Yeah to a day off. I grabbed some groceries really quick for a chicken salad. I watched Super Size Me today. I had a physical reaction to watching that movie. I actually felt physically sick to my stomach after watching it. This guy goes on a 30 day McD's diet, only food he consumes for 30 days must be from over the counter at a McD's. It runs the full gamut of health aspects to product branding to corporate manipulation of federal lunch programmes. I was so concerned for Morgan's health that after the doctor told him that if he were an alcoholic with the same blood work results that he would tell him that he had to stop drinking immediately or he would die. Then it shows Morgan eating another Big Mac. I was yelling at my comp, "No, baby, please stop, don't eat it, put it down". Then it went into school lunch programs and then I got really firey. I want to go back to Canada and become a lobbyist to remove all junk food (mostly vending machines) from our schools as well as instituting intelligent cafeteria programmes. I was totally one of the kids they had in the movie. You bring a lunch to school, usually just a pb sandwich and maybe a piece of fruit, and then get some fries from the caf and ditch the good stuff and just eat the fries. Not that I did that often as I didn't have the cash supply as a teen, but still, I feel like I know what those pesky kids are doing. I was one of them. Sure we can talk about giving them the opportunities to make wise life choices early on, but let's face facts, we are the adults, they are the kids, under no circumstances is providing soda at school a positive choice no matter what else they consume during the day so let's make that choice for them by removing it. By the end, as I said, I was feeling quite queasy. I've decided that I will forgo much of the fast food around me, and that's hard to do here because everyone eats out a lot and my schedule is such that it's difficult to make food for myself. It's such a different way of going about things here than when I was in Vic last year. I mean, I had a juicer and an oven and a great farmer's market just down the road, and a Nana upstairs with plenty of freshly frozen goodness in the freezers. Mmmm, blackberries, raspberries, 30 lbs turkeys. Okay, so I never stole a turkey, but I certainly helped myself to the fruit. And I use the word 'stole' here very loosely. Is it really stealing if the person who it belongs to is aware that you are taking it? I say not. At least 'not' if they don't try to stop you. If they know and try to stop you, and you still go ahead, well then yeah, that's stealing.
So I watched Super Size Me, then I watched The Amazing Race - Families Edition Season Premier, then I watched episode 3 and 4 of the new OC season, then I watched some Freedom TV that's on streaming on WinAmp, stupid President Bush. I won't deny that he's a Christian. He may, or may not, be a good man (so many people on tv, albeit often on Fox and they don't exactly supply impartial news coverage, I have heard say, "He's a good man". Who cares if he's a good man, he makes horrible decisions that lead to the deaths and the increased misery of the people he claims to stand for, ie. Americans) but that is truly beside the point, he just should not be President of the United States. It is far too powerful of a nation to be run badly. And I'm not just talking militarily. It has tremendous economic and environmental power that is going unchecked and unaccounted for. It has a tremendous population whose well-being is being ignored as a whole. Okay, so I could go on, but I'm going to stop now. I have more to rant about, but it does absolutely no good and will only prove to divide myself from some of my dear and greatly loved friends who are Americans and some of whom are proud Bush supporters. Or at least they have been in past times, I don't know if they have changed their minds in light of more recent events, although if their minds weren't changed due to his actions before the latest federal vote, then I doubt they would change now because it's all just a lot of the same old thing. Oh goodness, I said I would drop it and look, I brought it back up. Okay really. I'm stopping. Let's go back to the school lunch programmes. That seems like a much safer topic. After Bush I watched something that I can't remember, then I had a bath that was too hot. It was great but I'm still sweating. Then I watched an old documentary and the German taking and then defeat of Stalingrad. What can I say, I grew up watching old war documentaries. It feels like home, and are incredibly interesting much of the time although I don't always have the full grasp of what the effect on the whole war was, Dad usually filled in that info for me. Now I'm writing and downloading the last two John Stewart's of the past week. It actually set new records for my comp tonight. It got up to 105 KB per second. This is quite the feat as I'm usually really happy when it downloads in and around 20 to 30. So 105 is completely unheard of.
In a nut shell, today was a great day of airing out my flat and watching American produced "entertainment". Not a hint of Japanese culture in my day today. I didn't even talk Japanese to the lady behind the counter at the grocery store. Oh wait, actually I think I said "Arigato" to her. I said one word, other than that, it was me living in my own little haven of North American-ness that is my flat. I'm still trying to come up with a good name for the apartement. It's been 5 months of contemplating and nothing has really fit. That may have to be my goal for tomorrow...seeing that I HAVE TWO DAYS OFF IN A ROW!! I'm so excited.
