Wishful thinking

It's a given that the streets in Tokyo are notoriously narrow and that the phone poles often jut out into the street making the already difficult task of driving in a metropolis all the more complex. All this notwithstanding, sometimes my mother's driving gives me a heart-attack. It seems to me when there is ample room on one side, she crowds the other with many near misses (in mah humble yet co-rrect o-pinion, as my "Texan" father might say) of, say, parked cars, phone poles, center dividers, people on bikes and sometimes, yes, pedestrians. I swear that when she sees a pedestrian about to cross, she'll hit the gas first before hitting the brake. She claims to not notice doing this, but I can't help but think that maybe she gets some sick thrill out of watching me clutch my chest in panic and horror. Personally, I think it's payback for her experience of my drivers'-permit-driving when I was 15, but I digress. I realized early on in my stay that I wasn't going to be able to change how she drove and, as evidenced by the lack of dents in her car, my mom's driving couldn't be all that dangerous so I should just trust in her ability and let her be. I've felt relatively safe under this assumption until now.

On Sunday my mom took some visiting friends and myself out to lunch, just a short drive away. On the way back, there were several near misses of large objects, but I kept my cool, chanting to myself "She knows what she's doing; we're all perfectly safe in here." That is until we came really too close to a pole and I nearly popped both eyeballs from my skull. "YOU REALLY ALMOST HIT THAT POLE" I close to screamed. "It was less than an inch from your mirror!"
I was hoping for something soothing from her, like, "Oh, don't worry - it's fine." But, when have I ever gotten what I was hoping for in these situations. Her response? "There was a pole?"

Of course.

My nerves are shot for good.

Maybe I'm an asshole

Is everyone familiar with this magazine known as FRUiTS that publishes pictures of young people with outrageous fashion sensibilities for the rest of us to wonder and gawk at? Well, I don't know if it is because the Japanese are more attached to youth culture and fashion than much of the Western world, but there is a certain faction of, shall we say, older people who dress in this same outrageous manner. There was one such individual where my mom and I were eating lunch today and I was thinking that someone should start a magazine to document this currently ignored fashion demographic. They certainly have as much "style" as their younger counterparts. I was taking stock of this woman in her 70s dressed in black stiletto boots with a red plaid turn-down rim, leggings and cute mini-skirt jumper accessorized with a necklace made of fist size plastic beads and a big, floppy hat, wondering what I would name my fantasy magazine, when it came to me like a vision: DRiED FRUiTS. I guess it's kinda mean (maybe I am an asshole), but it was also pretty funny and of course I started laughing out loud, so my mom asked me what was so funny, and when I told her, she burst out laughing, too. I guess that means we're both kind of jerks.

Maybe I'm a culiary prude

Since I've been here, from time to time I'll notice this concoction my mom makes sitting in the fridge, looking disgusting. It's always in a bowl, covered by some saran wrap, and it looks like chunks of grapefruit in yogurt that has gotten watery and a little curdled from the grapefruit juice. This morning, I finally saw her eating it.

"I don't know why anyone would want to eat grapefruit that's sitting in curdling yogurt," I said maybe a little more rudely than I intended.

"It's not yogurt," she informed me. I look again...the grapefruit chunks are definitely sitting in something milky. "It's plain milk that's curdled. I saw it on TV. It's really healthy for you."

I can eat a lot of things, fermented beans, stinky cheese, foie-gras, I've even eaten ris de veau, though that is an experience I'll likely never duplicate. But I have to draw the line at curdling milk. I had a traumatic curdled milk experience when I was young...my dad can attest to that!

Maybe there was something in the water...

My mom arrived back yesterday and her suitcase was overflowing with things purchased or given to her while she was in LA. I'm ecstatic about the two bags of candy she brought me! They don't have licorice here in Japan (!?) so she brought me a bag with an assortment of red and black licorice and licorice flavored things as well as a bag with assorted gummy things which she knows I love, too. But, as she was looking through her suitcase for these bags of candy to give me, she pulled out this huge wad of snack-size ziplock bags. She had taken them out of the box so that they'd take less room, but here is the story of how she came to have them in the first place:

My mom has an old friend in LA who grew up in Tokyo with her. When my mom was visiting her, I guess she saw one of these small snack bags and commented that she had never seen that size before. The next part of the story is that my mom's friend gave her a box of ziplock snack bags to give to me as a gift. I have no idea what the common thread is through any of that. So, like I said, I think maybe there was something in the water in post-war Tokyo that affected left lobe development or something.

I'm beyond caring, though. I have everything I need in those two bags of bad-for-me things.