Letters to home from Kyoto.

2.28.2005

shodo and sexism

Today was not as productive as I would have liked it to be. I really enjoyed classes today though, because I was really prepared and engaged. Yet, I did get two papers back that had comments about sexist language. The funny thing is that I’m female and was using male pronouns and it’s still considered sexist. I get really frustrated by the need to use non-sexist language sometimes because it means inserting a he/she everywhere you have a pronoun, and then you have to change all of your other gender references to be inclusive. This means that a sentence can become ridiculously long. The other solution is to use obscure language that evades using gender references at all, saying things like “one may choose to lift ones particle over ones head.” I think that language, though it is very proper and correct, only sounds appropriate in the right contexts. Other than that, it sounds silly and pompous. I have wondered many times before if I, being a interested in women’s issues, sometimes go against the general grain of the current movement. I think that although it is wrong to be sexist, it is also wrong to allow an attempt to be non-sexist to obscure the meaning of an otherwise good passage within a text. Somehow, allowing a movement against sexism to cause a lack of understanding, whether it is in a related or unrelated text seems silly. I really like the way that Stephen Mitchell translates the Tao te Ching, rotating using male and female pronouns in each verse because, as he says, a Master can be male or female. Yet because he does not try to insert male and female into every passage, the text is still easily readable without being sexist. The only problem with this is that if you were to try to do it in a research paper, it would certainly interrupt the flow of the paper because we don’t think of he and she as interchangeable. Perhaps we should, but at the same time, I think that would be denying that there is an actual difference…and that’s a completely different story.

I’ve strayed a great deal from the events of the day. For this very reason, I’ve established another weblog where I will keep all of my “more profound” or at least longer and more academic ponderings, while keeping this weblog mostly as a journal where I will record the daily going-ons of my life. This way, I will be able to separate my own thoughts to see my growth in both an intellectual and personal sphere. Hopefully I will get to this soon, but today was too full to find time for it.

After school, we all went to the okonomiyako dojo for one of my friend’s birthdays. He was turning twenty. We had a good time eating and being loud and drinking and being ridiculous. Everyone was planning on going on a night hike, but after dinner, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to go hiking. I was definitely in a studying mood, so I came back home and studied for a good while, and then practiced my shodo. There’s actually a very funny story associated with it, which I will include in the next paragraph, but if you don’t like laughing, you should just skip it, because it might be a bit long.

So, shodo (Japanese calligraphy) is created using ink and a brush. I had the paper, I had my grinding stone ready, I had my brush. I unwrapped my ink and began to attempt to grind it. Yet I noticed that nothing was happening. Looking more closely at my ink, I realized that it was plastic! I just figured it was the case for the real ink, so I try to pry it open. I spend about an hour working on getting it open (I was REALLY dedicated to the idea of doing shodo). I finally manage to pry it open and inside I see a rusted metal bar hot glued to the inside of my plastic container. It wasn’t ink afterall. It was ACTUALLY the paperweight that is used to hold down the paper while you’re doing sumi-e or shodo. I felt quite dumb. Luckily, I had a shodo pen (a pen that has a paint-brush-like tip) so I still got to make some gifts to send home for people, although the larger characters for my family will have to wait until I get some ink. Even though it was a pretty ridiculous experience, I certainly got a good laugh out of it. And I still do.

I am going to bed after making some presents for people back home and addressing their envelopes as much as possible. I realized that I don’t really know ANYONE’s CSU box. Plus, I don’t even know how to go about looking them up. So I’ll just have to send messages pestering people to give me their mailing address.

Music equivalent of the day: Shodo
Food: pizza style okonomiyaki
Meditation/ inspiration/ thought of the day: sexist language as it relates to being a feminist
Top priority: getting addresses and sumi

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