Kanji & Cat Eye Musing 1

Damn I loved practicing kanji. I'm not sure why but here were my favorite things about practicing kanji:

• The kanji paper. Think of graph paper for the visually impaired.
• The way the kanji paper felt after practicing kanji. I need lots of paper underneath what I'm writing because I apply a lot of pressure. The backs of paper upon which I've written feel like Braille. Turning pages was a pleasant crackling crinkling sound, like a thousand-year old document. But no, it was just my kanji practice paper.
• Learning a language! Kanji makes sense. The Japanese language makes sense. Kanji are modified pictures. Each kanji has a radical, a signifier if you will. This identifies what type of kanji it is, from what grouping, or what it might refer to. What might make kanji want to pull your hair out is the on-reading (the Chinese reading at the time the kanji was introduced in Japan) and the kun-reading (the native Japanese reading associated with the character). Learning which reading to pronounce generally comes with practice and memorization, seeing word patterns over and over again. There are some general guidelines but are too detailed to go into this bullet list (I digress!).
• Kanjis have a certain number of strokes and a stroke order. I love all that meticulous, anal retentive crap.
• I love the tangible act of writing so writing in a foreign language was even more fun.
• Each kanji was like a tiny picture, a work of art (or attempted art). An aesthete like me appreciates good penmanship and fonts. I enjoyed the act and the art of making my kanji characters as perfect as possible (more of that anal retentive crap).

And while I had already been doing Cat Eye makeup a good 9 years prior to learning kanji, I think learning to write kanji supplemented my Cat Eye technique. Cat Eye is like a one-stroke (2 at the most) kanji which has no pronunciation but a plethora of meaning...