmian pointed out) all I seem to read are stories about Byakuya and asking Byakuya to cheer one up is its own punchline. I tend not to dwell on or enumerate negative occurrences on LJ because words reify experience for me - which also explains why I sometimes take on an obviously literary tone when I feel some RL event deserves setting down, not because I'm consciously attempting to live a narrative but because what I write on LJ is the "final version" as opposed to the jumble in my head that passes for a short-term memory half of which will be swept out with the trash during my next good night of sleep**, and I need to employ what writing skills I have in the interest of exactitude - but said habit this week leaves me nothing to ramble on about but arcane fannish indulgences and minute taxonomies thereof. So... that's what it will be.

1) ( Two anecdotes involving Adrian Brody: anything can be a koan. )

2) No one in the Chinese fandom writes Ikkaku/Yumichika either.

3) ( Renji's magical hairtie and the ljArchive word count analyzer )

5) Top ten ways you know you're reading a Sabina!fic: I feel the premise of this meme is wrong, because I am not a reader of my own fic (or at least, a very special and non-representative one) and thus should not be answering this question. Tell me, folks, if you feel like doing so - how do you know you're reading a fic written by me? ^^; (Someone on an SSBB guess-the-author thread said something along the lines of, "Cafés are a very Sabina-like setting.")

** My imagination subscribes perhaps to J.M. Barrie's idea that mothers sort through their children's thoughts at night, folding and organizing as if it were so many piles of laundry. My mother being my mother, almost certainly tosses two-thirds of what she finds in the rubbish on account of it being clutter and no use to anyone, which would explain a lot.

Reminder to self: acquire poppy! J is right in that they're hard to find, it slipped my mind because I haven't seen anyone selling them thus far. >_> I could swear in past years they had a poppy stand at Namur metro, but...

Last night I had to get off the computer at the WORST CLIFFHANGER CHAPTER EVAR in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, so much so that this morning I lost half an hour so I could read the ensuing chapters and find out what happened. XD;; ( Minorly spoilerish babble. )

One day Watanuki will be cleaning Yuuko's place, and he will come across The ~~CLAMP~~ Eyeball Collection. That will be one more day he rues in his tender life.

May Dance
by

gisho. TRC fic, far too tame to justify how dirty I felt after reading it. XD;; Rarely do I get that minty fresh ride-to-hell sensation from fanfiction these days, but this one did the trick - not because it was excellently written and characterised to the point of total believability (it was) but because it seriously hit a button I didn't think I had. Then I thought twice and realised it was the same whatever that causes me to write Toshiki x Ren (I thought of it as a pairing fic when I started writing but the point it was trying to make eventually precluded that). Clearly I just... have a kink for conflicted gay older man x sweet self-possessed pubescent girl. Oh, Papa Freud, where are you now.

Why Learn A Second Language?
Article found from

darcenciel. The bit about the Persian ghazal is tremenjously OTM and made me laugh. I'm not sure I've ever read a translation of a classical Chinese poem that seemed to me like the same poem (although it may be, and is often, a quite good poem in its own right). And when my Japanese comprehension improved to the point that I could read haiku and tanka I was taken aback by the difference as well.

(...Improved to the point, she says. Really it's only just about at that stage.)

( Have been thinking of the aesthetics of poetry lately. )

Okay, I think I have overcompensated with points in this entry. XD

(Is it just me or are bits of this track in the Kompakt Kittens? ^^;;;)

I feel tremenjusly out of it. Staggered home (and I do mean literally staggered, with intervals of vomiting into subway trashcans) and slept brokenly from 8PM to 9AM. Now I'm bodily all right - I think - but everything seems a bit unreal, and I'm not sure if it's the lack of caffeine or the lack of food or the too much sleep or what. Like that spacey feeling one gets when feverish, only I'm not. Joints are itchy with lack of exercise, but muscles are sore from the spasmodic shivering last night (it was a loooong subway ride, and the saddest thing about it is the last time something analogous occurred is not even out of recent memory. But no substances of dubious legality involved this time i.e. step up, perhaps).

...

fable and I have an on-off discussion re the recording of one's passage through space-time versus not doing so - linear past-present-future paradigm of existence versus pointillist in-the-moment paradigm of existence so to speak - ex. people who feel the urge to blog and/or photograph everything they do/see versus people who don't, and in fact may feel an aversion toward doing so. I said that if I could I'd record every moment of my existence, but this isn't true: I only want to record the fun and/or interesting bits, all the rest cannot slide into unmemoried obscurity fast enough for me. XD So fandom talk is fun, and horrible gastros are not fun but at least non-boring. For me the sufferer thereof anyway.

( I said I'd make an entry about Nobunaga being a rock star in Mirage-verse... )

Current Music: Michael Mayer - Perfect Lovers (Remix by Unperfect Love)

(Ced tells me I should make more RL posts while he's gone so this will resemble a proper blog useful for keeping tabs on person with. Unfortunately this post is not one of them. XD)

I'd gotten tired of having odd volumes of everything (when I go to the bookstore I typically buy the most recent tankoubon out I haven't read, because I can't remember if I own it or if I read it in scanlation or if I have the Japanese but not the French/English or what), so on Monday I went with a list and my credit card. XD Now I have:

Bleach up to vol.8. Eight is all that's out in French, meaning that uh, if anyone happens to have scans of chapters 71 and up lying around somewhere. *coughs*
Nana up to vol.10. I'm going to give up buying it in Japanese, I think, because it's so hard to read. ^^; Like, in terms of sheer difficulty of comprehension my top three are Trigun, Nana and Peace Maker Kurogane, in that order, all of which are quite a bit harder to read than Mirage of Blaze or indeed Murakami Haruki. Maybe it's just me? I mean, I'm a lot better at kanji than I am at slang or dialect or grammar.
XXXHolic up to vol.3. Couldn't help buying vol.2 in French, was seduced by the purple-edged paper.
Tsubasa 1 to go with the XXXHolic 2. Must catch my sister in the evening so I can pimp it to her. :0

That plus the Amazon shipment makes for 17 volumes of manga or thereabouts.

I'm really liking Bleach but then I've always liked Bleach - like Hikaru no Go I took to it at first sight, for the art. Now that I own the sequential volumes I'm going to re-read it from the beginning, as I think it lost overall emotional impact from the way I was reading a volume every few months... I have a sort of perverse urge to declare the series a ship-free zone insofar as I'm concerned, much as Kenshin was, but there's no sense in purposefully limiting one's opportunities, is there. XD It has something to do with the predominating friendship theme. Okay, all WJ series have "friendship" as a theme, but often it's a bit... abstracted? Like unrequited love when the person in question's moved to another city, an emotion still capable of breaking your heart but divorced from the daily reality of, I don't know, hanging out between classes or attending concerts together or bumming around playing video games. 'Nakama' in WJ is like as not 'a person you can trust to watch your back in a fight and vice-versa', but that's only one definition of a true friend, even taken figuratively. I think? I think. If you've gone through some hard or intense times with a given person at your side, you're going to have a special bond. But there's nothing shallow about the hanging-out-for-the-sake-of-hanging-out kind of friendship. It takes longer, is all. A human being is debatably comprised of his or her memories; anyone who takes part in my memories is a part of who I am, and I am a part of who they are. Nothing spectacular needs to occur. It builds up with the simple repetition of simple presence, you and the other bearing witness to your respective passages through time. The bearing witness part is important to humans, somehow: when we say "Remember when...?" we need to hear someone answer, "Yes, I do."

This is what GSeed tells us about Kira and Athrun, as opposed to showing. Bleach shows it, and it does make a difference.

I think all this ties in with my obsession with "texture" in fiction. ^^;

...Actually I'm just posting for the sake of making a post before Saturday ends, which never happens. XD Tax returns make me hungry, like writing a final; however, for all that they're the most challenging maths I have to do all year (mostly because I'm so insanely anal-retentive I fill out a three-page form for 8.67$ worth of foreign tax credit and use algebra to make it tally up to zero at the end), they're a lot easier than CS finals. I'm developing the suspicion that my life will never force me again to make the intellectual effort I made for my B.Sc. I mean, if I go back to school it won't be in CS, it'd be in something that requires essay-writing, and there's no comparison at all. There just isn't. Heck, programming as an actual job isn't as difficult as CS undergrad. Do doctors feel this way? Actually practicing medicine is easier than being in med school? It might be true of a number of professions, come to think of it.

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December 2020

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Page Summary

Dude, this is kind of not on
&honey;
Bodily ailments and embarrassing nostalgia
Personal growth and all that
Pillow book crap
Mid-afternoon, no one's reading
Too much braindump
We are perfect lovers / besides the fact / that we're not there
Manga manga manga
Did my taxes tonight!

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Page generated Jun. 19th, 2025 10:19 pm

Entries tagged with introspection

Dude, this is kind of not on

&honey;

Bodily ailments and embarrassing nostalgia

Personal growth and all that

Pillow book crap

Mid-afternoon, no one's reading

Too much braindump

We are perfect lovers / besides the fact / that we're not there

Manga manga manga

Did my taxes tonight!