Autumn has finally come
2017-Oct-13, Friday 09:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Spare me from management's idiotic initiatives.
The temperature has finally dropped. There's a chill in the air when I leave for work in the morning, and the leaves are starting to change. The week before last it was still up to 30°C, so I'm really glad fall has arrived. And I found a relevant fall icon that combines the colors of leaves with the spookiness that everyone associates with October. All I can think of when looking that are the warnings not to come on the fair folk in their revels. It's the perfect mix.
I found an autumn poem by Ueda Chōshū too in an article about haiku linked by a friend:
Stardew Valley is out on Switch, and while I'm not getting it there because I don't care that much about portability--usually when I'm out somewhere, I'm reading Twitter on my phone or checking my various RSS feeds rather than using that time to play games--but it has gotten me back into it on PC. I have the forest farm layout, so most of it is given over to grass for animals and fruit trees. I turn fruit into wine and jam, milk cows and make cheese, pick up eggs and make mayonnaise, and sell all the products. It's the perfect small-batch artisanal craftsmanship simulator with none of the actual hard work of craftsmanship. And living in the countryside with none of the backbiting cliquery or viciousness.
There was a post in that Japanese woman's blog I found about the countryside, since her German in-laws live in a small town where they grow grapes in the backyard. It ends with:
The temperature has finally dropped. There's a chill in the air when I leave for work in the morning, and the leaves are starting to change. The week before last it was still up to 30°C, so I'm really glad fall has arrived. And I found a relevant fall icon that combines the colors of leaves with the spookiness that everyone associates with October. All I can think of when looking that are the warnings not to come on the fair folk in their revels. It's the perfect mix.
I found an autumn poem by Ueda Chōshū too in an article about haiku linked by a friend:
砕けてもAnd my translation:
砕けてもあり
水の月
-上田聴秋
Though brokenThe moon is an autumn seasonal reference (季語, kigo) for haiku. Maybe the waxing and waning symbolizes the dying of the year?
And broken again by water still
The moon is there
Stardew Valley is out on Switch, and while I'm not getting it there because I don't care that much about portability--usually when I'm out somewhere, I'm reading Twitter on my phone or checking my various RSS feeds rather than using that time to play games--but it has gotten me back into it on PC. I have the forest farm layout, so most of it is given over to grass for animals and fruit trees. I turn fruit into wine and jam, milk cows and make cheese, pick up eggs and make mayonnaise, and sell all the products. It's the perfect small-batch artisanal craftsmanship simulator with none of the actual hard work of craftsmanship. And living in the countryside with none of the backbiting cliquery or viciousness.
There was a post in that Japanese woman's blog I found about the countryside, since her German in-laws live in a small town where they grow grapes in the backyard. It ends with:
田舎って退屈で不便と思う人もいるかもしれませんが、私は充実した時間がゆったり流れている気がして好きなんですWhen I was in high school I just wanted to move to the big city, which is part of why I wanted to go to Penn. And now I live in Chicago, and really like it. But living in Chiyoda taught me the good parts about small towns in the country, and sometimes I miss the songs of the frogs and long walks through the fields.
"There might be people who think the countryside is boring or inconvenient, but the time is fulfilling and I like how it seems to flows in a relaxed way."
no subject
Date: 2017-Oct-14, Saturday 21:28 (UTC)[砕ける To be broken, to collapse] + [ても even though, despite]
[砕ける To be broken, to collapse] + [ても even though, despite] + [あり exists]
And then 水の月
So in prose it's literally something like "Even though it's broken and broken again, it exists, the water's moon" and then I arranged it poetically.
Does that make sense?
I wonder if this is inevitable, or merely a function of late-stage capitalism.
I feel like--as with many things--capitalism is just accelerating pre-existing processes. Urbanization has been going on in Europe for a thousand years, but it's really ramped up recently, and with that comes the inability to make a living from small-scale agriculture that prevents a many small towns from being economically viable in a modern economy. I mean, I wouldn't want to be a farmer (though my grandfather was one), but at least it was possible to live as one in the past. Small towns now don't even have that as a basis.
In Chiyoda, the farmers were all the elderly--the saying was that the young went to school, their parents worked in the aluminum plant or the town's stores, and their parents farmed. Which is to say, they benefited from state pensions and from agricultural subsidies. American farmers only get one of those.