these things blur together
shards, thorns, and daggers
ribbons, leaves, and flowers
I'd been feeling awful all morning until I started drinking this shou pu'er. Past couple mornings, I've been trying to avoid morning coffees, because if you drink that every morning, it sets your baseline really low. No wonder I had been feeling so miserable. Caffeine withdrawal is a certain kind of hell.
I'm trying to model the transition between paleolithic, neolithic, and chalcolithic mediterranian societies in my head as a game. It looks like Dwarf Fortress, King of Dragon's Pass, and Crusader Kings in a blender. This is kind of a way I test myself to see if I have a grasp on all the changes involved.
I used to be of the sentiment that most shou pu'er tasted the same until I had this Vietnamese one, but I will say of this, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a shou pu'er. It's thick, and smoky, and warms away the autumn cold, fresh enough off the summer to somehow still have mosquitos in this room. Ugh.
Pervading sense of lethargy in everything I do. I haven't made music in like a week.
I will say, though, I did some HSK4 listening practice and was getting most everything. I always have this doubt in me that I won't understand the content without subtitles, but I don't read as quick as I hear, and when I get bogged down in reading subtitles as I listen, it actually makes the material less accessible as I'm too focused on "translating" the hanzi in my head. Zhangkai Chinese was probably right in that Chinese people learn to speak before they learn to read.
My HK friend tells me that the written language should never have matched the spoken language, 天 should refer to sky and 日 to day, and each should be pronounced as according to local vernacular, that 日 is pronounced 天 by Beijingren and etc, so that each Sinitic language can communicate accross barriers. I think of this a lot when I read classical Chinese stuff.
Anki is slowly syncing up to have sounds again since I moved distros. It feels weird to do my sentence mining deck in total silence, though.
I miss Kiyomi.
It's not good to think obsessively about fluency as this goal. A language is a marathon, after all. I have tried to avoid this line of thinking, but repression only defers these things.
And in it's deference, I feel as if I am incomplete to who I ought to be, that there is another Melody the other side of three years from now who is all grown up, who is playing shitty concerts and living in an apartment around Baguio.
Sometimes, there is a Melody who is lying in a pool of her own blood in Myanmar.
But everything flows, and really, truly, there is Melody who is never still, never static, always changing, always learning. In three years from now, she is as puzzled by Spanish as she is by Chinese now. She is reading about Medieval Europeans rather than Chalcolithic ones. She is trying and failing to make this really cool New Wave album. She is watching bad sitcoms with her friends. She's saving money off a job she hates, skipping lunches and living off nicotine lozenges, all so she can speak Welsh in Abertawe. How I am living now is a reflection of how I will live in a couple years from now.
and when I die, people will miss me the same way I miss Kiyo
No completion, no destination
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
ang album na araw neto: https://scsc.bandcamp.com/album/forever-almost-me-again