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About meArchives for May, 2005
Koganei coffee
We went to Musashi Koganei yesterday to hit up the main city post office for some weekend package-mailing action. On the way back home we spotted this new coffee shop that looked like it was right up Dad’s alley. Lots of green beans:
And a huge roaster that can do a half-kilo at a time:
We got a back of “Koganei Special Blend” and a bag of Guatemalan beans. Free cups of coffee to drink in the place while we waited for the roasting to finish. Here’s hoping Dad doesn’t see the pics and start thinking about making room in the garage for one of these behemoths . . .
For whom do you translate?
Just read an interesting piece on writing for money, and what it entails. One passage that stood out to me was this:
I’ll let you in on a secret: One of the primary reasons I am as successful as I have been as a professional writer is I don’t take my frustrations out on my clients and editors. My clients and editors tell me that one of the things they absolutely freakin’ hate about writers is that they’ll ask a writer to do something in a certain way, and the writer just won’t listen. He or she will want to do it another way, and will then get all pissy and moody when they’re told “no.” Because they’re creative, you see. They have this vision. And it should be respected.
No. No. No.
Not that I mind, of course. It just means more work for me, since I listen to my clients and I have no ego about the writing process — save doing the job that needs to be done, and doing it right and quickly. I let the client know that I have opinions, and I offer them if they’re interested, but when they’re not, I don’t take it personally. It’s a job. It needs to be done.
This ties in very nicely to the act of translation (which is, after all, just one flavor of writing). There are translators out there who agonize over the words they put on the page—a good thing, since it shows that they care about what they present and how it is presented. But some of them let this agony carry over into the postdelivery stage. That’s much less professional.
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Jerry Beans
So Dad likes to roast his own coffee beans these days. He buys different beans from some online shop and gets them green in the mail; then it’s out to the garage with a handful at a time, to roast them to just the right point (somewhere between “chewy” and “charcoal lumps”). This has gained him worldwide fame thanks to Adam’s sneaky inclusion of his activities in the Yahoo search blog.
He gives out samples to people who come to visit. Megumi and I sent him some little cans to use for this . . . and what good is a can of coffee beans without a brand and a label?
He got 12 little cans, and a big stack of stickers, and some T-shirts to spread the word. We figure the cans will go out to coffee drinkers who forget to return them, and the shirts will lose their ironed-on ink after a few trips through the laundry. He’ll be stuck with hundreds of little stickers, and lots of coffee to drink while he decides where to stick them all.
The second work week this week
Another long, long day. I haven’t worked this hard since Monday, the last time I came in to the office . . . Well, actually, I did a bit of work over the three days we had off (Golden Week, baby!) but today actually involved getting dressed.
Yesterday I went down to ASIJ and dropped off copies of the book at the library and with Matsumoto-sensei, who first taught me this crazy language. Well, she gave me the first classroom learning I got. The Bochi kids got me started early on with valuable lingo you don’t get in JFL1 . . . the phrases that get you beer in Tsubohachi and sea chicken onigiri at the 7-Eleven. Anyway. I gave her a book to show her that at least one of her students from the late 1980s remembered what she taught.
Kind of a culture gap between the school as I knew it and the school there now. I had to call ahead and have a teacher inform the security guards I was on the way; then I had to show ID to prove it was me; then they gave me a sticker to put on my shirt so I wouldn’t be attacked by taser-wielding attack bulldogs, or something. It was odd to go up to the balcony of the new administrative building and look out at the swimming pool we used to break into at night for a summer swim and the water tower we used to climb for a dawn can of beer as we watched the crimson sun paint the mists of Nogawa Park. I don’t think that happens much any more.
Back to work! Tonight I will, I will, I will buy a copy of Tiger to install over the weekend. I have to see what it’s all about.
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