(no subject)

You are Rizzo the Rat.
You have few friends, but are loyal to those you do
have. Maybe if you didn't smell like sewage
you would have more.

SPECIES:
Rodentia Digesta Lotta Grub
HOMETOWN:
Brooklyn, USA

FAVORITE MOVIE:
"Rat On A Hot Tin Roof"

FAVORITE SONG:
"The Pest Is Yet To Come"

FAVORITE FOOD:
You got it, I'll eat it.

HOBBIES:
See "Favorite Food".

QUOTE:
"When do we eat?"


What Muppet are you?
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Those of you more familiar with Japan than I,

I need a little advice: if you were going to found a very large enterprise that you hoped would last for hundreds of years, and you were working with a post-Meiji or post-1947 calendar (that is to say, an essentially Western calendar), what would be the day of choice on which to begin? I realize there's the six-day lucky/unlucky count to be taken into account as well, but I'm starting small, here.

This is how far apart my parents and I are.

I have thought, on occasion, that it is fortunate my parents do not know certain words that I know. If I am ever careless in a phone conversation, for example, they will not have the slightest idea what 'hentai' refers to.

I have occasionally felt a bit sorry for them not knowing other Japanese words; I have had to explain a few times what 'anime' and 'manga' are, and how they differ from American cartoons and comic books.

The word 'otaku' has never come up around them; I told them I was going to Otakon this year and explained it was a convention, and they never asked what the name meant. That's as close as they get.

But yesterday I told them, for the first time, about the idea of the Japanese Mounties. I could see a vaguely blank look on their faces as I sketched out the origins of the force, but they perked up when I mentioned the horses. "Where would they come from?" my mother asked. "Are there even horses in Japan?" asked my father.

"Well, yes," I said, "but they're a bit-"

"Small?"

"Yes."

They smiled at each other. It looked as if they were thinking of Toyotas.

I added, "They wouldn't be using native horses, though. The first horses of the Imperial Japanese Mounted Police came from gaijin-"

"What's that?"

"What's what?"

"Gaijin. What does that mean?"

... they didn't know? I thought everyone in their generation was forcibly exposed to Shogun, right?

I explained that it meant 'foreigner' and that it was somewhat less friendly than 'gringo' in its implications, and that seemed to work. My mother thought it very clever that in the future, the Japanese would have to buy horses from America instead of America buying cars from Japan. I had not thought of this, and I did not stop to think of it much. I was still boggling.

Gaijin.

There was a time in my freshling year of college when I grew so frustrated with what I suddenly realized no one taught me that I screamed it to the skies. I have spent the years since that day shoveling the things I want - the things I need - to know about other cultures and coutnries into my head. It had escaped my mind that the people around me did not do the same thing.

I have walked so far away from what everyone else in my family is, that I had forgotten I had walked at all.

Oh yeah.

olna_jenn, I started on the happy Japanese Mountie story today, but work was a MOTHERFRELLING MELONFARMING MOBOFSCKING bloody zoo. I only have the first scrap so far.

( Scraps away. )

Scrap 2.

( Working on it, Jenn, working on it. )