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 友達の青木美由紀さんは最近本を出しました。美由紀さんは日本で一番優しい、そして一番たくましい女性だと私は思っています。彼女はNPO法人シェアで色々な国で仕事をしてきました。中には、南アフリカでエイズ患者のために働きました。（下の写真はジャイカのサイトと美由紀さんの活動日記より。）

その経験をもとに、本にしました。

この本は南アフリカの状況、親をなくした子供達のこと、エイズで病んでいる子供達のこと等、写真と情報がたくさんつまっています。

元サッカー日本代表北澤豪選手の南アフリカでの経験談も本の最初に載っています。本の売り上げの一部はNPO法人シェアによせられるそうですので、是非ご協力をよろしくお願いします。誰でも美由紀さんのような働きはできませんが、本を1冊買って、その働きに協力することはできます！

I have the day to myself. I can work flat out from dawn till the middle of the night (OK, maybe 6:30). Everything will get done, and it will be done well and quickly!

Not.

Ideally, a long work day will be broken up by a walk to the bank or the mall to buy things we actually need, or even a trip to the gym!

Unideally, I will be unable to unglue myself from my computer and will need computer-related breaks. I have some favorites that I’d like to share–presented in order of “apparent intellectual worth.” (I made up this term after many long days decoding books on psychiatry that use a lot of similar sorts of terms.)

No. 1 “Abstract City” by Christoph Niemann. Intellectual by virtue of being from the New York Times. You can learn a lot from this guy, be totally entertained and never feel you are wasting time.  After going through his pieces (and you will), it becomes apparent that Niemann is a househusband of sorts, and gets a lot of inspiration from his three sons–all of whom have first initials corresponding to the New York subway system.

No. 2 Free Rice, a blog-cum-game that makes you learn hard words and somehow convinces you you are doing something good. To date I have never used any of the words I have picked up on this game. It is low on the fun factor, but high on addictiveness–and you feel kind of guilty if you give up too soon.

No. 3 Awkward Family Photos.com  OK, this takes a really big dive in terms of intellectual index, but the headings are very clever, and sometimes you just need to laugh until you cry.

No. 4 I Can Has  Cheeseburger Intellectual value: -5. Got an hour before dinner, it’s too dark to take a walk, your brain is too fried to work? Enter this site and sample some of the many, many categories that will keep you in cyberspace for eternity. I personally like FAIL Blog because you just can’t watch too many car wrecks or see too many kids riding their bicycles into things.When you’re done with all the categories on the top of the page, scroll all the way down to the bottom for many, many more. (Wedinator, a good choice!)

最近のブログにTwitter でフォローするような招待文が載ってます。ブログにはなくて、Twitterにあるのは何でしょうか。よくわかりません。それに自分の人生を運営しながら、ほかの人をフォローする力がないような気がします。

サイバースペースにはほかの次元があるようです。

聖書には目で見えなくても信じることが大事だと書いてありますので、twitterに関しても、それで行こうと思います。

There are a few blogs I enjoy reading, but lately I feel like I’m missing out because I’m being invited to “follow me on Twitter,” which is apparently something else. So there are blogs and twitters and there must be some other things, too, because blogs have all kinds of other icons suggesting other dimensions of cyberspace. But somehow “following” suggests more energy than I have to spend, and I have so far declined the kind invitations.

Back to work!

There are lots of Japanese words I just plain don’t like. Many of them are related to children and learning and schools, so I haven’t had as much contact with them workwise as mothering-wise. The end result being that I don’t think about them so much as rebel against (and complain about) them.

I recently had work-related contact with one of my least favorite phrases: 集団生活 shuudan seikatsu, literally “life in a group.”  Many mothers use it as a reason for putting their children into preschool as soon as they are eligible–they want the kids to get used to shuudan seikatsu early on.  (My daughters went to preschool the instant they were old enough, but it was because I wanted someone else to play with them for part of the day!)

Anyway, shuudan seikatsu has been stuck in my craw for years–and I never understood exactly why until a few days ago when the word came up in an editing job. The translator had written about the notion of a five-year-old being “adapted for communal life.” I checked the original Japanese, and sure enough, there it was–”able to deal with shuudan seikatsu.”  This was the aha moment!

I grew up in the 60s and 70s–during the glory days of, well, communal life in the United States. Although I never lived in a commune, I was on the fringes for several years and saw many people I loved and respected heading in that direction. Somehow, though, the notion of being unable to personally own anything was more than I could deal with. I had a good bike, a nice flute, the typewriter my dad took to college, and a few hundred dollars in the bank. The possibility of signing away even those was just too depressing.

So that was it!  My brain read shuudan seikatsu as “communal life,” and I was  terrified of the notion that my children, my only blood relatives on this side of the Pacific, would be ripped from my arms, and I would never see them except for short vacations in the summer or maybe at New Years. They would belong to someone else.

After years of living in the shadow of this menacing image, I could finally kill it off–and in plenty of time to apply it to any possible grandchildren. I carefully crossed out  “adapted for communal life” and wrote in “capable of participating fully in group activities.”

Done!

今時の会議の「議題」がなぜかすべて「レジメ」や「レジュメ」へと変わりました。

レジュメは英語で「履歴書」という意味です。どうやって履歴書が議題になりましたか。いつも不思議で仕方がないけれども、会議となると早く帰りたいので、その場では受け流します。

今週末、目眩で寝込みました。音も光もよくないと、刺激なく、自分でぼんやりと二日間あれこれ考えました。目眩していたのであまり深いことは考えられなかったので、この「レジュメ」の謎に取り組みました。となりでイヤホーンでテレビを見ていた相棒兼看護士にiPhoneで「レジュメ」を 調べるように頼みました。

なんと、元々は英語ではなく、フランス語の「resumé 」です。その意味は「要約」、英語では「summary」です。なるほど！履歴書は人の人生の要約とも言えるし、議題は会議の要約でもあります。

数百年前から20世紀まで、英語圏の人はフランスのことを色々憧れました。教育のある人は格好をつけて、話にも文書にもフランス語をたくさん使いました。つまり、今私を困らせているカタカナ言葉は昔フランス人もきっと英語圏人に対して感じました。 「ちゃんと英語があるのに、なぜフランス語の意味を都合よく変えて使っているんだろう」と思った人がいたにちがいありません。

The Onion, a daily online newspaper, recently published an article entitled, “New Six Flags Ride Based on Relationship with Deborah.”

I think the 75% of baby-boomer women who share my name will agree–The Onion (which is well known for playing fast and loose with the facts anyway) needs to change the name in that article to one more suitable to the thirty-ish picture on that New Six Flags Ride photo. I’m thinking Tiffany or Heather.

Nobuko Takagi has won the 36th Kawabata Yasunari Literature Award for Short Stories. The winning story was “Tomosui,” a tale set in the Philippines, written as a part of her Soaked In Asia project, and first published in Shincho magazine, April 2009.

Read the English version (by Deborah Iwabuchi) on Ms. Takagi’s blog.

第３６回川端康成文学賞（川端康成記念会主催）は１５日、高樹のぶ子さん（６４）の「トモスイ」（新潮２００９年４月号）に決まった。賞金１００万円。授 賞式は６月２５日、東京・虎ノ門のホテルオークラで。

トモスイはここで読みます。

南向き（岩渕デボラ）の英訳も高樹先生のブログで読むことができます。

ブログを書かないと自分で勝手にさみしいけれども、気づいたのは最近仕事が忙しくて、ブログを考える暇がないです。

商業的な英訳が多いので、もしかして日本の経済が上向きなのかなとひそかに希望を持つことにしました！

今年の春が寒くて今もタートルネックが手放せないが、心が燃えています。　：）