You Inner Faery Personality created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Sea Faery You are the beautiful and powerful Sea Faery.  A potent enchantress, none can resist your beauty or your charm, yet none can survive when your wrath is brought upon them.  On the lighter side however, you can sometimes be playful and whimsical, and the host of a wonderful party.          Sea Faery          95% Darkness Faery          90% Forest Faery          85% Wind Faery          85% Meadow Faery          80% Flower Faery          60% Mountain Faery          60% Mushroom Faery          50% River Faery          50% Mother Faery          45% Winter Faery          45%

I think the result of the test is interesting... (Can't resist tests - I'm an addict)

I like the description (who doesn't want to be mysterious and irresistible?), but it's just that I have a strange relationship with Sea. Or actually, I never think I have one, before I have to go on for a longer time without the scent of it. And then I suddenly realize how much I miss my Sea. Mainly the scent of the sea, since the Baltic Sea is quite quiet compared to the bigger seas.

I've been thinking for a long time that I should go and stay at our summer cottage for a longer time - it's situated on a smallish island with a smallish village, and there's pretty much nothing to do. Except of course chopping wood, carrying water and, well, being. I'm thinking about shutting myself there to write and do research for my MA thesis. Just to be and to see how it affects me. And to watch the sea.

But even though I'm fascinated by the sea, I can't swim. I don't like being IN the sea. I'm afraid of being in the sea. I like to jump in and out when coming from the sauna, but only if I know my feet will touch the bottom, and once when for some reason I couldn't feel the sand and my head went under the water, I panicked and spent the next 10 min trying to calm down - for a second my body had been sure it would drown.

I don't trust the sea to be nice. It needs a healthy amount of respect.

So, I certainly don't have anything against being a sea faery. And the following Darkness/ Forest & Wind -categories don't really surprise me either. Nice test. :) Thank you for DragonMuse from whom I nicked this...

I know I've been getting snide remarks for years about my bad posture in iai - the exact term having been "granny technique". I especially remember one certain iai seminar in England when a certain sensei, every time he passed by me, had to call me "obaasan". (Ok, it worked, I admit that. And snide remarks are what I've come to expect from old japanese men. Actually, I kind of feel betrayed if a whole iai seminar passes without any of them. But I still hear about it...)

But come and take a look on me now... Yesterday evening I REALLY looked like a proper 150-y.o. kotatsu-baachan - you know those old ladies that can be seen in Japan who walk with their backs at a 90 degree angle? Well, that's me right now. I will have my trusted chiropractitioner (is that a proper word?) crush me open on monday morning, but before that I'll be pretty much tied to bed (or the sofa, which however is too soft so that I can lie there for only some hours before having to escape upstairs on my futon) for the whole weekend. Well, obviously I already dragged my laptop here, I have my new and way-too-high-tech-phone to play with, books, someone to carry me coffee (ok, I have to get it myself, damn), my iTunes and almost everything one could hope to have to kill one's boredom. Except of course conversation, but hey, can't have everything, now can you?

Except that of course when one knows one can't be moving anywhere, the psychological (or something) need to do anything BUT lie still becomes overwhelming. It's strange that no matter how much I dream about being able to just spend time doing nothing but read, blog or whatever, when the time comes to do nothing but it it's actually the last thing I want to do. And this happens every damn time. (Nope, not the first time I'm down with back problems) But there's nothing to do but wait for monday and take some pills in the meantime.

And on top of everything else there's no food in the house. No bread, no eggs, nothing but 2 potatoes in the fridge (an ongoing joke in our family). So, on top of not being able to move, having a constant pain in my lower back, irritated by boredom, I'm also starving. :D Ok, it's not that bad, I'm only channeling all my boredom to my blogging, which is just too bad for anyone who reads this.

The main problem after the back pain itself, including the inability to walk, is that very soon the whole back from neck downwards is hurting, sometimes down until the knees. Actually the most painful part of the chiro isn't the point when the doctor cracks the back - the sound is sickening enough but it doesn't really hurt. What hurts is when he massages the back muscles open before the big cracking operation. That's when I shout from pain. Another problem is that if my neck muscles get cramped, I get huge headaches. So, in 2 days I should be a major pain in ass for everyone who is unfortunate enough to be near me. Including myself.

Thank gods (and bodhisattvas too, for that matter) I have the chiro first thing in monday morning.

For the first time in a veeery long time, I just felt I wanted to offer thanks to the divine. I lighted a stick of incense, and hands palm to palm offered a silent thank you out there...

Whatever else might happen I'm happy to be alive - no matter how hard it might be from time to time. And for that I'm thankful.

I'm thankful that someone just reminded me yesterday that the point of life is to make the most of it - even though life is full of suffering and problems you must try to live it to the fullest.

Now when did I forget that again..?

I just can't help feeling that I'm being given some nudges by the divine 2-4...

And that if I don't react soon I'll be hit. Hard.

What is the probability of me meeting someone at the exact time I'm starting to fall apart, then I'm restored (more or less, but actually less) but left with the feeling that things DO change. Meeting someone who I feel instantly drawn to, and from whom I get the feeling that we might be so alike? Someone with whom I can talk and who I think understands some of the things I'm going through? Someone I feel for when I read his blog entries, the few ones he has - and catch myself feeling that he has written my thoughts there.

And now here's a catch you probably didn't wait for: there's actually 2 of these persons (ok, the blog thing applies to only the more problematic case), the other one being a girl I've known for some time but now become really close with. The other one... Well.

And as if this wasn't enough - just as I start to get down from my first high of these meetings and decide to do nothing much about it, to get back home and give my previous relationship still one chance (I wouldn't do anything radical by email, even though it would be easier...), what happens?

My man decides to pull off one of his sulking-angry-stunts basically blamig me for something (I still don't know what I'm supposed to have done this time) and trying to get me to paw and comfort his ego. Well, guess what? At the moment:

I. Just. Couldn't. Care. Less.

And I'm so tempted to tell him that that I won't respond his last email before something happens. To one way or the other. As I said, no rash decisions over email, but still...

And then I hear comments about leaving people, even encouraging me - some of them from the exact people from whom I want to hear them.

And just when it starts to bother me more and more that I can't share some sides of me with my current boyfriend, I first of all find someone with whom I can speak about anything literally the whole night through... And someone from whome I get the feelings that he's been there and might understand me in a way others usually don't.

Hints or just wishful thinking? Whatever they are, the timing is, as always, immaculate...

And on a lighter note...

After a long and rocky road with japanese poetry, I've finally found a poet I like. Yes, it's true, you heard correctly. Or should I say, I've found a poet I understand, at least in translation. Weeell... Understand some of her poems, because some of them are even harder to understand than the classical waka I've been complaining about before.

Yosano Akiko.

I mean, she's just brilliant. *g* She's a woman poet of the early 20th c. whose best-known poetic work, Midaregami, was published in 1901. And it's radically different from any other tanka I've read this far. She also wrote a modern translation of Genji Monogatari in the 1910's and Genji poetry. And in Midaregami, as you might already have figured out from the title of this blog entry, she writes love poetry (is there such a genre as lust poetry? Because if there is, that's what her poems are) about monks. And I'm just writing an essay about her poems and the tradition of longing for buddhist monks in Japanese literature... (Yes, it's an scholarly essay folks. I have proof from 11th c. onwards that watching out for hot young monks isn't a bad thing - on the contrary, there's enough precedents to make it a traditional form of art *g*)

I might have mentioned that buddhism isn't the dry sexless religion one might think when reading some boring explanations of it. Well, this poetess certainly has opened my eyes to poetry in a whole new way... *g* Here's one as an example, as translated by Carter:

Must you lecture me?
Must you expound your Way?
Enlighten me?
Put your karma away now -
I offer you hot blood.

Or the one that got me hooked to her for the first time, also translated by Carter:

Not even once
have you touched my soft flesh
coursing with hot blood.
Don't you feel a bit lonesome,
you - always preaching your Way?

At least something I understand! At last I've found the karmic bond between me and waka (I knew it must exist somewhere...). At last I can be a proper student of japanese culture. :D Now I need to find a favorite manga/anime, and I'll have everything covered (and while searching for the perfect manga about young handsome monks I'll just go by my manga Tannisho and the manga in which Shinran battles demons while wearing only a shredded loincloth).