Twitter politely informed me, via email, that I had a new follower. Still woozy from yesterday, I dove headlong into today's wooz by googling the name of this person, found him, found him, also, to be seemingly aboveboard and legitimate. That's where most people would stop, having better things to do. But by then I was in wooz up to my belly button and had consumed three scones.
I started looking at other guys using the same name.
The first laid me low in the land of woozy laughter. He has a Wikipedia entry. So gasp or something. No, a gasp might be excessive. A brief intake of breath might be more appropriate. His entry is just a stub, a mere nub, under the categories of "Israeli linguists, Israeli expatriates in Japan, Jewish Japanologists, Living people, Lexicographers, Asian linguist stubs, Israeli academic biography stubs."
Slightly jealous, I found myself wondering if, one day, provided that I play my cards right and meet the right people, I might be a stub.
Listen to what Stub Man has done, how his life is beautifully wrapped in that exotic Asian yellowish orange tissue paper, secured with a miniature obi:
Jxxx Hxxxxxx (春遍雀來, ハルペン・ジャック) is an entrepreneur and linguist specializing in Chinese characters or Kanji. He is best known as Editor in Chief for the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary and the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary.
H is CEO of the CJK Dictionary Institute, offering electronic resources for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionary data. Hxxxxxx is also a Fellow at Showa Women's University.
Hxxxxxx also is the founder and current Executive Director for International Development of the International Unicycling Federation. Hxxxxxx is a major contributor to the Lifeboat Foundation, a project which aims to build a space colony so that humanity can survive in the event of the Earth's destruction.
My actual new follower, of the same name, is also a wonder of a person, even if there's no mention in his pedigree of unicycling or 4-man bobsledding. He is an advocate for old people and the families of old people, who usually meet him at a point of crisis and agitation. Elder Care, it's called these days, a subset in the economy of gerontology. He hates bed sores and is apparently a knight whose shining sword swiftly slices through the sticky webs of red tape at nursing homes, "rehabs," hospitals, and inappropriate home health set ups.
I'm thinking of "following back," since I'm closer to the bed sore scene than the many Seas of Tranquility awaiting humankind after the zombies, werewolves, and nuclear disasters have sent us fleeing this benevolent home.
Funny. In my wooziness following a long and difficult day yesterday, I immersed myself in Le Petit Prince, available now through the Gutenberg Project (isn't that wonderful?). In fact, here at the end of today's wooz -- there's been a considerable time lapse between beginning and end of this fascinating entry, mostly spent sleeping and reading a newspaper, the real kind, that folds and rustles, and smells all newspapery -- I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry developed the single most meaningful test of our individual lucidities, stripped of space colony escape pods and nursing home neglect, being fourteen or ninety.
And he was kind enough, before politely disappearing in the sky or in the sand or in the ocean, wherever it was he ended up, to make this single most meaningful test of our individual lucidities a test that cannot embarrass us.
Aren't people, generally, wonderful?
illustration from Le Petit Prince
© 2013 L. Ryan
Generally.
ReplyDeleteSometimes...
:)