Cat pee will not make your skin beautiful and more youthful

To cure my dish-pan hands, I grabbed a small amount of lotion from a container my mom keeps near the kitchen sink and rubbed it into my hands. I immediately noticed a suspicious smell. It reminded me of a combination of a hotel pillow mint and cat pee.

Before I continue with this story, I have to tell you about this daily noon-time program devoted to giving seemingly pointless 'tips' to the Japanese public. Tips like if you rub sesame oil into your hair before you wash it, it will get cleaner, or how to improve your health by eating grapefruit chunks in curdling milk. Things like this which my mom totally buys into, thus disgusting concoctions in the fridge and the bottle of sesame oil in our bathroom. Knowing that she has the penchant to take such strange advice only made the smell coming off my hands more worrisome. I sniffed the backs of my hands again. "What's in this lotion? It smells like cat pee and mint."

Her gaze came back steadily to me. "It's ur... urrr.......," she begins stammering.
"NO! Don't say it!"
"Ur....urr....," she continues.
"Don't say 'urine!' Please. No!"
"It's urine," she declares matter-of-factly.

Thankfully though, it was not a home-made addition. She meant urea which, though I suppose chemically the same, I can handle a little better than extract from Tokyo cat box.

Paul Newman tribute week chez Yoko

She was sad, as was I, as were Paul Newman fans world wide, at his passing this weekend. In tribute we are watching his movies this week. Yesterday we rented "The Sting" and "The Color of Money" (known as "Hustler 2" in Japan, though the store did not stock the first one). "It's really too bad, you know," she said. "Didn't Marlon Brando die a few years ago?" I affirmed this. "Who's that other actor I really like. You know the one."
"If you like them so much, you should probably learn their names," I told her. "What movies has he been in?"
"Cuckoo flew over..." she trailed off into dead silence. I cracked up, of course.
"You mean Jack Nicholson. The movie title is "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
"Right," she says. "I was in the theater watching it when it won the Academy Award for best picture. Someone came into the theater and shouted, 'It just won best picture!' and everyone stood up and cheered!" It's been 33 years since that movie excursion of hers and she remembers it vividly. I bet everyone who was at that theater remembers it, too. I wonder where they are now, and what they are doing?

A clue: the haves and have-nots.

There is a store in Japan called Zoff that has inexpensive but cute eye wear and I decided that I should buy a pair or two while I'm here because glasses, like belts, are a useful tool but shouldn't be relegated to simple utilitarianism. Why use a piece of rope when you have your snazzy Western belt buckle, right? So, I bought a pair a while back. I hadn't really worn them much, though, because they are a little bit more delicate than my hunk o' plastic frames that can take a lickin and keep on tickin. But last night, I was going out to dinner with a former student and I decided I should wear the new ones. So I put them on and to my extreme surprise, I realized they are vaguely reminiscent of Sarah Palin's glasses. Well, what can you do? It's not as though I bought them because of that plus it seems unlikely in terms of fashion no-no's that her eye wear choices will go the way of the Hitler mustache. So I put them on and went downstairs.

My mom was there to see me out and complimented my new glasses. "Thanks," I told her. "I just realized, though, that they kind of look like Sarah Palin's glasses."
"Who's that?" she asked me.
Even given who was asking this question, I was shocked: we live in the internet age; even my mom gets her daily headlines emailed to her from the New York Times; we watch the international broadcasts of CNN and the BBC World News.
"Are you serious! You don't know who that is," I replied.
"No. And should I?"
"It's McCain's vice presidential running mate!"
"Oh, that," she said with some exasperation. "I thought you meant someone I knew."

She was never allowed to Rock the Vote, not even once

I just received my sample ballot in the mail for the November elections. My mother, who was never naturalized, had never seen a ballot in all her 37 or 8 years in the US and so was curious to see what they looked like. I assured her they were nothing interesting, but she pressed, so I showed it to her. She was nonplussed in general and remarked that she hadn't realized it wasn't just a presidential election, that there were other things on the ballot. "Of course," I told her. "But this time around I'm registered to vote in Los Angeles, so there's a lot on the ballot I don't know anything about. I'm going to have to...," but before I could finish my thought about needing to do some research before the end of October, she conveniently filled in my words for me.
"...fill them in randomly?"

NO! NO! Thank God she's never voted! Argh!

My civic self had a total hissy fit, then my actual self dissolved into hysterics. Plus, it reminded me of a story about my mom's Japanese colleague who gave a talk in the US in the 70s or something about how progressive Japan was becoming and made the fatal L/R pronunciation error and told a bunch of people at a lecture: In Japan, even women can now have erections.
Ah, but that seems more civically responsible than filling in a ballot like your SATs when you've run out of time.

she knows just how to put my mind at rest.

So, I went to the Doc's just out of convenience really, but she told me that it didn't look like a spider bite and her only other guess (given how much it swelled and hurt for days) was that it might be the dreaded Japanese mukade. Or, centipede of doom, as I like to call them. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where in my home I got bit because I can't find out how long it takes to feel the first effects of such a bite (damn you internet! Though I did find this cute blog entry from 2005 about this kind of bug by some young boys. It was informative). But it definitely happened in the house. Possibly downstairs in the music room, which is where I felt the effects. But, there is a chance it happened in my own room, which pleases me NOT AT ALL. I can hardly relax for fear of the dreaded mukade falling on me from my ceiling or crawling into my mouth while I sleep, biting my tongue or throat, it swelling up and me asphyxiating to death. Well, that's dramatic and probably won't happen, but I did find a mukade in my closet. It wasn't alive but it was horrifying nonetheless, with its blue legs and black body. BLECH. Well, here. See for your self.Anyway, it was pretty tiny - maybe 2 inches long, but enough to give me the heebie-jeebies for a while. I was whining to my mom and she said that she hadn't known they came so small. She continued, "The one I saw crawl under the house a few weeks ago was at least 6 inches long." It wasn't the same type, though. It was the deadlier, red legged version.

Dude. I am never sleeping again.

First victim of the Japanese Ninja Widow

This morning I got some kind of insect bite. I did not see it, so I don't know what it was. But it wasn't a mosquito. Or, if it was a mosquito, it was a mosquito on steroids. It swelled up at the location at first (pictured), but now my whole arm is slightly bloated. It's been nearly 6 hours but the effects are not gone. In fact, I am having some trouble typing since my arm is sore and my brain isn't functioning to its highest capacity. I think I might have a slight temperature and was mentioning this to my mom. "It's possible, you know," she told me. "Because of the venon." It was cute. Steve asked me if it was a black widow. I don't think so. He suggested grey widow. Maybe that was what it was. My mom said she thought it was something invisible since I didn't see it. Clear widow? or maybe it was just that I didn't see it. So, I guess it was a ninja widow.

The results are in: Couscous ≠ Panko crumbs

She was going to make fried pork cutlets à la tonkatsu tonight. I just went down to check it out because it was smelling pretty good and she informed me that she didn't have any panko bread crumbs, so these are more like schnitzel or whatever. But the flour batter was a second attempt. The first time, she tried covering the meat with dried couscous. "But it was too hard," she told me. I immediately started having a conniption and had to run away. Who in their right mind thinks to substitute panko crumbs with couscous? It's like putting cornstarch in a bread maker instead of flour just because they are both white and powdery. It just doesn't make sense to me. "At least I only made one," she said in her own defense, "because I had my doubts about it, too." Well, that does show at least a little bit of foresight on her part. In any case, it's an improvement.

a different kind of HD

Japan is switching over to a completely digital television system by the year 2010, so many companies are urging their customers to upgrade their systems and equipment now. Because of this our TV channels recently changed and we now get things like Discovery channel and Discovery HD. We'd had just had the conversation about HD versus regular TV a few minutes earlier, so I cracked up like crazy when my mom turned to me last night and said, "What does HD mean again? High Density?"

Cute!