Waste not, Want not

Pam and I arranged for her to give me a tour of USC today (with the hope that I will be admitted into the Masters of Professional Writing program there, and that I would therefore need eventually to orient myself on campus). Deciding that it would be imprudent to don my favorite jacket (a grey hoodie from my alma mater, UCLA), I resolved upon my white "I ♥ Tokyo" Adidas jacket, with a Japanese flag on the right chest…

…Which seemed like a safe choice, until I remembered that before our tour of USC, I was to pick up my passport and visa from the Chinese consulate. [If you're not in the know, Japan is not a favorite among people from the PRC, who are still smarting from the so-called "Rape of Nanjing," in which 300,000 Chinese were massacred, and 20,000 were raped (these figures are disputed by the Japanese). In fact, in China, World War II is known as "The War of Japanese Aggression."] I suppose I was bound to offend someone today, since those were the only two clean jackets I had that were appropriate for the weather.]*

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Anyway, Americans are is too profligate.

Today, while having lunch at a USC eatery, we saw this guy, eating Indian food. I, at Pam's suggestion, was eating a turkey avocado sandwich, but I kept eyeing the tasting looking pieces naan and the various garbanzo bean-based dips into which I could dunk them. There they were, sitting on the tray of the man at the next table, just waiting for me to gobble them up.

I wanted to go over in the guise of a cafeteria employee and ask, "excuse me, are you finished? Let me take your tray for you." Pam pointed out that he knew that I was eating at the next table, and if he didn't, he soon would when he saw me sit back down and begin consuming his leftovers. She suggested maybe it wouldn't look as weird if, after clearing his tray, I looked at my watch announced, "LUNCH TIME!" and commence eating.

Then I began to think about all those dead people—dead people who clearly have no use for their hair. Can't we take their locks, and transplant them onto balding scalps of the needy living? The bare-headed living, who could actually make use of that hair. Does it strike anyone else as egregiously wasteful…sort of like all those organs we bury or cremate. I mean, those are just body parts going to waste, and the lives of so many could be improved immeasurably if we just took the time to reuse what we were planing to throw out anyway! (Maybe this post can serve as a legal record documenting the fact that I do in fact want to be an organ donor, and that my family should proceed accordingly with my remains.)

^*Incidentally, on my first trip to China, Adrienne Lau continually yelled, "apologize! Apologize for your history!" to me on day during lunch with several recently made acquaintances. "Apologize! Apologize!" she continued to shriek, even after I explained that I wasn't alive during WWII, nor had my parents even been born at that time. All four of my grandparents lived through the war, though as US citizens kept in internment camps, not as kamakazi pilots. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. Just to placate her, I said "对不起我的历史," ("I'm sorry for my history") to our dining companions, who had no idea what I was talking about.

And speaking of Adrienne, if you happened to click on the hyperlink to her homepage, WHAT THE MONKEY?!? Did you look at her gallery? Not only did she attend both the Grammys and the Oscars, but she met Quentin Tarantino, Kanye West, Nelly, Jamie and Vivica Foxx, and David Tao. Okay, I guess the karmic retribution to balance out these injustices is that she also met and had to take a photo with Flava Flav (who looks to be about 60 in that picture). Anyway, I am going on record here as saying this is some pretty unfair junk, since (in my totally unjaundiced opinion) the quality of my writing is way above the quality of her singing. Unfair. Can we take these blogs to the studio and synthesize them too, please?