To my relief, the stray cats didn’t forget me over my summer elsewhere; my morning run is now reliably interrupted by a belly-patting session with Miké-chan in the park, and one of the green-eyed cats near the nighttime junior high came immediately over to say hi when I went past, winding in and out of the fence and bonking its forehead into my hand.

How does everybody save (non-work-related) files as a rule? As with so many things I am old-school and inefficient; at the end of the month, the latest version of everything I want to save goes onto a couple of USBs, stored in different places. If it’s the middle of the month and I want to be sure to save something, I email it to myself. I never use GoogleDocs etc., everything is on my hard drive + memory sticks.

Work: Someone in a translation I was editing had come up with “adversary management,” which confused the hell out of me until I realized the intended meaning was “adversity management.” Presumably “adversary management” is a little more active…

I found a decent, simple recipe for limeade and have made it twice with very good results. Actually the first time, I couldn’t find limes in the supermarket and had to make sudachi-ade instead; even more of a pain to squeeze (it takes three or four sudachi to make up one lime), but just as good taste-wise. Lovely tart pale-green summer drink, and the kitchen smells deliciously limey as a bonus.

My mom reminded me of a piece of graffiti seen years and years ago which became a family joke: “I love grils. / [Different handwriting] You mean girls. / [Different handwriting again] Hey, what about us grils?”

Courtesy of the farmboys as usual, I learned the Chinese word for post-its (便利贴, convenient stickers) and duct tape (大力胶, really strong tape). Also 心急吃不了热豆腐, you can’t eat hot tofu when you’re fretting, roughly equivalent to “hold your horses, calm down.”
Earlier this year the actor Zhang Zixian was among the farmboys’ visitors; he’s the one whose nuanced performance as Wang Shi’an in The Rebel absolutely blew me away, and it was mind-blowing in another way to see him out of character: cheerful, comic, laid-back, with a bit of a stammer, obviously very likeable but coming off nothing like either poor screwed-up evil Wang Shi’an or one of the most gifted actors in the business, for all that’s what he is. Performers are something else.

Speaking of performance, Y and I went to Takarazuka a couple of weeks ago because they were reviving their production of Guys and Dolls, which has been one of my favorite musicals all my life. It was very disappointing on one front: the Japanese book and lyrics, dating from the 1980s, are limp and awkward and miss the point entirely more often than not, an extra shame because the original English ones are so sharp. (I know it’s a tall order to turn good English lyrics into good Japanese lyrics which are also singable and mean the same thing, but it has been done! The Japanese lyrics for the latter-day Gershwin musical Crazy For You are a masterpiece.) Also the audience was very subdued, hardly rippling with laughter even at the punchlines that survived into Japanese (“Tell him I never want to speak to him again! And tell him to call me here”), although Y figured this was just a cultural thing. Still, the dancing was very good (including the traditional Takarazuka Grand Staircase at the end), and the singing was a lot of fun: you get used very fast to the “men,” ie women playing otokoyaku, singing contralto instead of tenor/bass, and the second act in particular was riveting. This is from a much earlier production, but the staging doesn’t ever seem to change, and it gives you a good idea of what the otokoyaku sound like (Shibuki Jun as Sky Masterson singing Luck Be A Lady). Parenthetically, it amuses me that Takarazuka is obviously much stricter about policing YouTube than about B站. Also, we killed some time wandering through the theater shop looking at the vast quantity of performer headshots etc., reflecting that the gorgeously androgynous otokoyaku overlap interestingly with the occasional gorgeous androgyny of male C-pop (and J-pop and K-pop) singers, approaching from the opposite side as it were. I imagine there have already been papers written about this as a cultural/sexual/sociological phenomenon.

Music: I’ve probably posted it before, but Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 devolves (or rather sublimates) into jazz in the middle of the second movement, which I can never resist. I’ve linked it with a timestamp here (Mitsuko Uchida’s recording, with notes on YT by the astute Ashish Xiangyi Kumar), but listen to the whole thing if you have a chance.
Also, Jiang Dunhao song of the post (because I can): his own 铁皮火车不停开, sung live sometime last year, which I find very comforting.

In purely personal stuff, I’m depressed and annoyed with myself for taking no steps AT ALL toward ever getting anything I’ve written or translated published, in spite of helpful suggestions on all sides. I’m struggling with the pessimistic feeling that it’s all pointless: I’m terrible at promoting myself (either to agents/publishers or to would-be readers), I’m probably not writing anything that would suit the publishing zeitgeist, I don’t have connections who would do the promoting for me and nobody will take on a writer cold at this point in time, I don’t know the ins and outs of the process of getting translation rights etc., I can’t bring myself to try to get a novel published through what now seems to be the typical route of short stories*, and so on and so forth. Obviously the solution is to get off my ass and at least TRY, and if I fail disastrously in terms of original writing, then to look into self-publishing, but it’s very hard to get rid of the WHY BOTHER YOU WILL FAIL (and probably poison the waters by doing it wrong the first time around) dark cloud.
*Short stories. I think I’ve said so before, but my mind just seems to work in novel lengths? I never can think of anything I want to write as a short story. I have written lots of short story-length fics, but by virtue of being fanfic they’re all kind of…within novel-length [or drama-length, you know, long-form] continuities, not completely freestanding. I don’t know. Ideas for doing something to deal with this?

Photos: Very few, because it’s been too damn hot and humid to be motivated to photograph anything. My limeade and some flowers and the balcony with sudare at sunset, Koron-chan taking her ease, and also WARNING for people who don’t like creepy-crawlies, a very elegant centipede. I thought it was a lot like Oliver Melendy’s encounter …something which looked like a tiny, elaborate trolley car. It was perched on a leaf, standing firmly on ten blunt little round feet that could have been wheels… The whole creature was a rich cinnamon brown color, and along each of its velvety sides was arranged an ornamental row of creamy scrolls., but if you are more Mona than Oliver, maybe don’t click.

Be safe and well.