Ryan's Laxatives of Despair (Calligraphy)

Today me and almost everyone went to a calligraphy class that we signed up for at the beginning of the semester. I was pretty impressed to see how nice everything was. We weren't just using a calligraphy pen, we had a brush and ink to dip in and a cloth to put under the paper and a metal bar to keep the paper in place.



At first it was kinda frustrating because I couldn't get things to look how I wanted them and because we were just practicing with simple kanji. Though in retrospect some of it doesn't look half bad.



Then I started doing more serious things like how my host mom's friends decided to write my name in kanji that one time and words like "honor" and "wisdom".



And then I and some of the guys around me decided to start just doing random words from my dictionary. Nick did "niku" (meat) because it sounds like his name. Chris did "sky" + "walk" which he said meant "Skywalker" (as in Star Wars). Tom did "natural gas" and some other really random word from my dictionary, and I did "despair", "laxative", and "digestion". Seeing the reactions of the Japanese people was pretty funny too; everyone was laughing at the unexpected kanji we were writing.



And at the end we displayed them up front and showed off the ones we made one at a time.