By Ibaragi Noriko
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth
What a little girl had on her mind was:
Why do the shoulders of other men's wives
give off so strong a smell like magnolia;
or like gardenias?
What is it,
that faint veil of mist,
over the shoulders of other men's wives?
She wanted to have one,
that wonderful thing
even the prettiest virgin cannot have.
The little girl grew up.
She became a wife and then a mother.
One day she suddenly realized;
the tenderness
that gathers over the shoulders of wives,
is only fatigue
from loving others day after day.
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It was a beautiful 70-degree Friday in the DC suburbs, and the highlight of my morning was taking a long walk around the neighborhood looking at the crocuses and daffodils that are emerging and starting to bloom. There was a lot of damage to trees and bushes because of the heavy snow, but the bulbs seem to have come through fine. That and the fact that my Superpoke penguin got his gold at the end of the rainbow habitat put me in a good mood for working on my review of "Chain of Command", which I finished just before we went out to dinner with my parents, who are only home for a day between their trip to St. Maarten and going to see my sister's daughter in a play. Here are some local signs of spring:
Fannish5: List the five scariest scenes ever.
For the purposes of this, I'm going with scary scenes in non-horror TV shows rather than from horror movies, which I don't really watch and anyway wouldn't be a fair comparison. I mean, nothing will ever top the end of Alien for me.
1. Buffy finding her mother dead, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "The Body"
2. Seeing why the aliens want the children, Torchwood's "Children of Earth"
3. Jaime's collapse from bionic rejection, The Six Million Dollar Man's "The Bionic Woman"
4. Sylar killing his mother, Heroes's "The Hard Part"
5. Jamie saying "Are you my mummy?" while breaking into the house, Doctor Who's "The Empty Child"
We went to California Pizza Kitchen, where I had their fabulous Moroccan chicken salad without the chicken -- it has almonds, butternut squash, beets, peppers, dates and cranberries, so it really doesn't need chicken. Then we came home and watched Princess and the Frog, which we received in the mail on DVD today -- it was cheaper to order and wait a couple of days after release than to run out and get it last Tuesday -- I'd only seen it the one time in the movie theater, so it was a lot of fun getting to see all the places in and around New Orleans again -- and now we are watching the Maryland-Houston game, which has been close and entertaining so far, but I'd prefer a Terps blowout in the second half!
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