Kanji kanji kanji.

[snarp]

I have been doing so many kanji flashcards they have taken over certain other vital neural processes, including quantifying time and the sensations of pain and heat. I think I had a dream about flashcards. I have the idea in my head of the master kanji, with a stroke order requiring nine simultaneous strokes, properly writable only by the thousand-armed Kannon. The last attempt to write it was a five-person effort conducted in Sapporo in 1916. Four died, and the fifth, responsible for only one stroke, went mad.

We went to Nashville over the weekend, and I bought some substandard Houjicha for much more than I should have spent. I was unaware that there was a 1:1 model of the Parthenon in Nashville! There were a lot of reproductions of statues of naked men there, of the variety that had apparently at some point been partially genitally modified by the Roman Catholic Church. By this I mean that the phalli had been removed, but mostly not the testicles. There were also newer statues created for the reproduction by some late-1800s American artists, which reproduced the effect of the Catholic Church’s efforts. So I guess there is a whole Vandalized Art tradition in which these people were working, in which it is necessary to treat the vandalization itself as a valid part of the art? I guess.

I’m positive that it is some sort of sin that I was standing around the tourist trap holding my camera and squinting at small plaster crotches and thinking these thoughts. It can’t be a new sin.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Comments

[starlady]

JLPT? Or just self-improvement? Either way, ego morituri te salutat...

The master kanji sounds, well, to die for.

[snarp]

JLPT 2. I am very crazy and have no chance of passing it.

I don't speak your crazy Catholic moon language. This is a Japanese-only zone! (I became very confused looking at that, because I'm tired and see everything that's not obviously English as Japanese right now. I have this French Pokemon manga sitting around that I was obliged to stare blankly at for a while the other night.)

[starlady]

It's a very crude takeoff (because it's been 3.5 years and I'm too lazy to go look in my dictionary for the proper forms) on the Latin for "We who are about to die salute you" which is what gladiators said to the presider-over of the games before the games. I modified it to say (probably incorrectly) "I who am about to die salute you", because I registered for the JLPT 2 for the second year in a row and for the second year in a row am going to skive off actually taking it in favor of doing something much more fun. So more power to you! I could translate things so much faster if I actually knew more kanji off the top of my head. Maybe I should get some flashcards. Any recommendations, or do you make your own?

I have a volume of Bleach in Korean and sometimes I leaf through it trying to transliterate the hangul for the names, it is an embarrassing lark.

[snarp]

I've previously skipped taking the test after getting the sign-up materials twice. This time I both actually signed up and have already made travel arrangements to get to a faraway test site, ensuring I can't skip. So at least I'll know what it's like for next time.

I can't really make recommendations because I am very bad at kanji. My strategy-of-the-moment is making my own cards using Remembering the Kanji and this vocab list (but only the vocab that uses kanji I've already learned from school or RtK, which makes the usable list SHORT and SAD).

[snarp]

(And I did figure out the Latin after googling it - you would think Star Trek books or something would have taught me to at least recognize the phrase, but no.)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Yes! I vaguely recall going there as a child. Possibly around when we went to the World's Fair.

Do I need to do an Emergency Japanese Tea shipment? D:

[snarp]

My Mom was surprised I didn't know about it. She thought I'd been there before, but if so, I was obviously pretty tiny. It strikes me as a weird thing to find in Nashville.

I actually just got some good sencha, but there's a tea store thegeekgene and Mom always go to in Nashville that had houjicha, and I decided to try theirs. But they are apparently a lot better about black and lavender tea than about Japanese tea, because this stuff is really stale. I'll probably order some from the place where I got the sencha eventually.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Ah, maybe they just have a different specialty.

I had some tea with rose in it from Lupicia the other day and it was drinkable. I was shocked.