My online twin Krystyn is in town this week for business. We agreed to meet for dinner Monday night. I suggested a sushi place in Mountain View that I like, and we had a pretty good meal (though the service was wonky -- seems to be my fate these days). It's always such a pleasure to meet someone and feel that you are instantly meant to be friends. We already knew each other through our journals, of course, and we have some important things in common. Our birthdays, for one thing, and MOOs for another, plus that writing thing. It was quite a gabfest.
We strolled over to BookBuyers on Castro St. and had a ball scouring the children's section for Chapter books and copies of old favorites. I scored three Silverbergs and a James White "Sector General" I hadn't read. Then we stood in the rain next to her rental car for fully an hour laughing and talking and telling stories. It was hard to leave knowing we probably wouldn't be meeting up again any time soon, but it's good to know I have a friend in Chicago if I ever go there.
Check us out. Isn't that smirk on our faces positively sisterly?
Another friend met through the journal world, Amelia, wrote to alert me to a wonderful page she had discovered called Japanese Engrish. I was delighted as this was a page I'd linked to years ago when it was at a different URL. The owner moved without a forwarding address and I figured he'd gotten tired of maintaining the page. Heck, no. It's still online, and contains dozens of extremely funny examples of how the Japanese borrow and subvert the English language in advertising. I'm still laughing at the paper coffee cup promising, "The Art of Hot. Side by side, I'll be yours forever. Because please don't weep."
And to think in America we are so soulless as to drink our coffee from plain white paper cups.
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