SO UGLY

This is so ugly.

I take an in breath, an out breath. What else can I do?

Purging (Cont.)

The energy of the New Year is stimulating the urge to purge...or it's just necessary. There is a disadvantage in living in one place for a long time, in my case, a rather small tenth-floor apartment (though large and cheap by Hong Kong standards) for 15 years, with no attic or basement and seriously limited closet space. Until here and now, the divestment of possessions has always occurred because we were moving. A little like dying I guess, or at least starting a new life, you realize there's stuff just not worth taking with.

And it's so hard to get the stuff out of the house. Used to be the charity scavengers would make occasional visits; we could leave stuff at the mailbox lobby, but the wise tree-slaughtering building management put an end to that convenience, probably for some insurance liability reason.

So now my purging of stuff usually means just moving things around until constipated piles accumulate and must be taken to Goodwill or Salvation Army. This is making me think of digestion; bulimic purging is equally messy although certainly more dangerous.

In order to accommodate a gift from the Wizard, I have had to sacrifice a closet which was largely occupied by shoes and bags, because I once alluded, not seriously, that it would be a great, or at least logical place for a large television. (Even though conventional wisdom is to not install televisions in a bedroom.) And now it will be. Ostensibly this will be better for my eyes than watching so many videos on my laptop, an in-bed-habit. (I live a sort of kang lifestyle.) Now I will be able to watch swordfights and conversations over tea tables, nearly life-sized, going on in my closet! And read the subtitles too (which was difficult and distracting from a distance on the now-obsolete 19-inch screen).

But the dunging out...it forced me to finally discard 15+-year-old suits and shoes that even if they fit, I would probably never wear again. Lacking a sister or a daughter (or a friend who would accept the stuff) I am left to bag it all up for Goodwill. (One word of advice from a friend; when you do this, NEVER go back to visit the bag.) I could take it to a consignment shop, or do some e-Bay trading, or have a garage sale, but that would just become another task. (Or I could wait until I became thin (if not young) again, but likely from some wasting disease which would not encourage the wearing of tailored tweed suits and silk blouses.)

The Wizard is very good at purging. But then, like many men, he buys new clothes, like uniforms, once a year, identical pants and socks to replace the ratty ones. He fails to understand the emotional attachment women have for old clothes, many of which outfits he bought for me; he always liked the career girl look, tailored suits and bowed Ferragamos. And a particularly difficult issue is what to do with old underwear...by which I mean lingerie that looked good when I was 32, but now is silly as a hippo in a tutu...underwear you can easily throw out when it gets sloppy, but silky, lacy, satin lingerie...how can you pass on used garments of seduction in a Goodwill bag or put them in a dumpster. I suppose some sort of witchy sacramental burning ritual is called for, crones in caftans chanting some passage from the Story of O while torching the lacy demi bras and thongs and teddies, feeding the fire with old bottles of Chanel No. 5 and the weirdly named Samsara.

In the end purging is about balancing practicality and passion. And "letting go." It is easy to speak about these things, like speaking about clearing the mind in meditation, but in actual practice, it takes great will. How many shoes and handbags does one actually need? (Hardly any.) But how many do you love? (All of them.) In my mind, this associates with fantasy promiscuity, looking for the perfect man. (With whom I already live, the one I would never discard.) These comments probably belong over on the yin side, so female, but the energy is all yang.

So now I am stranded among piles of old clothes and accessories (to say nothing of old board games), finally cutting some cords of attachment...but first I want to get that plasma TV installed so I can see Song Il-guk and Vincent Zhao (also perfect men) in high def.

Maybe I'll look through that lingerie pile again.

Floor Scrubbing/Smooth Sailing

Not one to really get into floor scrubbing, being the world's most indifferent housekeeper (in my house, floor-scrubbing is on a par with remodeling), I finally succumbed to the really necessary task. The floor was sticky. I highly recommend the made for TV scrubbie especially since I could not find a proper rag mop or even a sponge. Actually there was a sponge mop in the closet, but so old it bio-degraded just as I put it into the Spic and Span solution.

I could do better...there are a few spots that could use a down and dirty massage with a Brillo pad, but I'm not a down-on-my-knees kind of girl, especially when it comes to housekeeping. I throw a few bowls of hot soapy water around the floor, and with the efficient TV-scrubbie/squeegie...eventually, everything comes clean...enough. Gou le. Ca suffit. A few final swish/swashes with the TV mop/squeegie and a half roll of paper towels to sop up all the muddy water...not perfect, but not too bad.

As Guan Yin advised me, smooth sailing!

Caught in a Web of Strategy Studies

Watched the final battle in Sunzi Bingfa and the 36 Strategies of Sun Bin (right) last night, a long and fascinating, if a little slow, Chinese TV series about The Art of War. I feel like I've just spent time in a strategy think tank, or a semester at West Point.

Last night, I was having difficulty concentrating on the action; I was wary because a VERY large spider, one of Hawaii's less promoted natural phenomena, had taken up residence in a space between a screen and some closed louvered windows in my bedroom, and it made me uneasy. Not very Taoist of me, I am not fond of this particular one of the five noxious creatures (wu du, sounds like voo doo). Which, now that I do research to provide you a link, I realize is NOT one of them; in Chinese symbology, the spider (zhi zhu) is actually considered a good omen, but you couldn't tell it by me. I will trade the spider for the gecko in my personal pantheon of wu du. I wonder if the Wizard had conjured it after finding on the web, so to speak, a picture of a similar spider that we saw while hiking in Hong Kong, a huge nightmarish thing that would throw silk from treetop to treetop, making a bug-catching canopy over trails. Not one of my favorite memories of life in Hong Kong. (Needless to say, I have to cover my eyes when Frodo is fighting Shelob in Lord of the Rings.)

The cane spider (you can Google it, I can't bring myself to do it for you), palm-sized and leggy, is harmless (I think), but unpleasant to encounter. We all have stories about our experiences with them--there was a season when a colony was living in my car. One might turn up on my windshield, suddenly at night, right in front of me. Or creep out of the defroster vent and work its way across the dashboard.

Yesterday, I noticed the spider on the smooth side of the inwardly folding louvers, staying there all day, moving maybe a half-inch downward to where the louvers were open to the outside. I suspect it is nocturnal and was confused; it had climbed up the glass, but couldn't figure out how to get back down. (Though, I'm sure it did; it was just terrorizing me.) Much as I didn't like to see it, as long as I could, I knew it was there and not somewhere else waiting to surprise me when I put on a shoe or pulled a book from my shelf.

It was still there when I turned out the lights for sleep, but I was just a little tense all night wondering if I would wake up to find it caressing my face at 3 a.m. For once I was happy to have the Yellow Emperor taking up more than his share of space on the bed; the cats are very good at arachnid search-and-destroy. I don't even have to tell them, "Sha!" I have sometimes found what looks like the remains of crab feasts on the floor. Good kitties! Hao mao!

The spider is gone this morning; I hope it found its way back outside. But I'm staying close to the Yellow Emperor. Not one of the Bingfa strategies, just common sense.

Which most of the Sunzi Bingfa is. The TV series featured colorful historically based examples. In the concluding battle, while employing a strategy called "The Tactic of Missing Stoves," (not making this up) Sun Bin causes his one-time classmate's downfall by writing some characters on a tree (essentially, "You will die here."). Pang Juan realizes he is trapped, defeated once again by the superior, even though crippled, Sun Bin and, with several arrows piercing his armor, Pang Juan falls intentionally on his own sword.

Earlier in their history together, Pang Juan accused Sun Bin of treason; he branded his face and "picked his patella," that is, removed his kneecaps. Sun Bin could never ride a horse very well after that and always walked with a cane. He never forgave Pang Juan. This is recorded in real historical records. This series does not include the face branding, a punishment that is illustrated in The Emperor and the Assassin, and Emperor of the Sea (at 3:23 in the clip, sorry more shameless promotion!)

Heroic suicide occurs a lot in this drama, usually self-inflicted sword impalements, but once by someone throwing himself against a pillar and cracking his own skull open. More of an Asian tradition perhaps, this is not so well thought of in Western military strategy, as we see practically every day in accounts of offensive activities in Pakistan, etc., although in those cases, taking innocent people along for the ride. Suicide bombing was not included in the Bingfa.

Sun Bin and his rival, Pang Juan, were both "cadets" studying with Guiguzi, a hermit and possibly a Taoist immortal. The series -- not as dramatic and over-the-top in terms of production as a sa geuk, like Emperor of the Sea, was probably more faithful to the history and traditional legend of the story of Sun Tzu, Sun Bin, Pang Juan and others of the Warring States Period. There was a little romance provided by a woman with extraordinary sword skills who was deeply in love with and in awe of Sun Bin, but who eventually became Queen of Qi. There's a great emphasis on Confucian duty and loyalty in the story, as well as traditional wisdom. Guiguzi is as stereotypical as a Taoist hermit can be, and both Sun Bin and Pang Juan are seen consulting yarrow stalk hexagrams. Pang Juan should have taken his final divination seriously.

I can't decide whether to re-shelve this set with my Chinese/Korean drama collection, or with Teaching Company history courses. I may actually refer to this later.

On Fortune Telling and Divination

It interested me to see the Sunzi Bingfa characters seeking advice (or therapy) from the Zhouyi/I Ching (and a fortune teller who employed the cup o' sticks technique.) I am concurrently reading Deng Ming-dao's excellent recent volume The Living I Ching: Using Ancient Chinese Wisdom for Shaping your Life. Despite its new-agey self-help title, it presents the I Ching in a remarkably accessible format, with explanation of its history and with nine illuminating appendixes. One point Deng makes, like one of my linked bloggers, is that the value of the I Ching is appreciated fully only after many years, decades even, of study and practice. Like many of us d'un certain age, I have fooled around with the old yellow-bound Wilhelm-Baynes translation since 1967, so in a way I do have decades of experience. But I never really appreciated the mechanics of the thing until it was explained by my Chinese Tao teacher, even though I had tossed many coins, and, a few years ago, read the somewhat abstruse Numerology of the I Ching by Alfred Huang.

Deng and W/B

Anyone who is interested in Chinese history, philosophy and culture, and in particular, Taoism (religious or not), would do well to delve into Deng's book. The Zhouyi/I Ching is another piece of the Chinese puzzle, and continues to be of value and interest.

I had a hexagram cast and interpreted in the Man Mo Temple in Hong Kong a couple years ago. I do not remember which it was, but the reader, also considering my birthday, advised me I should take care of my health and that I should not retire until 2012. (Which is pretty much what I expected and planned anyway.) It was a fun sort of experience but I think I might recast a hexagram to update the advice.

Less profound is the Chinese fortune stick method: I did this once in a temple in Wudang where the expected payment was to be based on the kind of fortune you got. I had a mid-range fortune. (Yi kuai? Gou le ma?) An English-speaking tourist couple from Taiwan translated it for me. It was a lot like the advice I got from a doctor when I had a recent colonoscopy/endoscopy: just keep on doing what you're doing.

I have a stick-set of my own that I use with the Guan Yin poems; when I bought the sticks, the Honolulu Chinatown vendor asked, "Do you want real or party favor kind?" There is a 78-stick set which is employed as a game for parties; the "real" set, used in temples, has 100 sticks and is linked to I Ching-like oracular statements. I knew the 78-stick set was just a novelty, I had gotten one in Hong Kong. I wanted the real thing. On the vendor's direction, I went to the local Guan Yin Temple to buy the accompanying book of divination, oddly, a little more kitchy than Martin Palmer's.

A hexagram takes time to create and interpret; the sticks are fast-fortunes. Guess which one gives the better advice.

Don't Gamble Today

Smooth Sailing for Floor Scrubbing

Just for fun, I used both stick methods while I was taking these photos. My party game reading was #26, which basically said I shouldn't gamble today. I was actually asking if I should scrub the kitchen floor.

The "real" one, #50, was much more interesting. It was about smooth sailing.

I'm off to scrub the floor.

Purging

...is so hard. Because you want to hold on to the stuff, like a potentially good hand of cards. And you just never know. And also hard because it's dealing with sheer bulk. LPs, video tapes, boxes of board games. And no attic to put them in.

I'm moving some old LPs (some of which were left to me by my father, his recordings of Bunny Berrigan, Perez Prado, and other big band/swing trumpeters) to a space previously occupied by a collection of board games we never play anymore. The nostalgia factor is preventing me from being efficient. What to do with the board games?

I haven't played a board game in years. It's what you do when you have kids at home, (or maybe not, WII and Nintendo may have replaced this charming custom), but how do I discard the really old, depression-era version of Monopoly I remember using as a child? It's like a first edition with wooden houses and money printed on fragile delicate stock. (Never mind that I detest Monopoly; I always sell out early and consent to be an absentee banker.) On my set's instructions, there is a "Copyright 1936" notation. It is probably really valuable, even more than Park Place with hotels.

I don't know what happened to the Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and Uncle Wiggly games , but I find stored Parcheesi...Sorry!...Boggle...Clue...Scrabble...Yahztee...Uno...Milles Bornes.** Several Trivial Pursuit boxes of questions. And especially peculiar, a board game developed by the Credit Union National Associaton (CUNA), called Managing Your Money, a weird synthesis of Monopoly and Life. (My mother managed a credit union -- she should have been in much higher finance, she was really good, but there it is, some weird promotional item, but my son loved it when he was five years old. Buying insurance policies and calculating interest on loans. He did not absorb its lesson.)

I remember playing all these games with friends, young and older. I think of the closet full of board games in The Royal Tenenbaums, (which only just occurs to me is a prequel to The Darjeeling Limited. That board game of associations, the mind.)

Two cribbage boards, a nice box of "ivory" dominoes and a mahjong set. I never ever played cribbage. Dominoes bored me, but I might like to learn mahjong. (I play computerized solitaire versions; I can recognize the pieces.) I think I'll keep that. One of my Chinese painting classmates can teach me; when she's not painting, she's playing. With great enthusiasm.

I played board games and dominoes at my paternal grandmother's house, at her kitchen table, with cousins, and later, gin rummy with my grandmother alone. I always had the seat with its back to the heat vent, so hot, which tended to bubble the paint on the chair. I liked to finger the squishy blisters of paint while waiting for my cousins' moves.

It's the bulk of stuff that is overwhelming. On the shelf above the board games are a lot of video tapes. (To say nothing of a lot of audio-book tapes about which I will say nothing.) Many self-made copies of MST3K from Comedy Central and lots of movies I don't want to get rid of (but probably available to stream on Netflix) and, some very weird "how-to" stuff:

• Home Haircutting with Wahl
• Lauren Hutton's Good Stuff: A Makeup Application Video
• Drywall
• Inside Disk Drives
• NordicTrack (we got rid of this noisy evil thing several years ago)
• How To Video: Cuisinart Food Processors (but where is the inspiring one about the more dangerous mandolin?)
• A personalized promotional video: the "virtual experience animation and composite," with my name on it...what the ??

The internet (and personal mastery) has--I hope--made all this pretty much obsolete so I intend to chuck all these into the trash. There was a time I would keep the tapes for recording over, but no more.

I am ready to offer to anyone who wants it, the Trivial Pursuit Canon, as well as all these classic literary knowledge games, but then, I look in the Scrabble box and discover the strangest thing: a rolled piece of Chinese calligraphy, what could it be? Where did it come from? I want to say it's beautiful but I'm not sure, I think it is not very well done, but I will leave it to my Chinese painting teacher to assess the quality and meaning. Some sort of Chinese Scrabble?

**Actually, I have played Milles Bornes fairly recently, not just because it has a French ambience. One of the most fun games to play with a few close, slightly drunk adult friends. A crazy road trip with cards.

Let It Lain, Let It Lain, Let It Lain

Apologies to the ultra-suave Mr. Song for promoting him in such shameless and callous fashion, (go to 1:47 in the clip), but we have no choice but to let it lain...and with thunder and lightning too; it has been pouring for the past several days, replenishing our aquifer (more likely encouraging mudslides), but also turning everything into a damp humid asthmatic mess. My closet smells of moldy leather. My antique kitchen knives have mold on their wooden handles. My hands ache. Typical Hawaii Christmas weather. But no tire chains, snow tires, engine heaters, windshield ice scrapers, things I remember, and not so fondly, from winter in more wintery climes.

Still, the lain has been good for one of my Chinese painting exercises.

Although not good for precise landscape work, the humidity does facilitate the blot-style which makes for quickly rendered cute animals. My ink doesn't dry out in its inkstone, and the paper is just damp enough for interesting spreading. I painted 14 rabbits to perfect a motif I might use

in a Chinese New Year message; rabbits just proliferate, they are all so cute. (Actually this design is from a book my teacher says is for children.) Next on the agenda, a style of camels which I learned recently is just a series of blots accompanying a stylistically drawn face.

Why is there no year of the camel?

A Taoist and a Confucian...

walk into a bar and review their 42 years of marriage.

The Taoist is lighthearted because of an enforced (but not unwelcome) vacation from the office until the (Gregorian) new year. The Confucian is relieved because the various seasonal tasks of propriety (gifts for his office staff, many bottles of champagne distributed) have been completed.

Dinner is ordered after the usual martinis (the Taoist has taught the Confucian to appreciate what you can do with gin); the Confucian compliments the waitstaff for being the most attentive on the island. The ultra-attractive young Chinese server (at an Italian restaurant) says they try very hard because the owner yells at them a lot if they don't perform well. Later the owner reveals that the server is his son and in line to run the place.

The Confucian and the Taoist start serious reminiscing after putting a dent in a fine bottle of pinot grigio, recalling past dinners and bars in Vermont, Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, agreeing that the Hong Kong pubs were the best, with crazy characters and despite occasional rats and cockroaches, at least "back then."

The reminiscing moves on to, what else, Woodstock. The pair were "at" Woodstock, the same way Bob Dylan was: "in the vicinity," having turned it down "because of disgust of the hippies hanging around his house," probably very muddy. Married just a few months, the Taoist and the Confucian were driving (for a reason they can no longer remember) with the paternal parents through upstate New York to Vermont, observing all kinds of freaks on the road, picking up flyers and broadsheets advertising the Great Event of 1969.

"We'll drop you off if you want," the father said. The Taoist was intrigued, but the Confucian, proper even then, (not yet having replaced his Buddy Holly black frames with John Lennon granny glasses) said, observing the weather conditions, "I bet it will be really muddy."

"But," he recalls 41 years and four months later, "There are two guys I would like to have seen."

"Jimi Hendrix!" the Taoist says.

"Yes, and that white guy."

"That white guy? What white guy?"

It had been an evening of "that place, you know," and "those guys, you know," the old folks' shared ESP usually leading to an answer but then not quite sure in the end why it was being sought.

The Taoist, in a fit of eternal youth, whipped out her iPad. "Have you got yours working yet?"

"No."

A search on "white guy at woodstock" reveals some interesting links but no definitive answer. "Woodstock performers" does.

"Was it...Country Joe McDonald ...John Sebastian ...Tim Hardin ...Ravi Shankar (maybe not a white guy) ...Arlo Guthrie ...Joan Baez (definitely not a white guy)...Cleedence Crearwater (the Taoist is a little tipsy now) ...Janis Joplin ...Johnny Winter (a really white guy) ...The Who (who the Confucian and the Taoist had actually seen some time before)."

AHA! Joe Cocker; Day 3. "That's it!"

We, I mean the Taoist and the Confucian, would have had to be there for Day 3 and Day 4, to see Joe and Jimi, getting really muddy.

Leaving the restaurant, the Taoist pointed out the astonishing breathtaking full solstice sacred (to her, anyway) moon in the sky. Some passing Rasta guy, looking a little like Jimi, seemed to like the observation. The Confucian went to Safeway to pick up some things; the Taoist drove home listening to Bruce Springsteen singing "Glory Days," randomly shuffled, like an I Ching divination, on her iPod. (Bruce was not at Woodstock either; he was still in New Jersey, pretty much unheard of.)

On rising earlier this morning, the Taoist had actually cast an I Ching divination, first in many months, yielding hexagram 53, which is, uncannily, about marriage. It is called "Gradual Progress," and uses the image of a tree on a mountain.

The Taoist believes that the Glory Days are great to remember, but the tree is still growing. It's not over yet. The Confucian agrees, but doesn't really like to talk about it.

Weirdly, in the mailbox at home, the Taoist's free Rolling Stone magazine, which makes her feel old and young at the same time, has a photo of John Lennon on the cover. Old trees on mountains.