So help me god (and I am not a religious person), somebody somewhere in this office, within earshot, at this very moment, is CLIPPING THEIR NAILS. I can't begin to tell you how much this disgusts me, makes me want to crawl out of my skin and over to said clipper of nails and ask if I could maybe slough off my foot calluses into their desk drawer, because to me, that is the same thing.
While we're at it, I will confess that I almost throttled a kid on the train the other day, for comitting the second worst living-amongst-society sin ever, the first being coughing or sneezing with mouth wide open and thus spewing bits of snot and spittle everywhere. This kid was maybe 14 or 15, and the entire time we were on the train together he could not stop scratching his DISGUSTING ITCHY HEAD. It wasn't like it was just the one itchy spot he may have missed while shampooing. It was his ENTIRE HEAD, as if there were wee little goblin creatures having a party on his head, causing itchiness everywhere their little goblin athlete's feet landed. Visions of the toe fungus mascot for that athlete's foot commercial are now dancing in my head, do you see why this is a problem?
And here, my visual for sin number one. Do you really want any chance of Mr. Snot and Mrs. Spittle, and all their little loogie babies, flying at projectile speed in airspace near you?
Best TV line in recent memory, courtesy of Lost: "Taller? You mean, like a giant?"
As in, Locke talking about Walt and saying he looked the same, except taller, and Sawyer going -
"Taller? You mean, like a giant?"
Hee!
So another issue I've encountered in moving to a foreign country is being completely out of touch with pop culture (that includes movies, yes? Let's say that it does, because I’m going to talk about a movie). There are movie theaters here in Japan, and they do occasionally play American movies, but due to the extremely high prices for movie tickets - about $17 - and our general unwillingness to get out of our pajamas, P and I have only seen one movie here (we do not recommend Happy Feet). Anyway, the point is that I know pretty much nothing about what's in theaters, and in most cases will respond "what's that?" if you mention a movie title to me.
Now, on to my story. We were in the states for the holidays, and having nothing better to do after gorging ourselves on pho one night, decided to watch a movie. Drove to the movie theater, browsed what was playing, decided on I Am Legend, thinking "Will Smith, love him, can't go wrong with the Fresh Prince". Well, shit. I almost peed my pants when I finally realized what that movie is all about. I don't know why it took me so long to figure it out (am I slow? Would seeing commercials and trailers have prepared me?) but it was at least a full hour in, when he and the dog go running into the deep dark warehouse and I wondered why it was so deep and dark in there and why Will Smith was so freaked out and then, all of a sudden, HOLY SHIT WHAT ARE THOSE THINGS WHY DO THEY LOOK LIKE THAT WHAT KIND OF MOVIE IS THIS????
Let me just say, for those of you who don't know, that I do NOT do horror movies. I am chicken poop when it comes to things like that - I can't even watch those Freddie movies that are supposedly just silliness. And one time at the gym (back when I was living somewhere I understood the language… and also went to the gym), a commercial came on for one of those scary movies, and the little possessed kid popped up onscreen and I swear to you I almost fell off the treadmill.
So the rest of I Am Legend was spent barely breathing, eyes wide open, squeezing the life out of P's hand (because if one of those zombie things ever jumped out of the screen I was going to be damned if P was going to run away and not take me with him). It was all very exhausting, and now I'm exhausted from re-living the whole thing. I'm going to go find a cookie.
Living outside the US, in a country whose language I can barely just get by with, has made it necessary for me to make an actual effort to keep up with current events and world news - I can't just soak it in haveint the tv on in the background. So, every few days, after I finish perusing my daily diet of blogs and celebrity news (hey, we all have priorities), I surf the wave of cnn.com to see what the world's been up to. Today was one of those days - and man, do I need a drink. A(nother!) shooting spree at a college; routine death and destruction in too many countries around the world, and suspicions that mentally disabled women were pimped out by staff in their psychiatric hospital to serve as possibly unknowing suicide bombers (??? can't make this shit up); penguins dying in the south pole and polar bears dying in the north pole (and the latter being waitlisted - WAITLISTED! - for the endangered species list) due to climate change - and all this is just this morning's news.
And then there's Beijing and the Olympics. That China was chosen to host the Olympics is exciting and great and all that, but - to be completely honest - for me, only a little bit. I just can't muster up that much of the warm and fuzzy in the face of all these other China-related issues that are a little difficult to kick under the rug. Things like human rights and mistreatment of animals and Darfur and the general bass-ackwardness of so many things about this country that is my motherland and fatherland (ok, not exactly, more like ancestorland). And the Chinese government's position that the Olympics should be purely about sport and not at all about politics and the state of the world - C'MON, PEOPLE, you've been given the honor of hosting an event that is supposed to represent the harmonious coming together of different countries around the world. It is not at all outrageous for people to want you, as representative of all this harmony and togetherness, to maybe consider bringing your policies and actions a little more in line with the more generally accepted (and acceptable) basic philosophies of the world.
And can anyone tell me why the IOC would choose, as the host of the mother of athletic competitions, such a badly-polluted city?
I fully appreciate that China has invested oodles of time and money and other resources to show the world how far it has come, and I hate that I am coming off as bashing China - but fireworks and fancy buildings can't take the place of actual meaningful reforms in the things that matter.
But those fancy buildings - especially to me as a former almost-architect - mama like.
On my way home from work last night, I saw two things that I had never seen before in Japan, and never thought I would see.
The first sight was on the subway ride. We pulled into a station, the doors opened, and in came a walking piece of MAN CANDY. I'm pretty sure my eyes involuntarily did that thing where they pop open for a second out of surprise and delight, then back to normal size because I'm suave and subtle like that. And then I silently gave thanks for peripheral vision so that I could stare without, you know, staring (ahem... hi P, you sexy beast, you!). There's no way he was native Japanese (sorry, no offense, but this guy looked nothing like a skinny girly-mon whose ass I could kick); he actually reminded me of Gabby's lawnboy-toy from Desperate Housewives. Allow me to illustrate:
Hellooooo nurse!
The second sight was, unfortunately, not so delightful. I came up the stairs from the subway, to the dead end of the street where my apartment is. There are usually a few cabs there, their drivers taking a break. And apparently, sometimes peeing. Because there, under a streetlamp, in the middle of the sidewalk a couple feet away from bushes that could have provided some cover, was a middle-aged man - perfectly sober as far as I could tell, and presumably the owner of one of the idling cabs - taking a leak. Gah!
