Saturday, September 8, 2018

All of the September Things from This Week

September! Yay! Temperatures are starting to ease up. The problem with summer up here isn't the heat (it barely hits the 80s!) but the humidity, which makes anything over 70 feel like you might be trapped on the underside of a dead animal decomposing in the bright sunlight.

No really, that is how it makes me feel. I realized in Michigan that the humidity is why my hair is always in a pony tail now. It used to fly free almost always, but this is not doable when a walk from my front door to the elevator of my building causes neck sweat.

We got a great mattress pad after I found out how badly we needed one, and now I just never want to get up. I do, because someone has to and giving everyone else a chance to wake up on their own means my kid misses school, my husband misses work, and I'll have to do some stupid thing to balance the household finances like going back to full-time teaching which at this point would be soul crushing.

Don't get me wrong, I like teaching an I like my students. I specifically like the control I get to have over the situation. If a student and I don't get on, we don't have to. Waiting for people to ignore me because it's better for the company at large is not the name of the game anymore and I am really okay with that not being my life again anytime soon.

I recently realized that one of the reasons I was so unhappy with my in-laws' choice to chop off all my daughter's hair is based on being harassed in public school with I was a six-year-old girl that no one knew with short hair and boys hand-me-downs from my older brother and even older cousins. The girls in that elementary school thought opening the stall door on what must have been a boy was completely excusable. So yeah, on some level deep down, they not only lopped off one of the very few traits that was obviously from me but also made her more vulnerable to the embarrassment I suffered as a kid.

That said, it doesn't really matter. My kid likes her hair short, mostly because grandma likes it, and maybe someday I'll find a tactful way of letting my mother-in-law know that she helped to trigger a fairly major depressive episode, but for now, none of it matters enough.

Last night, my daughter said she was sick and asked for a forehead cooling sheet, which is a weird Japanese thing. Here, they fight fever with ice, which always makes me less comfortable when sick but whatever. Her fever was low-grade so we went to bed and when we woke up, she was a lot hotter. Luckily, since they are also parents, my bosses for today's classes understood why I needed to cancel lessons. We went to the hospital, got seen to by a doctor, got medicine for the next five days next door, and did not even have to pay for parking.

The rest of the day was split between sleeping and trying to get my kid to eat and take medicine. She's better at the later than the former.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm exhausted or depressed. More likely exhausted, but who knows. I just need this kid to get well so that she can enjoy school this week and I don't have to cancel more classes during the final weeks heading up to my first decent paycheck since we left for Michigan.

The most exciting thing that I can talk about publicly that happened recently was a woman in one of my facebook groups asking broadly about a framed piece of calligraphy she had found. Was it Chinese? Japanese? What did it mean?

It looked...complicated. 4 characters, two of them each easily more than 20 strokes, and only one of them really recognizable to me. So I took apart the stroke order for the least understandable one and entered it into a dictionary, finding out quickly that it was a character of traditional Chinese that had been replaced and simplified in the 1930s. I went on to look up the remaining characters and by googling the lot together found the text the framed excerpt had been taken from. It was the poem Summer Breeze by the eighth emperor of the Song Dynasty, who was known more as a poet and artist than a politician. He abdicated and his progeny lost the dynasty, but he's still known as having been great with calligraphy. The excerpt was taken by someone who didn't really know what they were looking at, so they chose a few pretty or interesting looking characters, not unlike someone quoting Shakespeare in a tapestry by choosing any 4 words that happen to be in a line together and look nice. Only if you did that in Latin, since traditional Chinese is to simplified Chinese as Latin is to English.
(See Dr. Worthing? I remembered something!)
((Oh yeah, that TCU education is really coming in handy these days.))

The characters wound up reading, according to the work of an awesome history-enthusiast and calligraphy geek, something along the lines of "Lost along the fragrant path, fluttering" which is a weird bit of writing to have in your home without any context, but unless you invite lots of Chinese scholars to dinner, it's more likely that no one will ever be the wiser. Just pretty words in a frame. Just strokes of black on gold.

I do almost want to print and frame this bit now, as a trophy regarding the brain work necessary to decode the message of strange, old characters. But where to put it? Being lost and fluttering with fragrance cannot go down in or near my bathroom. It wouldn't look bad in the hallway though...

That was such a fun puzzle to solve and I was so lucky that there was a blog post by Hyatt Carter about the original poem scroll in its connection to the greater works of the poet-emperor.

But now I have been awake for too long so at least I have some confirmation for mood. I still might be depressed, or not, but I am definitely exhausted.
Yay! Time to go back to bed!

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