Listen to the Rain

Today was another session of Laila's Hebrew school (called משפחתון Mishpachton, after the small-scale daycares that exist in Israel) today. I've been dreading going, because Laila is pretty wild and usually goes crazy in class. This time, I had the bright idea to make her walk all the way to the bus and then walk all the way from the bus to the Mishkan headquarters, and it worked! She asked a couple times for me to carry her, I always told her no, and by the time we actually got there she was willing to sit in my lap or have me hold her while the teacher sang the opening and closing songs and when it came time for activities (it was a Pesaḥ lesson), she went over to the tambourine-making station and picked out all the tambourine bells herself, ran to the "color a burning bush" station and did a bit of coloring, and then spent the entire rest of the lesson drawing on the whiteboard and asking me to draw in shapes so she could fill them in. I did draw this extremely sophisticated burning bush image of my own:


These are three and four years old. Not a lot of religious instruction at that age. We did sing dayenu briefly at the end, and there were some other songs in between, butwith young kids the important thing is to keep them engaged. They apparently did a lesson on keeping kids engaged at the Seder, because of course all the discussion and debate and talking about the lessons of Egypt and the wilderness aren't important to hungry children. It's only a benefit if you get to do any of the parts of the four children, and Laila's still a bit young for that. We'll see how she handles the Seder this year.

I do have one bit of sad news, though. We walked part-way back to the bus--I relented and carried her another part of the way--and got on the bus to go meet sashagee for lunch. I got off a little early to go to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store to pick up some hummus for Laila, but on the way I noticed something on a nearby lightpole. And when I went closer to look, well:

( antisemitism )

This is the same neighborhood where I've seen people tear down innocuous "Bring them home now" posters about the hostages, though, so I'm not that surprised. I'm just glad that Laila is young enough she didn't notice it or care about it. I only wish that I could have faith that antisemitism would be getting better, instead of on an obvious trajectory to get worse and worse for the rest of our lives.

How time flies!

Laila is actually gone this weekend because sashagee and I are going to a concert, but we've already gotten news from my parents that she's full of energy, always running around, wanting to paint, read books, go for walks...she's definitely too big for four walls.

For so long we've been worried about Laila's language acquisition, especially after all of her brain troubles, but it seems like she's finally starting to realize the value of using words to communicate. It's still a bit hard to pry them out of her around us, where she'll fall back on grabbing our hands and trying to pull us toward whatever it is that she wants us to do, but she's started using full sentences when she doesn't remember that she's not supposed to talk. The subject of this post came out unbidden, and just recently when I was at the office sashagee sent me this:

sashagee: "Guess what?"
Laila: "Donuts."
sashagee tries not to laugh
Laila: "Donuts."
sashagee, hiding a smile: "Donuts?"
Laila: "Donuts! Let's eat some donuts!"

Regardless of her use of words, all the ideas are there. She knows what she wants and what she wants is donuts.

The big exciting health news is that we have finally, finally got her medicine right and Laila has not had a seizure since a few weeks after I wrote her last baby update. Now, her seizure detection mechanism on her bed goes off and we rush in, and it's always to just find a smiling Laila who's happy to see us. B"H we won't have to worry about it any more.

We enrolled Laila in swimming classes around the middle of January. Thanks to various things we've only been to a couple classes, and they've so far had mixed results. Laila loves being in the water, but the first two classes she kept dumping the floating foam toys that the instructors kept in baskets and they had to keep retrieving them. The second class she was a bit of a terror, and I overheard the instructor mention how stressful teaching her was, but the third class she was a lot calmer and more willing to listen to instructions. I kind of attribute that to extenuating circumstances, though--sashagee thinks that when she first got excited and pushed off the wall to splash around, she got a big mouthful of water and it scared her into caution. We can't rely on that to happen every time, though it sure would be nice. She tends to be foolhardy and while I'm glad she's not too scared, there's a good medium that would be nice to find.

Just about all little girls go through this phase, and now it's Laila's turn--she's a fairy princess:



sashagee's parents got her the wings, the wand, and the heels. The camera has basically not left her neck since she got it, other than taking it away to be charged. And let me tell you, whoever designed that camera is a genius, because the battery runs out in about 30 minutes. Well, I think so--Laila takes about 20 pictures a minute when she's not flipping through all the in-built Hello Kitty filters, so it's possible that that battery would last longer under ideal circumstances. On the other hand, maybe 20 pictures a minute is ideal for a three-year-old.

Laila's other big thing she does not is she's always dragging me into her room to drive her toy cars down on her rug. sashagee got her a rug that has roads and all kinds of scenery on it--mountains, forests, a hospital, a volcano, a pretzel shop, etc--and she loves grabbing me to pull me in to "drive on the road." Of course, that often turns into building with blocks, or watching the colored light projector's ceiling lights that, or using her toddler toolkit to build some simple shapes. It's no surprise that she can't keep much attention on anything--it's our job to help teach her how to do it.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Last year most of the Jewish holidays were on weekends, so I already had them off. That's not true this year, but the bonus is that many of the High Holy Days are on Thursdays and Fridays, so in October I only have one full work week and three four-day weekends. Not bad.

Wednesday night was Erev Rosh Hashanah and Mishkan did a livestream, but since Laila was awake I missed most of it and by the time she was asleep there were only thirty minutes left, so I skipped it. The next day, though, we woke up bright and early thanks to Laila, ate breakfast and got dressed, and took the bus out to the Copernicus Center for Rosh Hashanah services. While the last time we all went, we were able to go into actual services because Laila was small enough we could hold on to her and she could enjoy the singing, that was never going to work this time. We went for the Rise and Shine service (for kids 0-4), and then went over to the "Museum of Awe" where Laila immediately ran over to Toddler Town and started trying to grab all of the stamps. She was full of energy, so we didn't stay very long, but we did say yoni-labow-5693413a and whoolia45 with their new baby! They were heading in to services with a very asleep baby, just like we had been a couple years ago, but we chattered with them a bit and then headed out to lunch at a drive-in diner that also had Korean food (I got a teriyaki chicken pita. It was delicious) before heading home.

The next day sashagee wasn't feeling well, so while we originally all planned to go to the second day picnic, it was just Laila and I who went. I packed up a lunch for her and we got on the bus to go to Welles Park. We arrived just in time for the Shema, and while she initially squirmed a bit she calmed down once the singing started. Once it ended and the rabbi started talking, though, she immediately lost all interest, so we left the main area and went over to the part of the park where the kids activities were. She really went in on the activity sand, and while she still doesn't quite know how to interact with other kids, she waited her turn until she could get close and played very nicely with them. She even took a turn at blowing the shofar! When we got back home, sashagee was asleep, and while Laila woke her up when we ate lunch, she went right back to sleep when Laila laid down for a nap. She was really wiped out, so I took Laila to the park for a bit and let her rest of the day, and when Laila went to bed so did she.

There is one other thing we did, though. We didn't get to stay long enough at Welles park for the ritual of Tashliḥ, the symbolic casting away of our sins, as it is written:

Who is a G-d like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
-Micah 7:18-19

So we went to the lake to do it. Laila loved the actual throwing of the bread on the water, but she wasn't interested in anything else. She didn't want to run around on the grass, she didn't want to look out over the water, she didn't do anything. She did smile briefly for a picture, but that was it:



And then we went home.

Saturday we had two things scheduled but neither of them was until later in the day, so we had a nice slow morning where we all got to eat breakfast and sit around watching Kiki's Delivery Service until closer to 11, where we walked to the bus and went to Lincoln Square for Applefest. I went to it back in 2019, and then in 2020 and 2021 there was no Applefest, and in 2022 and 2023 we were out in the suburbs on both weekends, but this time we could go and a bunch of our friends were there too! The festival was twice as big as the last I was there, from Lawrence all the way down to Sunnyside on Lincoln, and the weather was beautiful but that meant it was a sunny day and I was carrying Laila for blocks up and down while we looked at the shops and got a bit of apple pie, some breakfast sandwiches--sashagee wanted a smashburger, but we were warned that it was a thirty-minute wait time so she got a breakfast sandwich too--and ate them while Laila ate her apple waffles. We got apple cookies and looked at the artisans, and chatted with our friends--Laila was obsessed with spacedragon's dyed hair and kept asking her to hold her--until 2 p.m. came and we needed to get home to rest for a bit. It was already too late for Laila's nap, but we could still go home and rest.

Around 4:30 p.m. we left again for our second event, thosesocks's housewarming, with apple pie and Laila in tow. We went out to the bus and the tracker said "no scheduled arrival times," so we had to walk all the way there--it was only a mile or so but it was a long way after all our earlier walking and while carrying Laila. When we got there, sashagee talked to thosesocks while I chased after Laila, which proved to be the theme of the evening--at one point Laila went out on the balcony and ran up and down, since it was laid out lengthwise along the entire building. She did that a couple dozen times, full of way more energy than I expected, except for some brief interludes to dip a cookie in ranch dressing and eat it and trying to steal chocolate-covered pretzels. After an hour or so, right when thosesocks was concerned about Laila being so energetic, it was time for us to go (Laila needed an early bedtime since she skipped her name), so we said our goodbyes and went home. We didn't get a slice of that apple pie but the chocolate-covered pretzels were delicious.

Sunday morning was a fast day, Tzom Gedaliah, so I woke up before anyone else to eat breakfast before the sun came up. When I was done, I opened the door so Laila could escape her room, we all got ready, and I took Laila out to Hebrew school. This time went better than the first time, where she was overwhelmed by all the people. She still wasn't very interested in the songs, but she was much more focused on the crafts. There was a craft to make a "Bug Sukkah" and that was what Laila focused all her energy on:


Sadly, it did not survive the trip home on the bus. While Laila wasn't interested in the songs, she did stay at the craft tables for much longer than many of the other kids did, who got bored and wandered off to sit with their parents and read books or something. She really loved those bugs, and we stayed through the closing songs and then left to go home...except the bus wasn't coming for 35 minutes so I walked most of the way home, carrying Laila the entire way, and then spent much of the rest of the day sitting down because she's heavy. She's a big girl now!

This coming weekend is Yom Kippur, so even more holidays ahead.

My Japanese tutor's grandmother died unexpectedly yesterday so class was cancelled. She was in her 90s, but we had just been talking a couple weeks ago about how she had all her living grandparents and I didn't have any of mine even though we're the same age (we were the same year at Penn).

I asked her if she wanted me to put her grandmother's name during Kaddish and she said yes. The way prayer has been weaponized by proselytizing American Christians makes me leery of asking that for people, but I've known her for years. I figured she wouldn't misunderstand what I meant.

(goshūshō-sama desu, "I'm sorry for your loss")

I'm back online now, but at 8:30 a.m. the power went out, and it came back and everything was fine for about ten minutes, and then the internet went out for two-and-a-half hours. I got on the line to the ISP, and they said it was a hub outage and all I could do was wait, so that's what I did. It's not even noon and all my chores for today are already done--I vacuumed and mopped the whole house, I did my laundry, and I cleaned the kitchen. Lunch is waiting for me when I'm ready for it, and now my entire evening is open because everything I had to do then, I've already done. It feels amazing, honestly. I hope that I learn from this and realize that sometimes it's better to accomplish pressing tasks earlier rather than putting them off until later while I play video games or whatever, and by writing down how I feel about it now, I'm doing a bit to bring forth that change in myself.

Will it actually happen? Who knows. But I'll try.

After I finally get onto the work network, there was a message saying that the current work-from-home order is being extended until the end of May. That's fine with me, since I've gotten used to my extremely short commute--and thanks to writing this, I remembered to go cancel my commuter pass for June. I've got two passes saved up that I haven't used, and I have $98 in Ventra credit because apparently Ventra refunded almost my entire March pass instead of just the unused portion, so I'm set for months of riding the L once I actually start doing it again. That'll save me hundreds of dollars, so I won't complain, but I do worry a bit about the health of the L what with all the lost ridership. Just another financial aspect we'll need to worry about as we try to sort through the fallout of the coronavirus.

On Sunday, I had my first class with my Japanese tutor in a month. Over FaceTime, obviously, and I did a bunch of reading in 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ / Socrates in Love, and then since it had been so long since we met, we just talked the whole time (but in Japanese!). We talked a lot about coronavirus, obviously, and I had to look up some vocab and talk a bit circuitously to explain that current infection rates reflect public behavior as of two weeks ago due to the incubation period, and that while the number of cases in Illinois was still climbing, it wasn't climbing as fast--that the rate of increase (増加率 zōkaritsu) was lowering, but not the absolute numbers. We talked about how we're both lucky to be able to work from home, and how we have a lot of friends who are out of work, and how I've reverted back to the me in the past. A few months ago, I was going out all the time, maybe five nights a week, and had almost stopped playing video games. Now, I'm back to watching anime, playing video games, and reading, with the very occasional video chat or in-person seeing of someone else. At least I have a solid foundation I can fall back on, but it's still not great. She's an introvert and lives with her boyfriend, so she's doing pretty well, but living alone is pretty lonely.

Speaking of which, thosesocks invited me out on a walk on Saturday, when the weather turned back to warm, so after lunch I left my home for the first time in a couple days and met her outside. She walked on the sidewalk and I walked on the street, close enough to have a conversation but far enough (and both masked) to keep each other safe. We went to Lickity Split for frozen custard and ate it sitting in the library parking lot while we talked about how we're dealing with things. The answer is "mostly well, but", and I feel like that's a pretty universal experience. I should see if anyone else would like to do something similar.

With my government stimulus money, I ordered a bunch of clothes I've been eyeing for a while. It's always difficult for me to buy clothes, becusae I'm 6'5" and very thin, so anything with the right waist size has legs that are too short, and similar for shirts with sleeves. But I asked the people at MDNT45--the ones behind this post about the cloak-coat I own--about whether they could make these pants with a small waist but a much longer inseam, and they said they'd do it for no extra cost! So I ordered that, I ordered some fitted dress pants and fitted t-shirts from Amazon, and all of them actually fit! I was especially surprised by the pants, since slim-fit 31/36 pants (in inches, waist/inseam American sizing) had the potential to fit terribly, but they were exactly what I was looking for, so I immediately ordered another pair. It's so rare that I find store-bought pants that fit well that I have to seize the chance as soon as I can.

The t-shirts had prominent logos on them, so I took a seam-ripper to them and removed them. Like Cayce Pollard, I am sensitive to #Brands.

That was about the extent of my stimulus usage. I dumped a bunch of it into savings, since I have a mortgage to pay, and invested some of it since the market is down and now is the time, or at least a more advantageous time than a couple months ago. I also ordered takeout after Passover ended, since I wanted to eat bread to celebrate but obviously didn't have any in the house. Tomato bisque and a grilled cheese sandwich, with dark chocolate chip cookies for desert. Delicious.

Alright, now that I can work, I probably should get back to it. I hope everyone had a good weekend!

The last night of class and I'm kind of sad about it. I'll be at Mishkan for meditation on Wednesday nights anyway, and I really liked having the chance to learn with everyone. I hope they do more of these.

This class was either going to be about prayer, or about Rabbi Akiva, and the rabbi chose Rabbi Akiva.

( One of the greatest rabbis who ever lived )

Notes from my second week of class:

( Week Two: Suffering )

Just yesterday I learned that "teriyaki" comes from 照る (teru, "to shine"), referring to the glistening sheen that teriyaki gets.

Yesterday, lisekatevans messaged me and asked if I wanted to hang out this week. I was busy two of the days she proposed (I'm going to an Anime Chicago meetup on Thursday and to a theatre event on Friday), but that night I was free, so I suggested we hang out at my place and I made dinner. Through coincidence I had been looking at a recipe for chicken teriyaki earlier that day, so I figured it'd be a chance to make it.

It turned out great:

( Shining chicken )

I actually had a discussion with my Japanese tutor about rice, about how I used to get white rice cravings before I moved to Japan but never get them anymore, though maybe that's because I eat rice almost every day. She mentioned how she'll make two or three cups of rice at a time and then she and her boyfriend will eat it all, whereas I'll make a half-cup for myself but have it almost every day with breakfast (and sometimes with dinner), so maybe we eat the same amount, it's just that I eat it gradually over time and she eats it in spurts.

We also spent a bit of time complaining about Japanese food prices in Chicago. I would have been going to Misoya Yakisoba, a yakisoba branch of the Misoya ramen restaurant, that just opened in Lakeview, but since I always make yakisoba at home from scratch I had forgotten that yakisoba sauce traditionally contains oyster sauce and thus is treif (hence why I make it at home). The only thing on the menu I could eat was kara-age, so I decided not to go. But also the yakisoba costs twelve dollars. Twelve dollars for noodles and sauce!

It'd be like an appetizer that was just spaghetti noodles and red sauce and it costs $12. I'm sure it's good, but I can make my own yakisoba, thank you. I can even make yakisobapan myself, and it won't cost anywhere near $12. $12!

Well, the benefit of being able to cook is that I can just make the food.

Last year was a mild winter, and this year is off to make up for it. After an initial fake out--usually if Chicago's winter is going to be cold, it starts with a sudden drop after the new year--winter finally caught up with us. Today it's -19°C, or -30°C with the wind chill. It'll get slightly warmer through Monday and then drop again, since Wednesday is supposed to be -28°C, -42°C with wind chill. Hopefully my workplace will close, but if not, I guess I'll see how much frost giant blood I really do have in my veins.

I was going to go to the ukiyo-e exhibit at the Art Institute with lisekatevans on Monday, but she was laid up with a cold that had knocked her out all weekend. I wasn't going to miss the exhibit and it's closing this Sunday, so I took advantage of my day off and went myself. It turned out to be the right decision--even though the Art Institute was offering free admission to Illinois residents, crowds were light, and the exhibit was mostly empty.

And it was beautiful. I took a couple dozen pictures and would have taken a lot more except I just had my cell phone camera and I kept being dissatisfied with the pictures I took. There were pictures of courtesans viewing cherry blossoms; crowds at the Gion Matsuri (which I went to back in 2016); shots of the shichifukujin, the seven lucky gods, in an ordinary context like drinking at a brothel or attending a street festival; and a lot of women looking seductively over one shoulder.

My favorite picture was almost at the end, painted near the end of the shogunate by 河鍋暁斎 (Kawanabe Kyōsai), which depicts a courtesan... 🔥 OF 💀 HELL. 🔥

( It's metal 🤘🏻 )

Ukiyo-e is one of my favorite art styles, and a lot of my apartment decorations are modern ukiyo-e. I have The Hero Rests handing above the fireplace, and I have this piece of Princess Zelda commanding the royal armies hanging over the dinner table. I have another one of the Warriors of Light fighting Chaos, but I haven't gotten it framed and hung yet. Hell Courtesan would go perfectly in with all of that if I could get a print.

You have until Sunday to make it to Chicago and go see it! It's worth it.

I had lunch with lisekatevans on Tuesday at Ramen-san, which was nice. She said she was feeling a lot better but wanted something brothy to help her recovery, and while I was dubious of Ramen-san, with the weather this week I figured why not. This time I got the lunch set and liked it, and then I posted our lunches on Instagram and got a bunch of comments in Japanese on my post (I always tag and caption my Instagram posts in English and Japanese). My posts are way more popular with Japanese-speakers than they are with English-speakers, though maybe that's because I keep posting Japanese food?

People who love Japanese food: my natural audience.

Had a nice discussion with my Japanese tutor about yard sizes on Tuesday. All the time she lived in Japan, she lived in Tokyo, and her family's from the Tokyo suburbs, so when we got to the part of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ that describes Saku-chan breaking into Aki's house, going through the hedge and past the garden pond, she couldn't wrap her head around it because she was thinking of cramped Tokyo apartments. I was thinking of spacious Chiyoda houses (you can see some examples in my Tour of Chiyoda tag), so the idea of a wall and garden made perfect sense to me. It's kind of neat how we can have such a different impression of Japan due to me living in a rural area and her living in an urban one.

I got an email from the JLPT yesterday afternoon, but I forgot about it until last night, and I finally checked it when I was lying in bed before I went to sleep. I didn't pass N2, which is what I was expecting. It's a little but I was prepared. What I wasn't prepared for is that I passed the listening section but not the vocab and reading sections. I get way more reading practice than listening practice, but maybe I was just having a good day? Or maybe I got lucky? Who knows. I guess I have to read more manga for more practice, which isn't really a hardship.

Tonight I'll brave the cold again and go to see Starlight Radio Dreams perform, and then I have two more events this weekend. I'll harden my flesh through exposure to the cold. That's how it works, right?

This was going to be a surprise. I'd been saving it for months. But, well. 奇貨居くべし.

I've been on the Penn Alumni mailing list for literally years at this point but there's never been an event that I was particularly interested in. It's mostly mixers or networking, which I don't care about at all, or events for families with young children, which I don't have and thus also have no interest in. Sometimes there are lectures, but most of them are in subjects which I either have no interest or not enough background to derive any useful knowledge from--the most recent lecture is about real estate, in which I have neither interest nor knowledge. But when I heard that there would be a Penn Alumni trip to see Macbeth, with lunch at Riva and a lecture by a visiting professor, all for the price of a normal ticket to a Shakespeare Theatre show...well, that justifies all those mails I skimmed and sent to the trash. So Saturday morning, I got dressed up and hopped on the L for the trip to Navy Pier.


The lecture was before lunch, so after meeting and making small talk (‼️) with the people at my table, we settled in to hear Professor Zachary Lesser’s lecture. It was mostly on special effects, starting with the very first line of the play:

Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches.

Apparently the Globe Theatre had a machine in the area above the stage where cannonballs were rolled around on a metal frame to produce thunder, and there were wires on the sides of the stage where lit firecrackers would be sent down to act as lightning. There’s even a contemporary account from the diary of one Simon Forman, an astrologer, counselor, and lecherous asshole, when he went to see a performance of Macbeth. He wrote about two lines he liked, when the witches say to Banquo, "Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none," and a similar but reversed line to Macbeth that doesn’t exist in surviving copies of the script, and everything else he wrote was about the special effects.

Special effects may even have cost us a few more Shakespeare plays. It was the cannons during a performance of Henry VIII that led to the Globe Theatre burning down (again), and rather than pay the £50 assessed from members of the company to build a new one, Shakespeare sold his shares and retired, dying only a few years later.

The other main point of the lecture was about the political context. Professor Lesser mentioned a pamphlet written by King James I called The True Law of Free Monarchies that put forth the position that only G-d could judge a king and that even tyrants must be obeyed if they were legitimate. Macbeth seems like it pretty squarely supports this viewpoint, with even nature revolting against Macbeth’s rule in the form of an eclipse, ghostly visions, and cannibal horses. Shakespeare also conveniently elides Queen Mary when talking about the line of kings descended from Banquo, since she was Catholic and this was politically undesirable.

Alright, on with the show. Spoilers for the staging between the picture and the line of emoji.


It was great! I’ve never seen a bad show at the Shakespeare Theatre, but I've certainly seen ones about which there's no other comments to be made, like, it was good, we had a nice time, let's go home. Not here.

"Macbeth is a dark show. To enhance that darkness, please make sure your phones are as dark and silent as the grave."

"Oh yes. Then, there’ll be no way to call for help."
-Teller

This was the second show that was partially directed by Teller, after The Tempest, and the universal reaction by the audience was that there wasn't much magic here. The other alumni mentioned it a few times, and I heard it from the crowd as I left. And it's true, but compared to The Tempest, Macbeth doesn't have nearly as much place for it. A lot of the supernatural events that don't involve the witches take place off stage, like the cannibal horses, and the eclipse is easy enough to do with lighting.

But the witches! Their costuming was fantastic--they were dressed in white cerements, with large, hooded grey cloaks, and white paint on their skin except for black around their eyes. Most of their lines were cut so that they spent a lot of the play looking down on the action from above or silently lurking in the background when anything significant happened, but they did have magic. In the first scene where Macbeth and Banquo meet them, when the witches leave, they walk off in separate directions. The two grab ahold of the last witch...but her cloak is empty the moment they lay hands on her. When they spoke, they used a sing-song chanting cadence and kept finishing each other's sentences in a way that reminded me of the Thryy Wyrd Tyyns from Night in the Woods. They were up on the second floor of the stage, and when Macbeth was informed that he was now Thane of Cawdor as prophesied, a cymbal clashed and they began wordlessly singing, much like this (if it had no words, anyway).

They'd also show up sometimes and chant "Sleep" "No" "More" sequentially and in harmony at Macbeth as his deeds weighed on him more and more heavily.

The sound design in general was exquisite. There was a man up on the upper level with a drum set and several other instruments who provided plenty of ominous drumming, clanging bells, sudden tones, and other moody noises.

And the final duel with Macduff! Once Macbeth hears that Macduff is not of woman born (so to speak--something else Professor Lesser said is that the witches' prophecies come true through cheap wordplay, but Macbeth still interprets them in the way that's most advantageous to himself and that's what leads to his downfall), he starts laughing and tries to run to a door only to have it open and a witch steps out followed by Banquo's ghost. A second door has another witch and the ghosts of Macduff's wife and children, and the third door has the third witch and King Duncan. Then Lady Macbeth's ghost appears on the balcony, and Macbeth throws down his sword and runs at Macduff.

In the final scene, the three witches are crouched around the throne of Scotland holding the bag that contains Macbeth's head. They pull back the wrapping, exposing the head--and it opens its eyes, blinks, and gasps. Curtain.

It was a great show.


The other interesting event from my point of view is that as I left, I walked out with Professor Lesser since he sat right behind me. We talked about the lack of magic compared to The Tempest and a bit about competent staging that doesn't leave much room for discussion. He asked what year I graduated and then asked if I felt out of place due to age--I was the youngest person at the lunch and lecture by like 20 years--and perked up a bit when I said that I majored in English. He then asked if I was registered on Penn's English Major alumni directory, and when I said I didn't think so, he suggested I do so if I wanted to help Penn English Majors. The English Department has a mentor program where people who are graduating with an English degree and thinking "Oh shit, what do I do?" can talk to alumni about their lives, and he thought my path of graduation to newspaper work to teaching English to being interested in Japanese and translation would provide a good example of a non-standard career path for an English major.

And you know, I might take him up on it.

Today marks the first week that I've gotten all my reading of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ done for class before we even met for the first reading. In fairness, it's a relatively short chapter and like three quarters of it is dialogue, which is always easier to comprehend than, to pick an example at random, a half-page about how beautiful and pure a girl is using an extended inorganic chemistry metaphor.

(That example was not random)

I also got more practice handwriting, when schoolpsychnerd and I took the postcards we bought at the wedding and wrote them out to our old Chiyoda Eikaiwa students. We do a mix of English and Japanese, with schoolpsychnerd writing the English and me the Japanese, and my penmanship is atrocious. Sometimes I wonder if they can ever read what I've written:


I can instantly read this and know exactly what it says, but I kept having to look kanji up while I was writing because I didn't know how to write them. This is actually a major problem with Japanese writing nowadays, even with native speakers. Auto-complete kanji selection means that writing that takes place on computers or phones can be done phonetically, leading to a phenomenon called character amnesia, or 漢字健忘症 in Japanese (kanji kenbōshō) (article here). I write in Japanese relatively often, but literally the only time I hand write it is for these postcards.

I had a nice vacation--still too short, as they all are, but I was able to go back to work with a minimum of problems. My insomnia last night was entirely down to the people across the alley staying up and talking until 12:45 a.m. on a Monday and drinking like four cups of water because I was inexplicably thirsty. And yesterday was schoolpsychnerd's birthday, so we went out to dinner and I ate duck curry! And I had butter chicken on Sunday, and I'm having more butter chicken tonight...

Yum.

You can tell I made that icon in my early twenties.

I've felt a sense of impending doom for the last few days and I'm having a very hard time pinning it down. I suspect some of it is due to Japanese class picking up again today. Aya-sensei was in ConstantinopleIstanbul for a friend's wedding last week, and this week we've scheduled free chat in lieu of reading more from 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ since she'll have a lot to talk about. Free chat is always more nerve-inducing, but I suppose it's payback for me making the final exam for my second-year English conversation students to talk to me for a few minutes. And I need practice asking questions.

I don't like small talk in English, much less in Japanese.

Some of it is probably because ACEN is coming up and I'm never sure how much I'll like it. The first year we went after coming back from Japan was disappointing, but last year was a lot of fun. It's never related to the actual purpose of the con, though. stephen_poon said that he used to think "These are my people" when he went and never does anymore, and I feel the same way. "My people" are the friends who I see when I go. I used to be very confused by people who went to cons and spent the whole time in the hotel bar talking to people, but it's because I didn't understand why they went. Now I do.

Also, they don't even sell 焼き物 in the dealer's room. What the hell? We need more rice bowls to replace the ones we lost in the Great Dish Crash.

Some of it might be work, though here I can't actually point to anything specific. I just feel like something terrible is going to happen, like I'm going to get laid off or have all my duties switched up for no reason or something. There is absolutely no reason I have to expect this, since my evaluations are consistently good and we're making money for the organization hand over fist, but that hasn't prevented them from suddenly tossing people out the door before, so. I suppose there's nothing I can do but my work and see what happens.

Maybe it's that I didn't get to get a manicure because the salon was too crowded? I really don't know.

It's also reflecting in my dreams, too. I had one last night where I was some kind of space marine fighting horrible shapeshifting tentacled monsters, but fortunately schoolpsychnerd going through her morning routine woke me up, and when I went back to sleep I had no dreams until my alarm went off.

I just wish I could pin down what's bothering me.