Uni For All

Caucasian ladies performing traditional Japanese dance should try to remember that what their childhood dance trainers told them - maintain eye contact and smile! - is completely inapplicable here. A lady performing odori should look like she may commit suicide after she goes backstage. Or next month. Or never. You don't know. This is a very elegant dance; the lady should look inscrutable. I got that clearly enough, from observing the Japanese girls and ladies.

Despite the general slowness of this dancing (it's no kind of workout), the two-hour dance recital at the Japanese cultural center passed quickly enough. Each short dance was introduced by a poem or a cultural snippet, and the music did sometimes get a little lively, and the range of the performers' ages was really delightful - darling little girls, probably as young as five, all through older girl to college girls to moms to older ladies who had some difficulty walking. One of the girls had Down's syndrome, I think. A few girls were half-Caucasian, and two ladies were fully Caucasian. I like unusual amateurish recitals with lots of short numbers! There are often some numbers with surprisingly artistic aspects. And of course little Japanese girls and little Japanese grandmas are cute whatever they do, and dancing in cute outfits makes them amazingly adorable.

Later we went to a food court at a Japanese supermarket. Boy, that is a good deal! Especially as my soba noodles contained longevity tuber; something I hadn't realized when I bought it. Before the new year, the Japanese eat soba made with the addition of powder made from a special kind of tuber which takes seven years to get to the size of a grapefruit. This makes them live long.

Perhaps you have heard the sad story of how the bear meat eluded me? Well, one can get bear meat only from a hunter, since it's illegal to sell non-farm-raised meat for health reasons, and never mind the details now, but I missed my carefully wangled package due to a series of misunderstandings. Very very depressing.

I don't know how this is possible, I won't look this gift horse in the mouth for fear I'll jinx it, but various cuts of black bear are available for sale on-line now! I've never seen this before. Thanks. Yes, I'll be getting some.

At our Christmas party a couple days ago someone assured me that rattlesnake is indeed delicious. I had suspected as much, as it was one of the most expensive meats on exoticmeats.com a while back. I looked again; they're out of stock BUT they have python!! It's of course unwise to order that as well, as I can already bearly contain my excitement.

Also today, I came across this!!! OMG. Some day.

I don't normally sew, but I aim to make a baldachin for my edible-body-painting cart (which J and I will be picking up the lumber for this weekend). So this afternoon I shopped at the fabric district in downtown LA. It's blocks and blocks of cramped mazes stuffed with dizzying piles of fabric rolls, and can be exhausting if one attempts to cover too much ground in one day. The stores are all owned by dark foreigners, some Jewish and some other. One nicely answers their hungry greetings and ambles about trying to collect one's thoughts, perhaps continuing to be pestered, then thanks them and leaves or else makes a decision and then haggles with them. Some of them have such pronounced ethnic features that they seem like racially stereotypical caricatures. I didn't recognize the languages they spoke among themselves, other than Spanish. I had thought I might hear Hebrew, but I don't think I have. Anyway, I found a store with a promising selection of ornate and nicely draping baldachin fabrics, picked up enough 1$/yd fabric to make a test of the pattern, and also some pretty mesh which will be part of J's ice-cream server suit, to be sewn by someone with far more costuming skill than I have.

Later I saw a production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. O'Neill is apparently the only US playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Granted, he got it for some other play, but it seems incredible that he could have exited the brain of someone who thought DUTE was in good taste long enough to write something nice. Whining can be very entertaining, as witnessed by so much literature being based on it. But despite the promising ways in which these characters' lives were messed up, their whining was annoying. It wasn't even as good as real people's on LJ, because it was mannered for the stage. Not well, in my opinion.

The best part of today was hanging out with my sister and having yummy Vietnamese roll-it-yourself rice-paper packages with herbs and pork.

It's posted.

The apartment manager was out by the mailboxes when I went to get the mail. He asked me whether I'd like some food -- it's a standing joke with him now, he thinks I've gotten pretty skinny and it must be a great trial to me. I said I couldn't trust his opinion, as he's Armenian.

And you may or may not know what that entails. In Russia there was a series of jokes about Armenian Radio. There were series of jokes about every nationality in the USSR. The Armenian Radio jokes went as questions from callers to the radio station followed by the station's answers. E.g.: Armenian Radio is asked: What percentage of men like fat women? Armenian Radio answers: Eighty percent of men like fat women. -- What do the other 20% like? -- Very fat women.

He said he is Romanian, not Armenian. I knew he's from Romania, but I thought he was an Armenian from Romania. He does look sort of Armenian, as does his wife. He said perhaps I thought this because of the story of his son's girlfriend, whose father was Armenian, and which was so sad that he wished he were Armenian himself.

She was Armenian. Her whole family was from Armenia. Her father was very old-fashioned and believed she ought to marry only another Armenian. The father's wife, mother, and other children were for the manager's son, so they continued to see each other. But when the father's mother suddenly died, there was no-one to put pressure on the father anymore; his wife could do nothing. The father insisted that the girl marry a certain Armenian who was 23 years older than her. She had no choice; she had to do it. She was 22 years old. No, this wasn't in the old country, but right here -- the manager has been by their house, and more recently saw the girl's mother briefly while he was driving in his car and she in hers.

His son was devastated by this. He was in love with her like that -- the manager waved his arms in the air above his head. He grieved for three years, and didn't date. Then he started dating, and eventually married and is very happy.

Then I remembered that I thought the manager was Armenian because that's what my mom told me. She's become a bit hard of hearing in the past few years, so she probably misheard him when he said "Romanian."

We got back from Houston Tuesday night. It was a short but productive trip: we saw various friends and family, bought groceries for J's great aunt, kayaked for a couple of hours, and ate well, as expected.

We weren't gone long enough to engage the cat sitting service; I just left the cats extra food and water. Therefore I fully expected upon returning some accumulated assorted unpleasantnesses which the cat sitter would have otherwise removed. I regularly clean up after the cats but our absence ensures a heightened rate of grossness ... Vacation is rough on them, but as a pet owner, you stop worrying about that after the first few times. What else can you do?

The only uncertainty is the exact nature, quantities, and positions of the deposits. I would have been very surprised by a clean litter box bathroom floor, and of course I had no cause to be. There was a strange little arrangement there which formed a perfect arrowhead, although I couldn't tell what it might have been pointing at ... just at the wall seemingly. Whatever. The really impressive thing was in the living room:

Indeed, the DVD player has issues. It forgets your place if you leave the DVD in there overnight. But other than that it's OK. I might understand barfing on the TV remote, our TV is tiny and about 10 years old and our friend laughed at it, we ought to get something decent instead ... Of course they're just cats, they might have gotten the two remotes confused ...

So tonight we watched an episode of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi and J worked the player using the onboard buttons and dials. I hadn't cleaned up the remote because I wanted to take a photo but couldn't find my camera. Now I have though, and I have written this thing up, so I will clean it up sometime soon.

BBC has a story about Zimbabwean bloggers decrying the recent violence over there. It opens by quoting someone's complicated and logically very flawed analogy, and this made me close the article and lose sympathy for these people's pain. Take note, everyone in the "blogosphere": if you want my sympathy, make sure your writing doesn't suck.

It's the Chinese New Year so J suggests we try Red Pearl in Huntington Beach for dinner. I'd wanted to go for a while, having read a good review.

I loved a bad boy when I was little. I really loved him. Mom and I were walking outside one evening and I said the moon was lovely and I'd like to walk under the moon with him, and kiss him, and f*** him. She asked me if I knew what that meant. I said no, but Elona said that's what you do when you love someone.

He was a couple of years older and he was a rotten kid. He used to make me give him my marbles. I'd be outside playing marbles with my friends and he'd come over and I'd give him some. I couldn't help it. What a jerk.

That Elona was a bad girl too. He hung out with her. She was a thief. I mean really a thief. I stole some doll furniture from some other kid too but I felt really bad about it. I hid it behind my dollhouse and didn't use it. Then I told my mom and she brought over the parents of the kid I stole it from and I tearfully apologized and returned it. They said it was OK, no big deal, all the kids do it. But Elona was something else. She was older and she was still a thief. I moved away from there and then met her again by chance later, I don't remember how many years later, maybe two or three. I went up to her room and there among her toys was my little doll. I took it back and asked her if she was ashamed. She said no.

I don't remember what his name was. I don't remember his face either, except that he was handsome. And had light curly hair.

Woke up at night again and couldn't go back to sleep. When that happens for long enough I get hungry and then it gets considerably harder to fall asleep. I try to fight it for a while but I know I'll fall asleep easier if I have a bowl of cereal. Hunger makes the circuits that depress thoughts about the negative give out and out it comes, enhanced by fantasy. Ridiculous but effective at keeping me up all dwelling on feeling sorry for myself. It makes sense ... being full commonly has the effect of making one blissful: the negative is wiped out, and the positive is boosed and enhanced by fantasy.

Another funny thing about trying to fall asleep is that logic circuits shut down and thoughts merge into illogical dream-thoughts -- and you'd think this would be a good and welcome thing but often enough my brain jerks itself awake from half-sleep with, "No! That was illogical!" Then I'm awake again and exasperated at its stupid particularity.

A couple days ago we were at a bar with some Burning Man friends. One of them brings his spiffy little laptop to these meetups to surf the web. Some normal bar patron assumed from this that our group were nerds of some sort. jpmodisette set about disabusing him of that notion (although actually we all were), explaining all about BM. Then the guy with the laptop jumped into that conversation in his inimitable way and explained that polyamorous people (he camped with PolyParadise last time, who were very nice to him and helped him (he needs help sometimes, he has Asperger's syndrome)) are just regular people like anyone else, no matter what you might think. jpmodisette just let him talk, with the result that the bar patron was left with the impression we were all polyamorous.

I have a new spiffy little laptop which is even smaller than the guy's beloved one, so one use for my laptop (I am surfing the web on it and trying to justify its cost to myself) would be to take it to the bar next time and set it up and annoy my friend. Except that this would tip the scales back toward us being nerds and away from us being polyamorous, which is undesirable. So, I figured I would leave it set up pointing to polyamorous sites. But on the other hand, I kind of like the blend. To polyamorous robot sites, then.

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I discovered that the Internet contains NO information about polyamorous robots. Googling "polyamorous robots" gets ZERO hits.

Unable to leave the Internet in this sorry state, I have compiled some rudimentary information about polyamorous robots. Naturally I cannot put it behind a LJ cut! It has to be out there, that is the whole point. Here goes:

Robot reproduction is inherently asexual. Robots pick pieces of other robots they like and incorporate them into their offsping (or themselves). Robot offspring are born full-sized so there is no need for all the internal female reproductive structures and mammary glands. Why then have robot genders? Only for enriching the sexual experience. (Why have a sexual experience? Because without it there can be no question of amory of any kind; in this discussion we assume amory and consider the possibilitiy of its being poly.) Since genders are there only for sexual enrichment there is no need to stop at two. Assuming multiple genders, we must suppose polyamory.

On the other hand, if there's n genders and group size tends to be n, then is it polyamory? ... I think I may be out of my depth here. I better ask the polyamory people before I say something stupid.

Already my new laptop is justifying its existence.

Also sound works on it, unlike on my desktop where I've been too lazy to fix it, so I can enjoy the video links hlurie sends me. Here's a nice one.

Today Burning Man tickets went on sale at 10 AM PST. While everyone else intent on getting the cheapest-tier tickets sat excitedly by their computers counting the minutes and exchanging saucy emails, I was driving home from the pet supply with cat food and litter. I made it back with a few minutes to spare, waited for the BUY IT NOW button to appear, pressed it, was told there were 2,974 others ahead of me, and after 45 minutes got to order my two cheap tickets, $195 each, hooray!

I thought I'd be back in time when I went to buy cat food but I wasn't sure. The next-cheapest tickets were $225 (by now, both of these levels have sold out) so it could have turned out to be expensive cat food, but what are you going to do.

At the pet supply checkout line the woman ahead of me was quite atypical for this area. This part of Costa Mesa is solidly affluent, and the people are fairly good-looking and well groomed. This woman's only apparent garment was a stained, oversized t-shirt, although it would be naturally supposed that the shirt concealed short shorts and thus the outfit was no worse than sloppy. She smilingly bought one item, a small box of cat litter, and went outside.

I paid, and as I wheeled my cart up to my truck another cart came rolling from the van parked next to me and across the parking lot. I began putting away what I'd bought, anticipating seeing the van's owner come to retrieve the runaway cart any second. He or she might be delayed putting away some large purchase, I thought after a little while, still not seeing anyone correcting this cart error and hearing someone moving about in the van. Then there was a loud thwack and I saw the box of litter that woman bought, now empty, hit the pavement between our two cars. The van started to shake. I couldn't see inside because all the back windows were reflective. But I noticed that the back of the van had a Jesus fish and an American flag sticker.

I understand about pushing the cart across the parking lot and throwing the empty box on the pavement, despite smiling at the store's cashier. There is a definite element of smugness in the civic-minded ways of the affluent local citizens, which one in this woman's circumstances might feel has very little to do with her. I wonder a little why she bought this rather expensive litter: over $5 for one litter-box's worth, whereas crappier litter in a bigger bag would have been at least half as expensive. But both cats and people are particular about litter so it's not surprising. And if you live in a smallish van with your cat, you really want to make sure you are both OK with the litter. The thing that still puzzles me is why she used a cart at all, given her small purchase. Perhaps it is a nicety she enjoys, like smilingly shopping for good litter at a proper pet store instead of getting the cheapest litter at the supermarket.

jpmodisette came across the Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation site and chatted me the link. They have some childhood goat trauma stories there, but I like my mom's better.

Mom spent her early childhood in the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Her family shared a small wooden house with another family whose father worked at the little factory Mom's father managed. Their neighbors were the other factory workers. Her father received an offer for promotion that would have meant managing a bigger factory but he turned it down, fearing the Stalinist purges -- upper management were more vulnerable. By his position he qualified for a telephone to be installed at his house but he turned that down too, because rumor had it that the KGB also looked up people to arrest randomly in the phone book.

Because they lived so far out of the city center they could have a vegetable garden and a few small farm animals, which was a great help to them. They had chickens and for a while, a couple of goats. The goats, Milka and Lubka, terrorized Mom when she'd come out into the yard without her mother. If she dallied there they'd put their heads down and chase Mom on top of the shed. Mom would yell for her mom to come and rescue her, and when the goats heard her coming they'd jump away from the shed and begin to innocently crop grass, appearing completely uninterested in Mom on top of the shed.

Both of these goats were female -- why would a small householder keep a billy? They don't give milk and they stink, unless they're castrated. But you probably can't tell their genders so easily just from their names -- after all they sound a lot like Mishka and Grishka, the villainous Russian circus performers from Octopussy. In Russian "ka" is a modifying ending added to names, signifying roughness. Thus it is particularly suitable for animal names, but it is also commonly applied to children's names by other children, or by friends to their friends' names. There are many ways to modify a name in Russian! For the diminutive Luba of the base name Lubov (Love), there come to mind: Lubka, Lubushka (this time connoting conversely tenderness), Lubañka (ditto), Lubochka (cuteness and smallness), and then various more fanciful variants such as Lubchik and Lubushkin.

Over Christmas dinner my sister told jpmodisette and me that her boyfriend's dad had a stroke the day before, but was now fine. This made me happy since his being fine may be a positive consequence of my dad's stroke. When the boyfriend's dad's stroke happened, the dad said that it wasn't serious and they shouldn't worry, but the boyfriend knew better than to listen, having half a year ago driven my sister to the hospital where our dad was being evaluated. He knew the story: our dad too had said they should wait and see, and have breakfast, and go for a walk, and they did! It was only Mom with him, and she went along with what he wanted. She finally called their family doctor and began explaining the situation. He told her to stop wasting time talking and take Dad to the ER! Getting there fast is crucial, because brain tissue dies quickly without blood supply. Then they went, and eventually the surgeon got the clot out of his brain, and he has since recovered remarkably, but he is permanently affected.

My dad's stroke had apparently happened sometime during the night, because he woke up with the physical signs (weak arm, sagging half of face) and told Mom that he'd woken up around 4 feeling dizzy or headachy, and went back to sleep. This certainly striked a chord with me ... The previous year jpmodisette's dad woke up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom, found his legs too weak to carry him and so went on all fours, and then went back to sleep. In the morning half of his body was paralyzed and he barely managed to telephone his wife, as he was alone in the house.

Mom has since made the point that any common stupid woman, if she wakes up in the night feeling funny like that, will know something is seriously wrong and will elbow her husband awake and insist that he drive her to the ER. Mom found out the hard way it's quite the opposite for men. Denial is a very common response when serious illness strikes.

Both times I took jpmodisette to the ER it was over his protests. The first time, his upper lip was flapping open as he was protesting (he'd flown off his bike into a tree). Not quite all the way to showing his gums and teeth, but it was still pretty impressive. After he agreed to go, he began insisting he drive, but I wouldn't let him do that either, which was also good because on the way there he hallucinated and nearly passed out. At the ER they let him go in front of everyone else, and then they let me watch as they stitched up his mouth and ear. The second time it wasn't quite so impressive and they didn't let me watch, but it was still good I took him.

In conclusion: men lose all credibility when they're injured. Make them obey your authority, even if for some reason you normally do not.

The pravda.ru article doesn't actually talk about fragile men or how they were horrified. This paragraph is the closest it gets to the topic promised in the title:

"Doctors say that men may run certain risks when they experience a wonderful pleasure of undressing a woman. An opinion poll was conducted to reveal that forty percent of men often find it problematic to take bras off their women. Clasps and straps turn out to be a real trouble for men at times. On average a man spends 27 seconds to take off a bra using his both hands. This is incredible but some men participating in an experiment spent 20 minutes taking off bras! An incident that occurred to a 27-year-old man suggested researchers the idea of conducting the experiment. The man broke his finger and got copulas seriously hurt when attempting to take a bra off his woman. The trauma resembled the one typical of mountain-climbers. The incident occurred when a finger of a man got stuck in the clasps of the woman's bra and he made an attempt to pull it out. The unlucky man had his hand put in plaster for three weeks."

My favorite part is the use of "copulas." I bet you've never heard of this word before.

Friday evening, while jpmodisette battled his way home from a Canadian conference with a very recently stripped-off toenail, I attended the pressing of the new wine at the Dark Side Winery. Luckily another girl showed up with her boyfriend to do most of the heavy lifting; the others were all older men, and while hardy, concerned about their backs.

There was plentiful tasting and I thought the sweet new wine was excellent just as it was and it was a shame it couldn't stay that way. It didn't seem wise to voice this opinion though, since the owners proudly explained that all their wine winds up bone dry. It winds up amazingly good too; even I can tell. They explained a little about why. For one thing the bigger commercial wineries, despite big expensive equipment, don't control their processes nearly so carefully as these garage wine makers. Also Dark Side gets top-notch grapes from small vineyards, picked at just the right moment. They don't come cheap, but this wine brings home the first-prize ribbons.

My camera was still sticky from last week's crush when I took these pictures.

Today mrmonkeybottoms allows us a rare glimpse of the mysteries of her profession.

Driving today I saw a license plate ahead of me that made me giggle uncontrollably. I giggled for a whole long block driving behind this SUV, and showed no sign of stopping it. I thought wow, this is going to be at least a two-block giggle. In the middle of the next block, though, I realized I was faking it, so it rapidly wound down.

The license plate said CALUMNI. I don't know whether this was intentional or an artifact of a poor vocabulary. I was too disoriented with giggling to notice whether they had a frame around the plate to specify which CAL they meant ... although that would still leave it ambiguous as to whether they loved or hated this campus.