Sad (What's New?)

SURELY ~ after I said I loved this time of year ~ I cannot have the autumnal blues?

There I was, posting how much I love the golden leaves and bonfires and how they "remind me of new beginnings". I clicked play on Eva Cassidy's Autumn Leaves ... next thing I knew, tears were flowing! And flowed on (intermittently) all day. And the next day. And the day after that. And I still feel down now. But what precisely it's all about I could not tell. (Because I don't know.)

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On to "new beginnings" ~ anyone remember my JAPANESE OBSESSION? This is nothing new ~ I have had a fascination with most things Japanese (not so much the food) since my teens.

I took Japanese classes for a few weeks at university when I was 19. But it wasn't part of my course, and on top of everything else it was too much, so it got dropped. So my Japanese language skills remain at the extremely elementary stage... as much as anything else for the lack of a half-decent textbook! Not a single one I've seen teaches the script along with the grammar ~ no doubt on the assumption that the casual student will find it too difficult. I find this extremely patronizing. Imagine a Japanese person turning up in London saying: "I learned English ~ only I cannot read or write it." Utterly ridiculous!

The one guidebook I used to have: Teach Yourself Japanese Script gave Chinese-originated kanji characters, along with their meanings ~ bamboo, river, mountain etc ~ IN ENGLISH! If you wanted to learn the Japanese words for these things you had to look them up at the back. After a few pages of this I was ready to scream and bang my head on the table. The fact that I still remember what bamboo, river and mountain look like yet haven't a clue how to pronounce them surely says it all.

To remedy the situation I sent of an email this morning to the British-born Professor of Japanese at Oxford. Surely if anyone can recommend a good book, he can ...

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The day finished off with my moody housemate ~ the one I was yelling at a couple of months ago after he claimed to my face that I hadn't said hello to him when I just did two seconds before... that person, who's forever convinced he's right, required my help assembling a double bed which screwed together ~ with non-screwing wooden supporting nubs in between. This man was trying to hold together two bed-ends and a frame with just the wooden nubs. He was planning to put the screws in afterwards. Surely I don't need to tell you how successful this approach was.

I endured ten minutes of such buffoonery before insisting I had to go. I have suffered too many fools over too many years ~ and not at all gladly. Nowadays my patience has run dry...

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AND how was your autumnal day?

Unless you live in Australia, in which case you're surely in the first flush of spring ...

Illustrated (descending order): Eva Cassidy's official biography; Chinese/Japanese characters for bamboo, river, mountain; self-assembley chaos ...