Today’s frivolity.

[snarp]

Things that smell nice together: Nippon Kodo Mainichi blend incense, Earl Grey, and rain.

I woke up at two PM wanting bacon, so I went to the store, bought bacon, fried it, and ate it with fava beans and sushi rice. Fava beans seem to have more flavor frozen than fresh. They are not a very classy food in Japan - apparently, like edamame, you have them with beer at bars. My manager thinks it’s funny that I eat them so often.

It’s strange to walk outside on a warm day, sweating and feeling dumb for having worn my coat, and spot, through an abrupt gap in the houses, the mountains still covered with snow. It feels like someone might have cast a spell on them, to hold them back; or cast a spell on my coat.

A nice thing about living in a non-Christian nation is that the mail runs on Sundays. I have a tiny adorable Kodansha English Library edition of Comet in Moominland now, as well as a new Japanese textbook (for me) and a new English textbook (for Mee, Goody Proctor, and the Devil).

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Interesting fact: the mail used to run seven days a week in the US--it didn't stop until after the Civil War, when the combination of the telegraph and an expanded rail system made seven-day postal service slightly less necessary for successful commerce, and correspondingly more vulnerable to the pressure of Christian pastors who considered Sunday mail to be a violation of the fourth commandment, and had been campaigning literally for decades to have it shut down. The hell-no-we're-not-a-religious-state argument against enshrining the Bible in government services and institutions held fast a remarkably long time.

[snarp]

Somehow I feel as if this story explains a lot about America, though I can't articulate why.

I wonder around when the no-selling-alcohol on Sundays thing started popping up places? (I'm still startled for a second when the wine shelves in grocery stores aren't covered with nets or blocked off on Sunday.)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

I was startled when I moved to California and there *were* wine shelves in grocery stores. In the last few states I lived in, you couldn't sell alcohol of any kind in grocery stores, but here you can sell anything--beer, wine, liqouor.

What textbook did you get (for yourself)?

[snarp]

Kanzen Master Level 3. (The explanations of the grammar are all really perfunctory. It's lucky I only got the book for review, because I think that's all it's meant for, unless there's some kind of supplement out there.)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

heh! Good luck. I've gotta start working on grammar and sentence patterns, but I *suck* at making myself study, which is horrible since I'm constantly trying to get my students to do more self-study. (Although to be totally fair to myself, I think there are a lot more decent English self-study materials produced by actual educators available than there are for learning Japanese. I realize that sentence is gibberish but I have a cold that makes my shoulders ache and I can't make myself care enough to re-write it.)

[snarp]

For the higher-level stuff, yeah, I'm definitely not finding much, and a lot of it's geared specifically towards JLPT test prep. The monomaniacal focus makes it less useful.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I read a book recently about the history of religion and secularism in America, which was heartening for its description of the deeply rooted and steadfast commitment to the secular nature of the US government, and how that endured mostly intact for a long time, but depressing in its description of how far we've gone in mixing up religion (and by religion, I mean Christianity) with our secular public sphere, especially in the last couple of decades, although the seeds of that do go back to the 19th century, with a pretty big boost around the 1950s.

But all that "Christian/Judeo-Christian nation" stuff is pure bull. The Founding Fathers were very clear on that, and it takes willful denial for anybody to convince themselves that the Constitution was written with any such intention.

The booze rules vary from state to state, I think. I know in Massachusetts (where is it now legal for stores licensed to sell alcohol to be open on Sundays, although it wasn't as recently as I think 2002 or so?), things being closed on Sundays was leftover from something called the blue laws, and I am under the impression it had to do with the Puritan heritage of the state, so that probably goes back pretty far.

You still mostly can't buy alcohol in grocery stores here, on Sunday or any other day--there's like a tiny handful in the entire state that have liquor licenses, and a recent ballot question that would have increased the available number of licenses for grocery stores was overwhelmingly defeated after being strongly opposed by law enforcement.

I'm always surprised and jealous to find out that you can easily buy wine in grocery stores in Texas and California. Lucky bastards.

[snarp]

My vague impression from history class (I have had many very good teachers, but am a poor listener) is that bursts of America-Is-A-Christian-Nation syndrome seem to pop up when people are feeling insecure in the Americanity - similar to how sharia has gotten harsher in those Muslim countries that we have, you know, invaded recently, except that we're more sensitive. Being slightly less rich and powerful, slightly less white, or slightly less Protestant than a decade previously is obviously very frightening. I guess people tend to store the My Religious Affiliation stuff in roughly the same part of their identities as the My Nationality stuff, so when feeling scared of the Other, the two can come out jumbled together.

The booze rules vary from county to county and town to town in Kentucky, as in a lot of the south. (Kentucky and Kansas appear to be the only states with complex enough liquor status to merit their own Wikipedia articles. Kansas's article is longer, so clearly we need to get on the ball on that.) There are lots of liquor stores at wet/dry county borders with signs saying "Last Chance" on one side and "First Chance" on the other.

Apparently dry counties have more traffic accidents than wet ones, because people have to drive further to get their booze. On reflection, this makes sense.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I was trying to confirm the exact phrasing of the Will Rogers quip on dry towns, which I *think* is "The South is dry and will vote dry. That is, everybody sober enough to stagger to the polls will,"
but when I Googled it, I found half a dozen variations with Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, and Nantucket. I feel this is sort of telling.