what's my line?

For laughs, at the behest of the English department, the Eigo club at my school deemed it necessary to interview the fresh blood for the newspaper, to be published at a later date. Can only imagine how I am going to be interpreted.
Upon entering the English room, I was motioned over to a panel of 13-year old girls seated behind a long table with their backs conveniently to the sun. The standard queries began easily innocuously enough.

“Where you from”? “How old are you”?
Then the line of questioning took an unforeseen turn.
“You have girlfriend”?
“Um, sorta”, I replied to puzzled looks. Does not compute obviously.
“Yes, yes,” to gleeful laughter and the scribblings of latest findings began in earnest once more..
“Will you marry she”? came a more uncomforting jab.
“Um, we’re not exactly big subscribers to the institution”.
Same blank stares as before. Stuck in the mud and turning my wheels.
“Yes, yes we will marry”, an eruption of wild giggles and a flurry of characters fill up the notebooks.
“When you marry she”?
“’Her’ you mean? We haven’t fixed a date as of yet”.
It’s quiet again, come up with something clever.
“October next year, we will marry”.
The Q& A session was becoming somewhat predicable. I was certain that my personal life was going to go back up onto the shelf, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Do you love she”?
Now I’m certain my face reddened for the first time. I wasn’t making mad declarations on an afternoon talkshow, but you can’t get much more straightforward than that one. Try that one on for size, Oprah.
“Yes, I love her” I said embarrassedly enough.
“Is she pretty”?
Taken aback again, 60 minutes should hire these girls, not afraid to ask the hard questions. I can feel my face flushing and a palatable giddiness in simply talking about her, which must have been apparent to the panel.
“Yes, she is pretty”.
“How many children”? It’s as if not having children is an option, it’s merely how few or many.
“Well, we haven’t given it much serious thought”. The interview ground to a halt again, although it’s not hard to kick-start this engine. You know the drill.
“We are going to have 2 or 3 children”. Mad laughter from the panel once more, they must be thinking about how one goes about making them.
Then one question came I wasn’t expecting. The word in English escaped them and a dictionary had to be brought forth.
“Do you have a_______,” a finger pointed in the book to the word lover. Apparently wife and lover aren’t the same. “Koibito” can mean mistress or girlfriend.
For a moment I was slightly jealous of the Japanese for knowing exactly what is expected of them for their life’s path. Even the idiosyncrasy of adultery found its fitting place in the larger scheme of things. Somehow it was all too idyllic and I secretly envied what confusion it must eliminate from a young person’s life. There’s a certain comfort in the “all or nothing” approach to life, yet something disquieting about too much perfection. You’ll notice there are no gray areas in the yin-yang symbol.
“Oh, too many side salads can give one the tummy aches,” was my closing statement. I’m sure they weren’t going to find that phrase in their electronic dictionaries.

Alister Cookie’s Letter from Japan

I once joked that “little things mean a lot in Japan”, but I couldn’t have been closer to the truth. It seems that everything is smaller in Japan. However in the larger scheme of things, this might be a boon in disguise.
Lately I’ve been perusing the labels in the local supermarket where I live (here just outside of Tokyo), looking for some shred of Americana to assuage my culture-shocked adrenals. Although you may chance across some labels you once loved and cherished as a child, not everything makes the transition seamlessly to Japanese speed.
For instance, in America when you open a bag of Oreo cookies, you’re easily confronted with a few dozen. If you don’t exercise a bit of self-restraint, you’re liable to tear through that bag until your teeth turn black. You almost feel obliged to finish the next row cause they’ll invariably go stale if you don’t. After all, you wouldn’t want to disappoint all those black and white smiling faces.
Not so in Japan, the bags come a third the size, with 2 individually wrapped packages of 8(the Japanese have a passion for wrapping things). Hence, if you start down that self-annihilating path of pure-cookie-gorging-ecstasy, you’ll encounter a fence or two you’ll have to hop. Oh you’ll get your cookie fix all right, but in smaller portions and not to where you’re doing serious damage to your health. From a sociological standpoint, smaller sizes function almost like a safety valve, in place for those like myself whom can’t practice proper restraint. The Japanese understand subtle psychology of finishing a bag of cookies, ”oh, better stop now, I’ve already gone through one.” In America you can always rationalize you’re well within your rights because the sizes are so big, ”What dude? I’m still on my first bag! Get outta my face with that carrot stick!”
Maybe the Japanese have taken a hint at the passion of unbridled American consumerism, where more is always better. The Japanese are well versed in the credo “less is more”. Maybe their American cousins across the waves look just a little too pudgy. Maybe implemented restraint isn’t such a bad thing. One thing’s for sure, you’re not going to see too many fat Japanese people outside the sumo ring lining up for Jenny Craig.
NPR said this morning America was the most overweight country on the planet, with a good 3/4 the people tipping the scales. This almost begs the question, what if Americans learned to do with less? Could it be there’s some bad planning on the part of companies who don’t always have their consumers’ best interest at heart? Is it such a good thing to give the consumer all that they want, even if it’s detrimental to their health? If we want a healthy population, maybe certain changes need to come from the top down.
Of course Americans are so used to super-sizing their meals. We have been conditioned to believe bigger is better. Can you imagine what would happen if the cookie bags magically appeared one morning a third their previous size? Why, there’d be a riot in the shopping aisles! How do you change peoples’ minds about the concept “more is better”? How do you make people understand enough is sometimes less than you thought you wanted?
The same NPR broadcast later said the Japanese live longer than any people on the planet, with more than 25,000 people over the age of 100. Apparently they must be doing something right.
“Yeah, shut up and pass them goddamn cookies bee-yach!”