Stay Away From Me

That first tickle in your throat is an ominous precursor of misery to come. Sore throat. Coughing. Runny nose. Fever. Congestion. Fatigue. [Pause.] Inconvenience. [Sigh.] No one wants to be sick, but this is the time of year that germs go flying and there always seems to be someone around you that catches something unwanted.

It’s usually not hard to tell who has caught a bug with their sniffling and coughing and nasally voice. Granted, there’s only a certain number of hours that people are actually contagious for, but these symptoms are all indicators of those to stay away from—a warning of things to come if you’re not careful. So if you’re truly sick, it’s probably best to just stay at home and rest and regain your strength (not to mention not contaminating the rest of us with your cold or flu).

You can always do your best to avoid getting sick: washing your hands, using hand sanitizer, and avoiding touching and being breathed upon by those sick. But you can’t avoid getting sick all the time—eventually a persistent bug will find its way to you and make you miserable. (And I only hope that I can prolong that inevitability for another year…)

Go-To Food

Sometimes I find the most ordinary things fascinating, like supermarkets. Supermarkets contain a range of items from fresh produce to dry ingredients to prepared foods, and they reflect the preferences of their customers. Going into a supermarket in a foreign country (or even a foreign food supermarket in the U.S.) is an experience for me because while there are often many similarities to an average American supermarket, some differences are quite vast.

A quintessential food I think of for Americans is breakfast cereal. There’s an entire aisle dedicated to boxes of the stuff in flake, puff and loop form. There’s the ultra sweet cereals, chock full of chocolate, “fruit flavors” and marshmallows; there’s the “healthier” cereals with dried fruit and nuts. There’s pretty much every type of cereal imaginable (and some you didn’t think ought to have been imagined)—basically, there’s a cereal for everyone.

In Japan, there was no breakfast cereal aisle. I found cereal on a lower shelf —there were about six different cereal options (and half of them were essentially corn flakes). But they did have a very extensive instant noodle aisle; there was ramen, udon, soba, yakisoba and perhaps some “low fat” noodle options as well. Everyone seemed to eat instant noodles and have their favorite brands and flavors.

Both breakfast cereal and instant noodles have one thing in common: they’re fast and easy to make. When you’re hungry, you just want to eat something immediately, and with cereal you just add milk; with instant noodles you just add hot water. Anyone can do either of these things successfully, so it becomes that go-to meal when you’re just too lazy to make anything else (and there are times I get pretty lazy…).

$9 Luck

It doesn’t matter what it is, whether a raffle ticket, bingo or the lottery, winning is always exciting (even if the prize itself isn’t terribly impressive.) I don’t really play these games of chance very often. The pragmatist in me knows that the chance of winning (anything) is slim and that it would be all too easy to start playing and not want to stop (just like the problem of eating just one more potato chip). So I don’t feel much of an inclination to pay to partake in these games.

However, if I’m given a lottery scratch off ticket, then sure, I’ll play. During the holiday season someone gave me a scratch off ticket where you could win $1,000 dollars. My level of expectation was to win nothing, yet my excitement level was high. Sure, I probably wouldn’t win $1,000, but I could. It was a possibility. There was that little piece of hope that was dangled in front of me, because someone has to win, right? Why not me?

So I scratched off my ticket and it revealed two $3 and a $$$ mark, which altogether meant I won triple the amount of my $3. A grand total of $9. I was a winner. Not a big winner, yet a winner all the same. $9 isn’t a lot; with $9 I could get a burger and fries at a fast food joint, or a couple of lattes, or a cheap basic t-shirt, but it was a free $9 and who doesn’t want free cash? So while I didn’t have big luck, at least I had a bit of luck to win something, which is a whole lot better than nothing.

What the Fudge!

It’s not uncommon for me to flip through the TV channels and stumble upon a movie that I like and own. And even though it’s somewhere in the middle of the movie, I may watch it for a while even though it has commercials and has been edited for television. (I guess I’m just too lazy to put on my own copy of the unedited movie and watch it from the beginning.) So I’ll hear all sorts of edited language (as most non-children movies have at least a few curse words in them).

It’s rather distracting to hear dubbed over words; there are often odd pauses or pitch changes from the actual dialogue to the dubbed in dialogue. And sometimes the words they choose to replace the swear words are just ridiculous. To me, it makes the swear words even more apparent, like a red flag waving in the air: “Look at me! There used to be a ‘bad’ word here, but now it’s been replaced by an ‘okay’ word!” (Well thank goodness. My delicate feminine ears just couldn’t handle that rough cad-like language.)

Hearing that substituted language takes me out of the moment, and I pay less attention to the movie itself. It’s no secret when a swear word has been replaced, and sometimes you know exactly what word has been replaced, while other times you can’t help but run down the list of possible swear words in your head to figure it out. So really, eliminating that curse word just makes me think of more curse words.

It’s too bad they feel the need to edit the swearing because it sure downgrades the quality of the movie. Swearing can be necessary at times to show the progress of the characters and story. It can help portray the distress and anger that a character feels or give authenticity to a certain area or era and can create a particular ambiance. So when those swear words are changed to “appropriate language”, you lose part of that substance. Because once you start changing a finished movie, it’s no longer is the same movie.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Poster

While I was working on my Flashback to 1990’s TV Shows Notebooks, my mind veered into another direction: a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster. My brother loves Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as do I), and I thought it would be fun to create a Buffy poster for him as a Christmas present.