From the category archives:

traveller’s fragments

KY: reading the air

12 April, 2009

in the social round,traveller's fragments

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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Social capital

25 January, 2009

in in Aotearoa,O internet,the social round,traveller's fragments

Before our brief northern vacation recedes completely into the happy cache of summer memory, I want to recount and acknowledge the hospitality we enjoyed with so many friends.

A bumpy descent in a small Plane was the worst part

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Footloose

24 November, 2008

in in Aotearoa,the social round,traveller's fragments,we are family

When we arrived in Dunedin on Saturday afternoon we spent our time lolling around the motel room, napping with the self-assurance that we would have all day Sunday to recover from any late-night excesses, see the exhibition at the Blue Oyster Gallery, visit the Chinese garden.  We planned to make our idle way back to Waianakarua on Sunday afternoon and pick up more cheese for our relatives in Oamaru on Monday (today) before returning home for tea.

These plans were all going swimmingly until around nine on Saturday night, when I stepped in a small, concealed hole-in-the-floor at the bottom of some stairs at the party venue and fell, spraining my right ankle with swiftness and efficiency.  Fellow guests bound my ankle in ice while I lay on my back, dazed, confused and tended by the señor whose presence, on his knees, led the host to call out (erroneously) to all that a proposal was taking place.

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The Motel Wireless Broadcast Service presents

22 November, 2008

in in Aotearoa,the social round,traveller's fragments,we are family

Caution: contains cheese, photographed on a mobile phone camera.

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In triangulation

8 October, 2008

in in Aotearoa,the social round,traveller's fragments,we are family

Friends, I have been out and about, which is why there has been so little activity here of late.  I italicise those adverbs in order to convey, in some skinny way, the exhilaration of having a break from the every day.  Not the tender pleasures of life at home, in which the señor and I slowly consume our merged collection of DVDs (“it’s only a film, h-bird,” he said as I gripped his arm during the final two or so hours of The Seven Samurai), and in which the too-longness of the dogs’ nails is recorded in the score-marks on our arms as they attempt to insinuate their hairy selves into our couch-sitting, all at once.  No; the every day from which I have happily flown is the predictable minutiae of work: interesting students, affable colleagues, tasks completed without too much throat-clamping pressure of time (unlike the first-semester blues), but a routine so familiar to me I sometimes dream it and think my day’s finishing when it begins.

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