Grandfather (dad's side, so not the one I hung out with last summer) seems to be the only person in the world convinced that I can and should become a doctor. Not that I'm not considering, but he's completely dead set on it. And have you ever tried to say 'no, let's wait and see how smart I am' to your ninty-year old grandfather? It's very hard. You know what else is hard? Remembering three languages at the age of ninty. He speaks Taiwanese mostly, Mandarin to me, the youngest grandchild who knows the least Taiwanese, and somewhere in the back of his mind, is Japanese, which he speaks to no one nowadays but still keeps fresh. I hope I keep my tongues like that when I'm old. It'd come in especially handy for cross-culture TV watching.
I have never seen a Korean soap I haven't shaken my head at (though sometimes I keep watching, and watching) and a Japanese game show I don't enjoy. I don't like the shows for their zaniness, but there's an earnestness and innocence in the contestants that you don't see in reality TV in the States. On the game show I watched today, two chefs duked it out over three courses using the finest of ingredients. In today's case, it was kobe beef against some really, really expensive tuna. What happens is that the two chefs make their ridiculously luxurious food that normal people could never afford to eat, then a panel of celebrities vote on whose food they'd rather have. Those that vote for the winning chef get to eat the food and those that vote for the loser don't. It's very simple yet extremely cruel. You basically watch two people make equally mouth watering food in front of you, have to somehow choose between the two, and if you make the wrong choice, you end up watching other people eat really good food while you sit there with nothing. My mom said they once had an episode with kids on the panel. And a few of the losing kids started crying when the winners started eating. That ought to teach the kids not to strive for things they may not reach.
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