Category: Uncategorized

It’s Saturday, and the beginning of a five day weekend. Yes. five.

As I leave Japan in three weeks (!) things like goodbyes are starting to appear. Whether it’s a friend or a favored food place, I’ve started to gauge the likelihood of another encounter before I go.

Today’s trip finds me headed to kansai for one meeting I know won’t happen again for a while. more visit to my homestay family from college. I go bearing what might be my weirdest “hey what’s up” present yet, baumkuchen and fish eggs.

Since I’ve been insanely busy and tired from work, I’m coughing up money for the bullet train over the night bus. (I would like to state for the record that I purchased my shinkansen ticket unassisted, from the ticket machine.) I’m on a nozomi, the fastest kind! For those who can read Japanese, you can see that from tokyo to kyoto, there’s a stop at shin yokohama, and one at nagoya. Two hours and fifteen minutes. California, pleaaase catch up before I die.

While typing an email this week, I noticed that the auto spellcheck in Firefox highlighted “dilemna” as erroneous for me.

It is possible I was a spelling nerd, and even now find personal lapses and typos particularly irksome.

Lapses, say, of the sort that happen when I see there/their and its’/it’s/its.

Or dilemma. Lazy spelling, that one.  Horridly incorrect.

Also slew.  As in, slew of stupids.  In my book, the only thing you can slew is a dragon, and that’s past tense, not a noun.

Anyhow, there I was  – typing email, accused of heinous crime.

Looking up dilemna versus dilemma revealed 220,000 results for the dilemNa, and 22,100,000 for dilemMa. Clearly the result of unwashed masses contaminating and taking over the English language with a common misspelling. The illiterate internets, they should be called. 

But then, scattered among the dilemNa results were disturbing propaganda articles claiming that dilemNa did not exist in any dictionary, and that an entire generation of Americans (checks passport) were mysteriously mis-educated.  Oh sad day!  I have been deceived.

(Really though, you dilemMites.  That extra M is totally extraneous.  If you’re going to have a pointless vestigial letter, at least mix things up a little.  Reaally.)

…In other news, I have rather come to like the taste of hojicha.  Also,  I suspect oolong tea makes my stomach hurt.

Boo oolong.

It’s not what you think. As if I’d go on a diet with only a month to go here? Hah. Bring on the fried chicken/pork/shrimp/veggies. Yum.

No no, this diet is one I learned about at dinner with some coworkers yesterday. This is the “misery loves company” diet. Best described as…hm…”make everyone around me fatter so I look skinnier.” With this diet in mind, the kara-age (fried chicken) and deliciously stewed pork were ordered as diet foods.

I mentioned this not-so-self-depriving diet to some friends at another dinner.
One of them mentioned “Oh that’s totally Christine’s style of dieting.”

Indeed, I logged on to Google Reader today, and what do I see?

(There were more, but this was the most I could get to fit on the screen at one time. )

I feel strangely compelled to go eat something unhealthy.  Something like … bacon caramel linguine ice cream. Hm…what to do for dinner…