I was just reading the February 2010 edition of Reader's Digest magazine. (Apparently we only received this issue recently, which is odd. I mean, it's long past February now. I guess they forgot to send it to us before.) This time the magazine had a focus on ways to lose weight and the attitudes of people in various countries about being fat.

Regarding France, many families eat together every night, much more than the percentage in the USA out of people surveyed. And the meals in France are quite long. My French teacher told us that the lunchtime at French schools is about two hours long, so school ends late, like 5:00 pm or so. It's such a long lunch that you might even be able to go home and take a nap (just as long as you got up in time to return to school).

Actually, the longer the meal, the less you eat, given that you talk to someone while eating. If you're holding a conversation while eating, then you don't eat as quickly, compared to when you're focused on eating (as I tend to be). That pretty much explains why eating lunch or dinner seems to take so much longer when my parents are eating with their friends.

In this way, you end up not eating as much even though you supposedly would be spending more time talking. By talking, you have to slow down your eating (unless you eat and talk at the same time, which is disgusting and can also result in choking or food coming out). It's a good strategy, but it does take up time, which is a valuable resource that is impossible to replace.

But the opposite - that less is more - is also true, when it comes to swimming pools. Blackberry Farm, a place of recreation in my town, has its pool open during the warmer months. There's a discount on Sunday evenings (after 5:00 pm), I believe, so my mother and I went to the pool.

My mom had thought it wouldn't be crowded because she figured not many people would know about the pool, but she turned out to be wrong. It was quite crowded. Still, we figured that since we bothered to come we should go and swim. I suppose that less money needed to go swimming means more people flock to the pool.

The deepest section, 6 feet deep, was the one with the least amount of people. (This is an instance of "more is less" - the deeper the water, the smaller the amount of people in it.) The shallower sections were mostly occupied by parents teaching their children to swim.

It brought back my memories of the time when I was still struggling with swimming. My mom and I would go to the YMCA pool because we used to have a membership there. My mom would tell me to do four paces of Freestyle or something like that. It had been difficult for me then. Sometimes I choked on water and became very upset. I used to resent swimming. I feared water. Even showering was something I disliked because I might get water in my eyes. Now I don't fear the pool anymore. I guess the toils and trouble turned out to be worth it.

Labels: conversation, deep, fear, fight, france, lunch, magazine, meal, pool, readers digest, shower, struggle, swimming, time, trick, water, weight, YMCA

There have been myths about the moon. People have thought that sleeping outside under the full moon would make you go crazy, and there are some creatures, like werewolves, associated with the moon. Words have come from the moon, too, like the words lunatic and lunacy.

I fear that my mother may have some problem with her eyes or mind. On Thursday night, we went outside to look at the sky and try to spot the moon because of an astronomy lab I need to do for my science class. After walking around my backyard and looking in different directions, I finally found the moon. It looked rather unusual; The white, sunlit crescent shape was on the bottom of the moon, not on the left or right (which I had expected).

My mom was staring at the moon rather strangely, and later on, she asked me, "Did you see other white things? Not the part at the bottom?" I said no, I had not. I wonder if perhaps her eyes were going bad or if she was hallucinating. (Well, people do see things in the moon, like animals and men and things like that) Nearsighted people don't usually see funny things when they don't have their glasses on, do they? Is this a result of old age or stress?

Time really is passing, after all, and my parents aren't getting any younger - nor is my aunt's family. Once a week or every other week, my mom and her younger sister will talk over the phone or on Skype. This week my aunt talked a little about her son and his birthday party. She and my mom also discussed their countries' policies about retirement and things like that. (She lives in France, and things work differently there.) I guess after years of working, you're counting off the days (more like years) until you get to settle down.

My cousin has already turned ten years old. And I myself will be going on to high school next year. How did this time pass so fast? It feels like so long ago now, the time when my aunt, uncle, and cousins came to our house for a while. Back then, things were really different. I had still been in elementary school, and there wasn't that much to worry about it. In fact, probably the only thing that bothered me at all was the annoying behavior of my cousins. Both of them were rather picky, if you ask me. One of my cousins wanted to eat ramen noodles, so we cooked her some (I think it was just one of those Maruchan ramen packs, where you get a pack of dried doodles and you put them in hot water), but she didn't eat that much. (I hope her appetite has improved. I know her brother has quite the healthy appetite. He even ate more than I did at a pizza place, which is impressive.) At the time she was quite prone to crying when something upset her, though the last time I saw her she was a bit better in that regard (I suppose people do mature somewhat with age).

Well, my pet fish have been aging too, and so there aren't that many of them left. We used to have guppies, once upon a time, but they are all long dead. Now there are only two fish in the smaller tank. We have three fish in the other tank. The big tank, where the three koi are, is by far the most dangerous. If you open the tank, you will see the lid is only propped up on one side, and even that part is unstable. So there has to be another person standing by to hold up the lid AND hold up the black part under the lid that fits in a slot directly over the water and fish.

I was feeding the fish the other night, with my mom holding up the lid. My mom said that I was dropping the food in the wrong place since it ended up landing on one of the fake plants, and the fish have really bad eyesight (and don't have much brains either) so they don't notice the food. I got some kind of fish tank cleaning rod and was going to use it to poke the fake plants so the food would fall down onto the bottom of the tank, where the fish would have an easier time getting to it. Unfortunately, my mom tried to reach for the rod I was holding and in the process lost her grip on the lid of the tank, so it crashed down and bonked us both on the head.

For a while my head was sore, but as I am accustomed to such injuries, I soon forgot about it. However, my mom was still having a headache later on. I wonder if this is a result of old age. Since you can't really make new brain cells, and you're weaker in general, it's harder when you do get injured. I hope it won't give my mother any permanent head damage. But I fear it is already affecting her. She forgot that I would be staying late after school to take a French test and panicked, thinking some tragedy had befallen me. (Luckily, nothing of the sort had happened.) I probably should have reminded her in the morning, but still, I would have thought she'd remembered. This is a very bad sign indeed. If she can't remember something her only child has to do...Imagine if she had a lot of them, like seven children.

Labels: age, appetite, brain damage, cousins, crescent, danger, eyesight, fish, france, illusion, lid, memory, moon, picky, ramen, relatives, retirement, tank, time, young

I know, my previous post, "Blood is Thicker than Water", also mentions thickness, but really, this title is fitting, so I am using it nevertheless.

Not that long ago, one of my pencils disappeared. I had only started using it recently. It wasn't really a great pencil - in fact, it was a Disney Princess pencil featuring Belle from Beauty and the Best - but I hate to lose pencils since they go to waste. I was giving up on finding it when I noticed a pencil on top of a supermarket flyer. It was the very pencil I thought I had lost. And my dad doesn't go around circling what he wants to buy on supermarket flyers, so that left one culprit - my mother.

This isn't the first time she took a pencil when she saw it lying around. I found two pencils of mine which I also thought I had lost in the room of our house that is her home office. I just wish she would ask me before she uses them. It's annoying, thinking that I've lost pencils when in reality they're hanging around the house, all because my mom wanted to borrow them for some reason or another. I guess she thought I would be annoyed if she had to keep asking me to lend her pencils, but still, having my writing utensils disappear mysteriously is really not convenient.

What really bothers me the most, though, is when people borrow things from me and don't return them. It happened in elementary school - I lent a girl my scissors and I asked for them back, but she didn't even remember having borrowed them. I eventually found them in the classroom. Then I went on a trip to a bowling alley with my class and a classmate wanted to buy a drink, so he borrowed some money for it. He never repaid the money (I don't know whether he would remember after all these years anyways).

And I had a repeat of the incident I mentioned about the scissors. In French class, we were making sachets in December. Sachets are basically little pouches with something scented in them (like potpourri). These can be left someplace, like in your clothes drawers, to make things smell better. A classmate borrowed my scissors to cut string, but she didn't return them. The next day, I asked her if she had my scissors, but she didn't seem to remember that (just like that girl a few years back). So I had to go into the classroom scissors box to find mine.

I wonder if I should just stop lending things to people. It's kind of a lose-lose situation. If you lend something and it gets returned, that's the one good outcome. But if you lend it and it gets lost, that's bad for you, and you'll lose trust in other people. And if you don't lend something, then people will think of you as stingy, since you have things but don't want to share them. (Sharing is caring, so goes the saying) Maybe I should require people to give me a compensation for lending which will be returned to them when they return what they borrowed. (Like how my science teacher will lend you a pen if you give her one of your shoes. That way you won't forget to return it, unless you want to hop around all day on one foot.)

I guess there's really no perfect solution to anything, though. You can choose to make yourself happy or you can choose to make other people happy...(You're lucky if it's the same thing)

That reminds me of something Thomas Jefferson apparently said. Because of Jay's Treaty (look it up, like on Wikipedia or something) France felt like the USA was taking Britain's side, so the US needed to repair its relationship with France. John Adams, the president at that time, asked his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, to go to France and work things out. Jefferson would have been a good choice because he was a Republican (Republicans at that time were supporters of France, whereas the Federalist Party supported England), and Jefferson was a respected man. However, he refused. Adams got upset, saying, "Aren't we supposed to be friends?" and "But you're the vice president!" and probably also said something about how he should go because he is vice president and not let the fact that he is the Republic party leader be an influence. But Jefferson said, regarding the role of vice president and the role of head of Republicans, "They are one and the same."

George Washington had said that political parties were bad, that they would cause unnecessary divisions and disagreements. Politics in general seems to be quite a mess sometimes. (No wonder my mom doesn't really like politics...) I mean, it got so bad one time that Aaron Burr, who was supposed to be Thomas Jefferson's vice president, actually shot Alexander Hamilton. (Hamilton had kind of convinced people to turn against Burr, thus making Jefferson president instead of Burr) And the US presidents end up with grey hair and wrinkles from their stressful job. I wonder what their true motive for getting into politics is, then. Do they hope to make a difference? Do they want prestige?

Labels: aaron burr, borrow, france, jay treaty, john adams, lost and found, money, motives, party, pencil, politics, president, republican, scissors, shoes, stress, supermarket, thief, thomas jefferson

Well, maybe middle-aged, and not quite old. But the actresses in the movie Mamma Mia don't seem too young, except for the person who plays the part of the main character's daughter (the main character is played by Meryl Streep. Sounds like a married sheep to me, no offense intended) who is probably pretty young. Her eyes look kind of buggish in a way. But anyhow, back to the old ladies. There's Meryl Streep who has wavy blonde hair. Then there's another lady with glasses, and then a lady with brown hair who just scares me. They all do, really. Here's a link to a picture. Kind of scary. Click here

The movie itself is just wacky...I saw the three old ladies sliding down the banister of a staircase. Then there was this guy swinging his guitar back and forth like he was trying to hit someone. And then three old guys and a young girl leaped off of a cliff. They're all beach bums, no doubt about it. o_O;;

Today, by the way, is the first day of the Cherry Blossom Festival in my town. Apparently, the city I live in is part of some sister city thing with a city somewhere in Japan (that's how come we have some cherry blossom trees around). The lame thing is, probably most of the cherry blossom trees are no longer in bloom. Due to our climate changing, spring starts a bit earlier than usual. But I guess it's still nice to see the festival is still going on. Last year I bought a necklace. It had a cherry blossom pattern, since cherry blossoms are one of my favorite trees (besides ginkgos, Japanese maples, and something else I already forgot). Actually, it was made of rice paper (the necklace pendant, not the trees XD) so that was interesting.

It seems like the Louvre museum in Paris, France is very popular. Louvre is an art museum and has things like paintings and statues. The statues are kind of creepy since they are often nude. -_-;; The Mona Lisa was on display at Louvre last time I went. (There was a story about how it got to be at Louvre, but as always, it's flown out of my mind. I think it used to belong to Italy.) Apparently 8.5 million people visited Louvre...Or so San Jose Mercury News says. Apparently the British Museum in London, England is also quite popular. I hope I get to see it. Even though I've been to London, we've just seen things like the Tower Bridge and a castle (there was a sign saying some queen got beheaded there. It was probably Anne Bolelyn or Catherine of Aragon or someone like that) and also Big Ben. We never got to see the museum. I want to go to the museums in London and see the Egyptian artifacts and stuff.

Whenever I walk by the hallway bathroom in the mornings, I always get hit by a waft of some foul, sourish sweet-smelling substance. My mom says it's my dad's shampoo. Maybe later, when the smell has worn off a little, I should go in and find out what it is. I don't think it's his mouthwash since he always used mouthwash (but who knows, maybe he changed brands or something, you can never be too sure). Anyhow, we have to get rid of that smell. It makes me grimace.

Labels: abba, beach bums, cherry blossom festival, foul smell, france, louvre, mamma mia, mona lisa, movie, necklace, paris

I can't speak French. But I saw this on some of the De Young Museum's souvenir merchandise. (Like t-shirts and bags) Apparently it was the old motto of Yves Saint Laurent. It means "Fashion passes, style remains". I don't really get it, so good luck to you figuring it out.

...Maybe I'd better clarify, before everyone gets confused. My family has membership to museums in San Francisco, and we heard there were some new exhibits, so we went to see the De Young and Legion of Honor (both art museums). At De Young, the special exhibits right now are 1) Yves Saint Laurent, and 2) Andy Warhol...While at Legion of Honor, the special exhibit is Artistic Luxury - Fabergé - Tiffany - Lalique.

Yves Saint Laurent is a French, high-end clothing brand. Apparently the guy who started it and owned it (until he died of brain cancer o_O ) was called Saint Laurent. The clothing in the museum wasn't all that old, I mean, my parents were alive then (1960's was around the oldest of the clothes displayed) but still, flash photography seems to damage clothing and art for some reason, so this guy in a black suit leaped out to stop a woman who was taking pictures with her camera. (That must be what those security guards do...I always thought it was weird since they usually just stand there, or walk around looking at you)

Anyhow, the YSL clothing is kind of odd. Some of it is really freaky, like this black, tall hat, and a "wedding dress" which covers you and makes you look like a little dressed-up doll. Here's some pictures of various types. (The third one is really disturbing, but apparently it is also a wedding dress)







And about Andy Warhol...He was an artist, who painted portraits of people, designed record album covers, acted as producer for some band called Velvet Underground (no idea what that is, even my dad doesn't know), and made short movies. My dad wanted to see a picture of Chairman Mao which Andy Warhol created, but apparently that picture isn't featured, so he was quite disappointed. I was pretty freaked out since when I walked in there was a little sign to the side that said there was nudity in the exhibit. Still, people bring their kids in!!

Finally, about the exhibit at the Legion of Honor...Carl Fabergé, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and René Lalique were all male jewelry/decorative art designers. Just so you know, the Tiffany's products we see today are from the same Tiffany's company in the exhibit. I thought Louis's name was weird, since Comfort is an actual word, and Tiffany usually seems like a girl's first name, not a last name.

If you like shiny things, you should look at that exhibit. It had a lot of things, like Easter eggs (made of rare stones, and they were bigger than usual eggs; sometimes there were other decorative items put inside the eggs) and combs (like a comb made from the shape of two swallows, carved out of wood; looks pretty, but would you want to use it?) and even dog collars (whoa, they look so expensive, people would probably steal your dog just to get the collar).

My feet got really tired from tromping around all day. My mother thinks that I need to exercise more, but...that's a different story. If you want to go to San Francisco's museums, and need a bite to eat, go to the cafe on top of De Young Museum. It has tasty food. :D

Labels: andy warhol, clothes, de young, dog collar, exhibit, france, jewelry, legion of honor, lunch, motto, museum, oddity

Top ↑