Fried Fast Food on a Full Moon

Not a good idea!  I should know better -- I do know better -- but something about the holiday season makes judgement fly out the window like a lot of reindeer on a mission, driven by a rotund guy in a funny hat shouldering a big bag of Jack in the Box...and I don't mean the archaic toys. My digestion last night was eclipsed even more profoundly than the actual eclipse of the night before, of which I did manage to catch the waning portion at 4:30 a.m.  It can't be that cold if I can stand naked on the lanai in the moonlight without shivering, although I didn't linger that long.

Last night I should have left my warm bed to sit upright while contemplating the full moon, trying a Moon Cream Meditation that was demonstrated last spring in Wudang, but I was tormented restless with excess stomach acid and vivid dreams, if I really was asleep, of Dickensian England and medieval Korea.  I'd just finished the 8th and final episode of Bleak House, Dickens's tale of an interminable lawsuit which pretty much consumes all the plaintiffs up to the point where the final will is discovered.  Simultaneously discovered is that the lawyers have consumed the estate, so there's nothing left to distribute anyway. The adaptation does have a positive, if not completely happy, ending (and reminds me that there is one last element in my father's estate, latent over five years, which could possibly pay for a trip to China...Resolution for Year of Dragon: must call lawyer.)  I don't think I could have endured actually reading Bleak House; the screenplay with the marvelous late Denholm Elliot and Diana Rigg, was compelling and sufficient, though I could tell there was probably a lot left out in the 8-hour 1985 BBC rendering: quantity, if not quality. (Dickens was a paid-by-the-word writer...where do I get a gig like that?) 

I thought I might try another piece from the BBC collection, but The Pickwick Papers failed to grab me; I succumbed to revisiting a favorite Korean drama, Emperor of the Sea.  I needed a Song Il-guk fix and though he doesn't appear until the fourth Korean hour of the 51-episode drama, when he does, it's worth it.  Just as savvy as Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow, but more sinister, and less Keith Richards grubby, not BBC but KBS, the Pirate of the Yellow Sea may see me through the holidays, even though a new Korean Drama, a birthday present, waits to be opened up.

Song Il-guk as the delectable Yum Moon

How ironic to recall on this morning after serious lunar events and indigestion that SIG's character is named Yum Moon!

RANDOM RANTS

My mind is cluttered, disturbed, boggled, full of sloshing debris like the tsunami wash. Many thoughts, observations just flooding through, eddying around.

I might attribute this condition to the anticipated SUPERMOON. Seems like every time a month goes by, there's another lunar anomaly to worry about. Closest in 18 years! But 18 years is nothing in the large scheme of things. I can remember 18 years ago, and I don't remember that moon.

Or it may be from watching news because there's so much of it right now, but never enough of the right kind. Where is Walter Cronkite when we need him? Once in the evening was enough to calm us during the Cold War. But CNN, as sloshy as my mind, where newsmen not only report the news, but make it, interviews the husband of a New York Times reporter among four missing in Libya. He is, according to the CNN reporter, a "Reuter" bureau chief in New Delhi. Reuter? It's Reuters, people. (Although someone named Reuter did found the company.)

Anyway, that bureau chief says of his wife, who has been indulging in some sort of humanitarian aid in Libya, "She has to come home, we've got to have kids." In times of nuclear ambiguity, overwhelming natural disaster and war on several fronts, that's the first thing I always think of!

And then, later, a beautiful woman, not Mr. Reuter's wife, loses the feed to a correspondent and says, "I hate when that happens." Would Cronkite ever have said that? Or something like another reporter, somewhat ditzy, the kind that used to be an excuse for why women should NOT report the news, "The tension so palpable you can almost feel it." I suppose there are excuses for all this, but it seems to me standards have deteriorated.

Or maybe it's the Chantix ad, a drug commercial that I wasn't sure what it was for at first, mostly endlessly listing horrible side effects from skin rashes to suicidal urges while a middle-aged couple chat in their kitchen. Chantix is an enchanting "stop smoking" drug. If the side effects aren't scary enough to make you quit, continuing to smoke might be the better alternative. And who names this stuff? Drug naming and Google account visual word verification seem to use the same algorithms.

So one half hour of TV news makes me crazy. I'm going to go back to watching DVDs of Eagle Shooting Heroes tonight where the subtitles offer better entertainment and edification. In the last episode, the endearingly cute kung fu mistress is kidding with her goofy sidekick. "Would the Emperor like some flesh fruit?" For all I know, that's exactly how the Chinese script reads. Once finished with their dallying over kiwis and pomegranates, they go to seek the magical coveted manual of "splendiferous" kung fu. That sounded a little too Akbar and Jeff to me to take seriously...until the Wizard said, "No, that's a real word. Look it up."

And indeed it is. Although, according to my American Heritage dictionary, best used ironically. And not recognized by the Google blog spellchecker which wants me to change it to "splenderous." I expect to hear some CNN reporter use it tomorrow.

"In a splendiferous effort by Japan's National Defense Force, with the assistance of Gamera, nuclear disaster has been narrowly averted. Flesh fruit has been delivered to all affected. Here to speak with us, is that Giant Turtle...oops, sorry we lost the feed. I hate it when that happens."

SO MANY NEW YEARS, SO LITTLE TIME

I thought I was just dissipated after 12 days of Christmas at home, away from the day job, but maybe it was something else. After a lot of Expensive Big Bangs on New Year's eve, supposedly the last ever since fireworks are being banned in strongly Asian Honolulu (and we'll see how THAT goes), it was January 1. Again. Didn't feel any different than the day before, or really, the year before...and neither did Sunday and Monday and Tuesday. But today does feel like New Year's Day to me.

The moon was calling the shots, demurring to the fireworks, until Monday's New Moon, Tuesday's Dark Moon and tonight, a little sliver of light in the sky, the first waxing crescent, like a delicate silver upturned cup waiting to be filled.

On Tuesday, the Dark Moon, Deng Ming-Dao's 4th passage of 365 was about reflection: "Moon above water. Sit in solitude."

But there was no moon to mirror the divine, to be receptive to the Tao. But tonight, something stirs: "Movement in stillness," the weird reference in Deng Ming-Dao's next passage. 365 Tao is sometimes as relevant as the I Ching. (I recommend reading it every morning on the appropriate day. It's become a sort of liturgy for me over the nearly two decades since it was published.)

My mind, a little fuzzy the past couple days, is suddenly clearing. In a burst of energy, when I came home, I cleaned the kitchen in a flash, disposed of the trash, fed the cats, and sat down to gather these thoughts. I blame it on the moon. (Or possibly the hefty dose of naproxyn sodium I took because the weather and air conditioning in my office were making my hand ache.)

Next New Year: Year of the Rabbit, February 4th. In just a month.

MOONCALF-ISH?
What have I learned from Korean drama? Some King's English!

While watching Muhyul, (at right) via dramafever.com (highly recommended), I have been enjoying subtitles that are by and large grammatically excellent, well punctuated, and I can only hope, more or less accurate. The subtitling team actually takes credit for its work. (The Written in the Heavens Subbing Squad, aka WITHS2). But there is a curious tendency, like in the King James Bible, written the way it is to emphasize antiquity, to employ terms that I'm not sure even Shakespeare ever penned. Certainly nothing I've ever used, lyrical epithets, some of which you may recognize, but others which sent me to my OED. I hope to work some of these into corporate memos and telephone conversations:

• you anserine...innoxious ...undextrous... dullards
• you miserable begonians
• you yeasty slattern
• those facile runagates
• you inutile (not a word I can find, but perhaps a pesky Taoist)
• you fatuitous man
• he's a pertinacious specimen
• you ruthful nimwit
• you wretched dotard
• he's a felonious scapegrace
• those comiserable rapscallions

All of these are usually repsonses to questions like:

What is this audacious pertness? Why did you beguile me with such:

• mendacious trifle
• dastardly prodigality
• heedless nimiety
• shady celerity
• uncanny diabliery

At which point a warning may be issued that someone will "cark himself "(or perhaps, "cark you!"), asking forgivenss of his "peccancy," excusing himself to "micturate" while "perlustrating the intelligence." (I think this might mean taking a piss while considering the state secrets he has been entrusted with and possibly divulged.)

In light of such "ludicrous jabberwocky," due to a "fruit of my misreckoning," a battle fails despite someone having sent "oodles of troops." (Though that last one must have come during a quick ramen lunch away from the Oxford Korean-English Dictionary of Archaicisms.)

But my favorite phrase is "you harebrained mooncalf" which I have been employing recently as an acronym, HBMC.

Which is what I was wondering if I was, hoping not, when I noticed on my very cool iPad app called Luan, which puts the phases of the moon at one's fingertips, that today --my birthday (or as a spiritually inclined friend put it, the anniversary of my incarnation) --is the last waning crescent moon, which precedes the dark moon of Saturday, and the new moon on Sunday. I wasn't sure what a dark moon was but according to Wikipedia it is "the moon during that time that it is invisible against the backdrop of the sun in the sky. The duration of a dark moon is between 1.5 and 3.5 days, depending on the orientation of the Earth and Sun.

"In astronomicial usage, the new moon occurs in the middle of this period, when the moon and sun are in conjunction. This definition has entered popular usage, so that calendars will typically indicate the date of the 'new moon' rather than the 'dark moon.' However, originally 'new moon' referred to the crescent on the first night it is visible, one or two days after conjunction. Maritime records from the nineteenth century distinguish the dark moon (no moon) from the new moon (young crescent)."

The darkmoon, also called the dead moon (kinda creepy following my birthday) is regarded as preparation for the new beginning that begins with the new crescent.

So, I'm wondering if I'm just a harebranined mooncalf for paying any attention to this, or is it kind of cool. Old age is new age?

Speaking of Muhyul, (Jumong/Haesin Redux) it's everything I hoped for. Lots of Song Il-guk, on a horse, shooting arrows, gazing into his doomed lover's eyes, mowing down everyone with a sword. Well, if this gets me going, I guess I'm not THAT old.



Jumong & Haesin (Muhyul above)

FAITHFUL FULL MOON
I thought I was going to miss it. Was at Costco getting my usual 84 pounds of cat litter and came out of the warehouse to see beautiful sunset-kissed pink clouds over the Ko'olau range to the east. I turned my back to load the cat litter and when I looked again, the clouds had gone grey.

Driving home, I was probably a little inattentive, looking for signs of the moon through the clouds, but when I turned into my complex I caught my breath. There it was, directly in front of me, touchable almost. Not easily photographed with a phone camera.

I stopped at the gate and told the security guard, "Wait 'til you see that moon!"

"Huh? Is it full tonight?"

I thought everyone knew that stuff, and everyone I told in the elevator was equally indifferent. Most people have become so disconnected with the rhythms of nature, the magic show, and even more so when there is a big flourish like this equinox/full moon simultaneity. Lots of doors open in the apartments -- it is very hot and humid -- and lots of big flat screen TVs playing.

But I think the real action is outside on the really big screen of the sky. I keep pointing, but hardly anyone seems to care about my finger or the moon.

But, when I opened my own door, I dragged the Wizard outside to see it. "Wait, I have something for you, too," he said, presenting me with two tickets to next Tuesday's Chinese Moon Festival performance at the Hawaii Theatre. How cool is that? He says he may not be able to make it; a dentist appointment that day may interfere. And I have a dentist appointment on the next new moon, but probably auspicious; you can only fill something when it's empty.

But tonight, it's fuller than full!

PENDING EQUINOX
Awoke this morning with my personal barometer/sinus headache caused by low pressure and rain, which will probably prevent viewing the spectacle of the full moon at the equinox tonight, not a common conjunction. Night-skygazing can be a spiritual activity, but is easily hampered by clouds, as a muddy murky mind clouds meditation.

This reminds me of my only "regret" from my last China trip, a failure to observe a particular starry night in the mountains, listening to insects and frogs, away from city lights and traffic noise. We had been out in the courtyard at the kung fu academy, watching the moon set, also noticing a passing satellite. I had washed out some underwear, hanging it on the line in the dark, then did a little qigong, a little standing meditation. I reminded myself that it would be great to come out and do some sky viewing after I had been asleep for a few hours, eyes adjusted to really appreciate the stars after the moon had gone. When I awoke at 3:30 a.m., it was just too cold and damp to leave my finally warm (if hard) bed. I told myself...tomorrow night.

But the next night it was rainy and cloudy, a condition that continued until we left the mountain. It's always better, I think, to regret things you haven't done (as opposed to what you have). You can't change what you've done, but you can always try something again, the way I finally, after several visits to Beijing, managed to spend some time at the Temple of Heaven. It had been on my to-do list for years. (Is that the "bucket list" people talk about? What is that? And the Temple of Heaven itself wasn't all that great after Wudang, though the wandering around in the park on my last day was pleasant.)

Temple of Heaven (for solar festivals)

In any case, I have already seen the Taoist mountain stars in great glory, Big Dipper and all, on a painful dark descent from the main summit of Wudangshan in 2007. I just thought it would be nice to see them when I wasn't suffering from leg pain and exhaustion. That was the real regret. But I got over it.

******
The falling barometer may also have caused some bizarre dreams for me (or it could have been a lot of really bad, if yummy, food I overate yesterday. (A chai latte from Starbuck's, a pumpkin cream cheese muffin, a Beard Papa cream puff...a Korean chili-cheese dog with jalapenos. What was I thinking? I'm fasting today, more or less, and Longjin tea has calmed my stomach.)

The dreams were only in my muddy murky cloudy mind, but they seemed meaningful. In the first, a version of the "exam in class you haven't ever attended" dream, I was among a group of peorsons to be presenting scientific abstracts for proposals. When my turn came to present, I realized that instead of a proper paper, all I had was a couple of pencil doodles on a scrap of bond paper.

"I propose," I said,"to posit an imaginary universe." I went on to discuss something about imagination, imaginary things, all fluid and fluent, it was really good, like a successful Toastmasters speech. When I was done everyone applauded. The next speaker up, said "You're a hard act to follow."

"Why don't we just take a little break, " I asked the moderator. And we did, and I woke up.

Only long enough to remember the dream and fall back to sleep again, when next I was on some sort of job interview, trying to talk to people who didn't really understand me. I was having a wardrobe malfunction, no nudity, just all tangled up, so I threw the uncontrollable bits of my costume (which may have included a sword) over my shoulder like a sari. Then as I was leaving, I met my boss on the way in. This actually happened to me once. She got the job, I got hers.

Practically everyone I know is in some state of distress over relationships, job pressure or lack of such, health puzzles...seasonal existential despair. Perhaps once past the equinox and its unusual associated full moon, things will begin to change. Partly because in past years, this is when I ordinarily would have been returning from China and I have a nagging longing to be returning (one way or the other), and partly because I am having my own share of existential despair, I hope the dreams actually mean something. In any case, "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

May we all have sweet dreams tonight.

CAUGHT IN THE ACT
Made a rare trek to Waikiki last night for a corporate awards banquet (a substitute for the Christmas party that seems to be a thing of the past, not that I miss it).  I was hoping that the skies would have cleared so I might see the second night of the Wolf moon through palms over Diamond Head, but it was not in the stars, so to speak. I wasn't prepared to bet on it; I certainly would have lost. It was still cloudy and rainy, even in Waikiki, where the sun is usually shining on days that are bad on the rest of O'ahu.

I got back home early enough to go to bed at a normal time (while most of my co-workers were still drinking and playing pretend casino games at the hotel--real gambling not yet legal in Hawaii**) and without disrupting my weekend routine too much.  (A night at the opera was enough really for one weekend.)

The only award of personal note was for our enthusiastic little qigong group, which won second place in the heallthy habit program. We received a wall-plaque with a half-eaten apple on it and some Starbuck's gift cards. We were lauded for our promotion of martial arts. "That's okay," I said to my co-amateur-shifu, "let them think it's martial; it may be to our advantage."

Woke at 5 a.m. for a bathroom visit and the room was unusually bright.  I went to the lanai where in the west, the moon was shining bright in a cleared sky, with Mars still dogging it off to the right. The Yellow Emperor and I enjoyed it for a while before returning to the mink blanket, me under, he on top. Still we managed to catch that elusive moon, a day past its prime, but you'd never really know without instruments of scientific measurement.

**Gambling, a potential revenue enhancer and tourist attraction which comes up regularly in legislative discussion in Hawaii, hasn't yet been approved as any sanctioned sort of Atlantic-City activity here.  Although there is LOTS of illegal betting and gambling going on.  Ironically, the most popular tourist destination of people who live in Hawaii is Las Vegas.

MOONLIGHT AND OPERA
An impressive moon tonight, biggest and brightest (because it's closest) --and the first full moon -- of Gregorian Year 2010. It's called the Wolf moon, and is chasing away the Year of the Ox, plodding through its last days, until February 14 when the White Metal Tiger appears.  I wonder what happens when the Wolf and the Tiger meet.  I suppose I'm mixing cultural folklore here. Next year we'll see about that!

Seems like an auspicious moment for the first opera of the season, tonight's Marriage of Figaro (Mozart).  Will be a change from kung fu/wuxia dramas. But another opportunity presents itself:  Beijing Opera at the Unversity of Hawaii (UH)! Next week, White Snake debuts.

Not Mozart

From UH's website: "This well known Jingju (Beijing "opera") in its English language world premiere enacts the famous legend of the snake spirit who descends to earth as a beautiful woman. Guest Artists from China have been in residence since August training the UH student performers."   I certainly enjoyed Vincent Zhao in Tsui Hark's Green Snake (which is related in plot**), so I must make a point to not miss this, even without my favorite taijiquan inspiration. (Though, Green Snake was really Maggie Cheung's movie; Vincent played a very weird character, a megalomaniacal monk.) Our qigong group may go see White Snake as an extracurricular activity.  Lots of good qi moves in Peking opera!

I was privileged to have seen "Peking" opera in "Beijing" some years ago.  My host offered a running commentary through the endless and convoluted plot involving emperors and concubines and generals and corrupt officials, all while the audience was chatting among themselves, cracking melon seeds and spitting them on the floor, and wandering around the theatre.

At one point, as a female character performed a lengthy aria (if that's what they're called), my companion was silent. Finally I said, "So what's going on now?"

"She is singing much, but saying little," my host said.  Which led me to think opera -- the ultimate in multi-media--is the same world-wide.  A wolf moon, an ox year... opera season everywhere!


**The White Snake (Bai She Zhuan) relates the famous legend of a snake spirit who descends to earth as a beautiful woman, marries a handsome young man, and then must fight to restore his life and save their marriage in the face of supernatural attacks from a powerful monk who believes that she is an evil demon.

SIGNS

The 74 percent waning gibbous moon in the morning, seen from my lanai. About 7:30 a.m.

The other Christmas cactus, the white yin one, is bursting with buds.  It always lags the red one by a week or so.  But it never fails.

HAPPY MOTHERS' DAY

Well, not exactly.  After some months of steady decline into very old age, my wonderful Druid-ish mother-in-law died last Tuesday at 89 in a hospice setting, attended by her husband, son, and daughters.  In a very normal series of events, her last days included one "hallucination," perceiving she was on a train.  In a way she was.  She was probably recalling the long rail trip that was one of the big events of her early life, as a young woman, traveling  with her first daughter and pregnant with my husband to meet her own who was off on an Army training mission in Texas. It must have been early 1945. Not long after reliving the train trip, she told the nurse she knew she was dying and ceased asking to go home, understanding her destination was elsewhere.  In the Anglican prayer book there is a prayer for a "happy death." She was happy on that train, I think.

In this situation, having lost my own mother to cancer nearly 40 years ago, I was caught up thinking about Mothers' Day while having  dialogue with a friend who is having a likely unreconcilable conflict with her own mom.  She has generated many pages of what amounts to testimony to this unfortunate relationship, love lost.  

I took the opportunity to help another friend, incapacitated in Kentucky, whose mother is afflicted with Alzheimer's and resident in a facility just a few minutes from my home.  I took her flowers and a card, on behalf of her daughter, playing surrogate daughter but really paying tribute to all Mothers. Perhaps I am coming under the influence of the Wizard's Marianist colleagues.

The moon is 100 percent full this early morning, 3 o'clock, May 10, which to my surprise is also the so-called "Optional Memorial" day of the already Blessed Father Damien, to be canonized this coming October as Hawaii's first Roman Catholic Saint.  

Ironically, the good Father became a Saint by doing 

the work of a good Mother. His life of dedication and selfless service is the subject of an excellent 1999 film. The effect of Christianity in Hawaii is not limited to those New England Protestant missionaries who invented the mu'umu'u for the sake of the natives' modesty, or more accurately, their own discomfort with the naked body.  Father Damien cared for lepers in a colony on Molokai, in a setting that looks not unlike the place shown here where I spent the afternoon after taking flowers to my friend's mother. I had a little solitary picnic of sushi and chocolate cream puffs near the Century plants in bloom -- those are really the tall flowers of a large kind of agave.  It was a good day for flowers; I appreciated the digital photos my own son sent me of wildflowers in Oregon.  They last, and didn't cost him too much,  and will serve as references for my pathetic Chinese painting efforts.  A good son, he makes me feel like a good mother.