got_quiet | February Study

I am back on the wagon of being a good student, sort of.

After a brief hiatus with my book club because I was too busy, I'm back to reading Momo no Kanzume by Sakura Momoko.

Sakura Momoko is a famous essayist and manga-ka in Japan. I first discovered her when I was studying abroad, and asked a bookstore clerk to recommend me something that would be easy for a student to read. She is not exactly easy for a student to read honestly, but that is more because I am a bad student than anything lol. If you're sitting at the high intermediate level I think she's not too bad. She is still kind of perfect for me even though I fucking suck at this stupid language, because her preferred format is essay collections, so each chapter is short and there is payoff every time you finish one. And she is hilarious. She writes with this tone of self-aware hyperbole that turns the fact that she's talking about fairly mundane stuff, like getting athlete's foot, or falling for scam products, into world-ending disasters and high drama. I also turn minor inconveniences into world ending drama so she speaks to me deeply. Meanwhile, one of our reading group members hates Momoko because she is too stupid and impulsive etc., and she also yelled at me because I whine a lot about having forgotten the kanji that I am looking at when it's my turn to read haha. I complain that I am too sleepy for this and she says "Don't make excuses!!"

I have a physical copy of the book and scan it so that my book club can read it, so if anyone studying Japanese is interested in a sample chapter, here is an upload of the scan and OCRed text. I've mostly cleaned it up, but sometimes there is a character here or there that I failed to correct. I don't know how many people both are interested in reading Japanese at this level and care to read this book in particular, but I find being able to discuss a text with other people and hash out the harder parts together to be extremely helpful. I also made an anki deck for the book, but it only includes a fraction of the words, only the ones where I think I will keep seeing them, or I feel shame for not knowing them lol.

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I'm also back to studying tea.

After about a year of hiatus due to my teacher having family matters to attend to, we had our first class in January. It was a complete disaster. My teacher was like, "you forgot everything!" And yeah I did. Even though I frantically reviewed the temae before hand, even how to fold to fukusa, which is the very first thing you are supposed to learn, I just screwed up over and over again. There is an essay in a tea magazine that is titled 茶道はにがてです, (I suck at tea) and fucking same, dude. I don't know why I continue to practice sometimes. It seems that tea is tailor made to be a sort of hellish punishment for those with memory issues. And I have never developed a good habit of practicing anything. Oh, did I mention all her instruction is done in Japanese, so sometimes I just don't know what she wants me to do!

Our second class went much better. I asked the teacher to please let me try the tea from beginning to end without correcting or instructing me, because this often throws me off completely, or I get unsure if I'm doing the right thing if I don't hear her telling me that I should do it. I went from beginning to end and... only forgot to put the whisk in my bowl at the beginning, so I had to run into the kitchen to grab it halfway through the ceremony! But outside of that minor glitch, according to my teacher, I "did much much better than the previous week, even though in everything I did there was an error." But this is basically how it works. I've been practicing for long enough that I know that there are very few people, even my teacher, who doesn't fuck things up constantly, so the goal is to just fuck it up less and less. I'm a perfectionist in so many parts of my life, I don't know how I haven't crashed out completely with this.

With the turning of the seasons we are going to a whole new process, and I'm going to have to learn how to serve koicha for the first time. Koicha is something that everyday people almost never see. It's 10 times thicker than the usual whisked tea, and much harder to prepare correctly. It just keeps getting harder.