While the commonplace belief that not much ever happens in this city may at times be true, on other occasions the social whirl picks up. The latest of these eddies has had a bittersweet quality. My exchange students completed their internships and yesterday graduated their programme. Some are staying on for skiing and travel, others are returning home to the last of the humid Kanagawa summer immediately.
These young women are modest and tend, I think, to measure themselves by a deficit rather than a credit model. One explained in her farewell speech how she had aimed in coming here to overcome her “weak points”, one of which she identified as speaking in public. I don’t think their teachers see them in the fashion: we notice instead their persistence and resilience, their willingness to take hard knocks and refuse to give up. I hope in their studies and work to come they have time to reflect more hopefully on what they’ve experienced and accomplished here.
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After six blog posts in a row last Saturday and a weekend spent in that grim halfway state of staying on the internet, waiting for something to happen, I decided to take what, for want of a better phrase, I dubbed a spiritual detox. It is no disrespect to you, gentle reader, to say that I’m feeling much better for it: I’ve got a lot of reading done, for one (although I’ve yet to finish the weighty tome I’m showing off in the Amazon link at right).
This final non-teaching week also gave rise to a lively social round. The señor and I called mid-week on Governor’s Bay Jay, whose lovely blog you can now find here. Today we took Evie and Fern to visit Ashburton Jay and friends, some of whom were very young puppies. You can see my too-fast panning and unsteady walking zooms of Coco, Zsa Zsa, Evie and Fern below.
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The inky salutation of Mrs. Russell’s sketchbook sweetie, at right, does not know the world of taxonomic confusion in which he and I live. Permit me to elucidate my obscure statement.
Last Saturday, Nanette and I made a cheerful sojourn to Craft 2.0 here in Christchurch, where we met the lovely Ms. Tyler and browsed the many crafty delights. The event, held here, was as densely packed as Shinagawa Station, with rather more pushing and shoving (albeit discreet pushing and shoving). As a result, I decided to take the business cards of the sellers whose work I particularly liked, and browse their online spaces at leisure, later.
A small spanner in the works was the number of sellers whose sites indicated a reduction in the amount of available stock as a result of preparing for Craft 2.0. Not particularly thwarted, I browsed further through the Felt shops, looking for necklaces (my jewellery of choice these days). Eventually I found three lovely pieces to my taste and budget, ordered them and waited.
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Originally published at The White Mist.
One matter to which all those involved in the wedding are amenable has been the creation of a wedding cheese, in lieu of a wedding cake. It was in pursuit of this that we travelled to Whitestone Cheeses of Oamaru earlier this week. Bob, the managing director, brought out a variety of cheese rounds for us to play with and we tried stacking different kinds and sizes of cheese on top of each other to create our lactic vision. This was a level of fun normally associated with childhood. A wholesale price list meant the costing of the enterprise was reasonable too.
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I am always happy to play with other people’s digital cameras, especially if they are newer and fancier than mine.
As my current camera was a hand-me-down from harvestdad in spring of 2007, this isn’t hard. (I had my previous camera for six years. I bought it with the fees refund when I handed my thesis in; it had 1.3 megapixels.)
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My recent visit to Japan was my third. On all of these three I have made many mental and pen-to-paper notes, with the intention of writing up everything later, and on each occasion I have felt–what?–not so much stymied as muted upon my return. Increasingly I shy from the conventional “on this day I did this” touring narratives, and yet don’t seem to be able to come up with an alternative.
When it comes to Japan, I think that part of this is something like travellers’ superstition. I love that place, and hope to be able to continue to return in future, perhaps even with the señor in tow. These emotions leave me feeling in part that if I say too much about my adventures, I’ll break their spell, that I’ll be able to return to them only in print, rather than in the storehouse of memory.
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In Japan, said one of the misses Y. on the train back to Yokohama, it is necessary to read the air. This is the name for the art of perceiving the atmosphere in any situation and of understanding the appropriate manner in which to speak as a result.
The problem is, she explained, a lot of people can’t do this very well, either by temperament, inexperience or lack of intuitive abilities. So the expression for them is “can’t read the air”.
In a country where people–especially the young–love to abbreviate things, the expression “can’t read the air” shrinks down further to its component romaji initials: KY. Therefore, someone who lacks the ability to intuitively interpret the communicative demands of a situation is KY.
Even a politician has used the phrase, said Miss Y., and you know it’s widespread when it gets to parliament.
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The days of ‘92
16 September, 2009
in O internet, commentatrix, in Aotearoa, the social round
A recent article on the Fairfax webpages profiled a group of school pupils preparing for the annual ball. Here they are, dressed up and excited, as featured in the main shot of the article. There is also a series of four- or five-minute videos, which I confess I haven’t viewed. It would be an exercise in nostalgia, which, as you’ll see, doesn’t sit completely easily with me.
To the Ball
My high-school ball, or formal as we called it at the time (“balls” were for the posh schools) was nearly seventeen years ago, a literal half lifetime. I wore a dress my mother made for me, from a wedding-gown pattern. I chose the fabrics: crushed velvet for the bodice and sleeves and a black background with red rose-print for the skirt. I wore my mother’s jewellery, and possibly her shoes too. Though my skirt was full-length, I wore patterned black stockings which I saved for years, until they no longer fit.
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