Shodo-(tenran)kai: Day of Reckoning

Earlier on in the year I posted that I'd picked up brush calligraphy and joined a school where people spend hours writing pretty looking kanji. Though it might not look it, I've been going to classes as regularly as I can barring sickness, so I can now proudly say that I've broken into the regional ranks of calligraphy enthusiasts at Level 7. Six more levels to go... *sigh* it will be a hard slog.

I went to class once after being absent the week before due to my cold, and as luck would have it, the class had been cancelled owing to the teacher preparing for an exhibition of her students' work in the town's community centre. I decided to go take a look because I reckon I should support my teacher, but mostly because I had to apologize for skipping so many lessons this month. ^^;

Looking at the stuff on display makes me feel a lot better about my own work, until I realize these are kids and they'll be miles ahead of me by the time they get through elementary school. T.T

Just to drive the humility angle home, the town's calligraphy teachers (so mine isn't the only one after all) lent the exhibition some of their own works. Sure I had to read the labels beside their scrolls to understand what they wrote, but it just goes to show that the longer you work at it, the more aesthetically pleasing your stuff gets... yeah.

I also discovered that these professionals were actually the same people I met during the New Year's dinner hosted by the Sukagawa branch of Soroptimist, a Rotary-like group dedicated to furthering women's interests all over the world. Thing is, I wouldn't have recognized their names even if I'd remembered how they were written, because they go by different names in their work. I was told that they would use their family name but take on a different given name, one containing a character from their teacher's adopted given name. If it sounds a little confusing, it's pretty much the same system as the one in Memoirs of a Geisha. Which is cool, because it means that if I ever get good enough, I can use a different name too. Might take a while though. A long while. Gah.