Categories
just life weeknotes

weeknotes, 16/21

– spent the week in the north, helping the in-laws run errands and making sure they got the second round of vaccinations. all the parental units are either vaccinated or have appointments to get that done. hurray! :D

– currently using the momentum from our last hiking trip to plan new stuff. morale has been a bit low, so trying to remember there are things to look forward to.

– put together a walking desk of sorts in my parents old treadmill. it’s surprisingly comfy to type on it — i think i might make one at home, so that i don’t sit so much during working hours. raking up thousands of steps during the workday feels a bit like cheating, but if it works to strengthen the back and make me healthier, i’m all for it.




– while looking for stuff to draw, came up with an idea of drawing this day in (our) history. so everyday i go through our photos and draw something we photographed on this day, in previous years — an haphazard diary of sorts. it’s surprisingly soothing, and also nice to have an excuse to look back and remember.

– 25th of april, always!

Categories
analogue wednesdays

analogue wednesday #259

happy (early) anniversary to us! has it really been 15 years?

Categories
just life weeknotes

weeknotes, 15/21

– this week was just… ugh. being away is amazing, but coming back to work after a few days away feels like being slammed by an avalanche. it’s relentless and overwhelming, and it takes days to catch up.

– on better news, my air plant is blooming! i got it from a friend’s mom, and it has been hanging in our olive tree ever since it got here last summer, looking half-dead. we just let it be, and now there’s pink flowers in it, whoa!

– following our detour into the chinese supermarket last week, i cooked my first gong bao chicken. omg, it was amazing!! :D i feel like i performed some sort of sorcery involving a dozen ingredients that somehow leveled up my powers!

– i finished listening to the artist’s way. i’ve been writing morning pages on and off for years, so it feels good to finally read the book that started this idea of stream of consciousness writing as a sort of rambling meditation, of getting rid of the thoughts that just clutter the mind.

Categories
languages

the thousand character essay

The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless
Sun high or low, moon full or parsed; with stars and lodges spread in place
Cold arrives then heat once more; Autumn’s harvest, Winter’s store
Extra days round out the years; scale in tune with sun and spheres…

from a postcard i’ve recently received, i discovered that the chinese have a rhyming poem with a thousand different characters, which kids used to learn in school, as part of the character-learning process… how weird and wonderful is that?!

it’s called 千字文 and was written by Zhou Xingsi, about 1500 years ago.

a bit of history, from this archived page:

According to legend, Emperor Wu (ruled AD 502-547) of Liang sought a Chinese character literacy text for his son, and to this end had scholars select a thousand non-redundant characters from work left behind by famed calligrapher Wang Xizhi (AD 321-379) to be put to rhyme by the widely learned and talented scholar Zhou Xingsi, who also wrote China’s earliest extant example of a type of historical study known as a Shi Lu or “Factual Record”, the Liang Huangdi Shi Lu. Zhou now applied his heart and soul to the task and created a full rhyming text of four-character couplets, eight characters per line in seven chapters, in only one night; legend also has it that his hair and beard went completely white during those momentous hours. The imperial heir for whom it was written in turn grew up to close the circle by compiling the “Wen Xuan”.

The resulting Qian Zi Wen or Thousand Character Essay was, in the centuries that followed, distributed throughout the Chinese-reading world and has ever since been a major source of inspiration for calligraphers, due in part to its unique feature of non-repeating characters, and for Chinese schoolteachers, tutors, students and general readers as well. This was true especially throughout the ages when a grasp of the classical language was the key to success in traditional China.

Categories
analogue wednesdays

analogue wednesday #258

remember the blue sky.