If the shoe fits...

I noticed a pair of unfamiliar grandma-like sandals in our genkan-entryway and thought maybe there was someone here. So I asked my mom, but she said no and why do I ask. "Because there are a pair of old granny shoes in the genkan that I've never seen before."
"Oh, those are mine," she tells me.
"Those granny shoes?" I ask.
"Yes, I thought I'd start wearing them from now...," she responds.
I thought about it for a minute.
"Because you're getting old or because it's getting warm?"
She laughed so I thought she was going to say, "Both" but she didn't say anything at all. Sometimes her actions are super CB*

* Yay! Footnote number 2
cho bimyo means 'very hard to tell' - I recently read an article about this kind of Japanese that they are calling KY-style Japanese. I want to bring it to the US because if it's possible to make something that already is kind of meaningless to me even more meaningless while somehow retaining some significance, then I'LL DO IT.

The KMpire strikes back

My mom and entourage of Ogura san and his grandson, Yuki the KM (standing for kari-mago meaning borrowed grandchild in the KY Japanese tradition), arrived from the hot and muggy hell of Tokyo today. We drove up to San Francisco to pick up John before going to get burritos in the Mission. The KM, who is now 12, was marveling at how cold and foggy it was out in the avenues.  We tried to translate the oft quoted Twainism that he maybe never said, about the coldest winter he'd ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but Yuki was nonplussed to say the least.

Anyway, Mission and 22nd was warmer than the avenues, though this pleasantness was offset slightly by the crazy and/or homeless people milling about.  We had arrived at our dining destination: La Corneta.  It's the kind of place with a dauntingly long menu in an exceedingly small font on the wall, where you order at the counter and the hungry people waiting in the long line behind you hope that you're decisive. Being with a bunch of Japanese folks for whom the differences between tacos and burritos isn't ingrained,  and who will likely only be confused if I told them that either consists of meat, beans and cheese in a tortilla (a nod to Jim Gaffigan here), in the interest of time I suggest we just get burritos all around since they are super.

The only choice, then, is which meat from the usual options of chicken, carnitas, asada steak and shrimp.  So having bypassed the need to translate the various food-type options and feeling pressured by the looming line behind us, my mom turns to the KM and says, "Do you want chicken? Or beef?..."

And before she could say anything else, the kid's retorts in bored tones, "It's not like this is an airplane."

A dry and sardonic tween? Or has the apple not fallen far from the Ogura san grandfather tree?

Confounder confounded by confoundee

On Tuesday morning, my mom was multi-tasking, talking on the phone and surfing the net simultaneously. I learned later that she was trying to look up directions to a museum on the impossible-to-navigate Japanese internet. I don't know who they've all hired as their UI advisors, but they should all be killed. Or failing that, at least fired. I know that this entry took a harsh turn right away..... (hello dad....).

Anyway, something was evidently not going right, so she turned to me and wrote me a note on a piece of paper then pushed it toward me. It said, "map." I had no idea what that meant. I was completely confounded. So, I decided to confound her back, by using some of my recently acquired KY-style Japanese. Underneath her words I wrote, "I.W." (which, if you're too lazy to look at the link, means "Don't understand a thing"). But, unfazed, she continued chatting on the phone and turned back to the computer. She then typed the letters "I.W." on her key-board and waited patiently. Of course nothing happened, at which point she turned to me with a half-scowl, like I'd purposefully deceived her or something. It was around this time I was able to piece together what was actually going on. Once I did, you know I laughed like mad.