This space left blank due to exhaustion
Feb. 21st, 2005 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksAnd lo, this weekend I went to Katsucon (a mid-sized anime convention in Washington, D.C.) and it was mostly good, although not without its problems. I am still letting it digest for future write-up and am as well in the near-coma stage of post-con recovery, so
1. Eaten freshly-made tofu in the attached restaurant of a tofu factory in Kamakura, Japan, where I discovered that for the first fifteen minutes after it is made tofu has an incredibly delicate and subtle flavor that requires no seasoning or sauce. After fifteen minutes, it suddenly becomes standard tofu, but the initial flavor is so good that I ate about a pound of it plain in that fifteen-minute window. That restaurant is also noteworthy because every single one of the staff, including cooks and janitor, lined up and bowed to me when I paid my bill. When I smiled at them in polite confusion, one of them blushingly told me that I was the first gaijin the place had ever had. I asked how long the factory had been in business, and was told since the Meiji era (for non-Japanese-history buffs, of whom I believe I still know a few, that's well over a century ago).
2. In desperation during a summer in Ohio, I applied for a job as a phone-sex worker, only to discover that the woman interviewing me was a graduate of my tiny Catholic Montessori elementary school who absolutely could not believe that any alum of that institution would be willing to do that work for the money and refused to hire me.
3. At the Vatican, I once had the opportunity to open the case containing their miniature mosaics (these would be mosaics using pieces of one-sixteenth of an inch across or less-- they can achieve photorealistic detail and were mostly created before the existence of magnifying lenses). I got about twenty minutes to pick them up, handle them, put them under a microscope, and snoop to my heart's content, as long as I told the guard about the techniques used to make them, which he had been curious about for years and which I had been studying. He also wanted to look up my skirt, and I did let him, because my undergarments were far more decent than ninety percent of anybody's swimwear. It seemed fair.
4. Held and petted a stingray, in the water, while it waved its flaps and twined its tail around my arm.
5. I have never seen any movie in which Sean Connery appears other than the movie Zardoz. For that matter, I've seen the movie Zardoz, and I'll be really surprised if anyone else has who doesn't live with me.
6. I first became aware of Dorothy Sayers as a Christian theological writer, and found out some ten years later that she also wrote novels.
7. I have read Neil Gaiman's legendary Miracleman graphic novel, now lost forever to copyright hell.
8. At age twelve, while in San Francisco with my parents, I went to the Haight-Ashbury and bought a lot of T-shirts with pretty colors and patterns on them. We continued onward to Hawaii, where we discovered simultaneously that our travel agent had bumped us up to a five-star hotel, that we had arrived just in time for the mandatory dinner seating and had no time to change, and that my shirt that day, which no one had been paying much attention to, had marijuana leaves stenciled all over it (yes, no one noticed when I bought it, including me). I believe I am almost certainly the only person ever to have worn drug-related sixties kitsch to dinner at the Prince George.
9. My junior year of high school, I made a three-foot by three-foot stained glass mosaic in our spare room, because I'd always wanted to do stained glass. I designed it after a mosaic on the roof of St. Mark's Cathedral, in Venice. I still have it. It's decidedly novice work, but continues to give me a warm sense of accomplishment.
10. While skiing once, I was cut off by an extremely thoughtless person and forced to turn onto the snowboarder's pipeline to keep from a nasty collision. I managed to stay upright on skis down the entire pipeline and land reasonably after the drop-off at its end, but fell down immediately afterwards and caught the sharp end of my ski pole in my ribs. When I went to survey the damage, I discovered that the point had gone through parka, coat, sweater, and shirt, but bounced off the underwire of my bra without even scraping the skin. I had to go lie down with the shakes for a while, though.
1. Eaten freshly-made tofu in the attached restaurant of a tofu factory in Kamakura, Japan, where I discovered that for the first fifteen minutes after it is made tofu has an incredibly delicate and subtle flavor that requires no seasoning or sauce. After fifteen minutes, it suddenly becomes standard tofu, but the initial flavor is so good that I ate about a pound of it plain in that fifteen-minute window. That restaurant is also noteworthy because every single one of the staff, including cooks and janitor, lined up and bowed to me when I paid my bill. When I smiled at them in polite confusion, one of them blushingly told me that I was the first gaijin the place had ever had. I asked how long the factory had been in business, and was told since the Meiji era (for non-Japanese-history buffs, of whom I believe I still know a few, that's well over a century ago).
2. In desperation during a summer in Ohio, I applied for a job as a phone-sex worker, only to discover that the woman interviewing me was a graduate of my tiny Catholic Montessori elementary school who absolutely could not believe that any alum of that institution would be willing to do that work for the money and refused to hire me.
3. At the Vatican, I once had the opportunity to open the case containing their miniature mosaics (these would be mosaics using pieces of one-sixteenth of an inch across or less-- they can achieve photorealistic detail and were mostly created before the existence of magnifying lenses). I got about twenty minutes to pick them up, handle them, put them under a microscope, and snoop to my heart's content, as long as I told the guard about the techniques used to make them, which he had been curious about for years and which I had been studying. He also wanted to look up my skirt, and I did let him, because my undergarments were far more decent than ninety percent of anybody's swimwear. It seemed fair.
4. Held and petted a stingray, in the water, while it waved its flaps and twined its tail around my arm.
5. I have never seen any movie in which Sean Connery appears other than the movie Zardoz. For that matter, I've seen the movie Zardoz, and I'll be really surprised if anyone else has who doesn't live with me.
6. I first became aware of Dorothy Sayers as a Christian theological writer, and found out some ten years later that she also wrote novels.
7. I have read Neil Gaiman's legendary Miracleman graphic novel, now lost forever to copyright hell.
8. At age twelve, while in San Francisco with my parents, I went to the Haight-Ashbury and bought a lot of T-shirts with pretty colors and patterns on them. We continued onward to Hawaii, where we discovered simultaneously that our travel agent had bumped us up to a five-star hotel, that we had arrived just in time for the mandatory dinner seating and had no time to change, and that my shirt that day, which no one had been paying much attention to, had marijuana leaves stenciled all over it (yes, no one noticed when I bought it, including me). I believe I am almost certainly the only person ever to have worn drug-related sixties kitsch to dinner at the Prince George.
9. My junior year of high school, I made a three-foot by three-foot stained glass mosaic in our spare room, because I'd always wanted to do stained glass. I designed it after a mosaic on the roof of St. Mark's Cathedral, in Venice. I still have it. It's decidedly novice work, but continues to give me a warm sense of accomplishment.
10. While skiing once, I was cut off by an extremely thoughtless person and forced to turn onto the snowboarder's pipeline to keep from a nasty collision. I managed to stay upright on skis down the entire pipeline and land reasonably after the drop-off at its end, but fell down immediately afterwards and caught the sharp end of my ski pole in my ribs. When I went to survey the damage, I discovered that the point had gone through parka, coat, sweater, and shirt, but bounced off the underwire of my bra without even scraping the skin. I had to go lie down with the shakes for a while, though.
