even cash registers need copy editors

The commissary just installed self-checkout lanes, which have to be the greatest invention since ... whatever cool thing was invented just before them. I'm squarely in their target demographic: extremely impatient, with a degree of computer literacy and no desire to unnecessarily interact with other humans. I also have a knack for picking the worst possible line, like the time the old woman in front of me at King Soopers paid her $67 grocery bill in dimes and nickels ("$63.35, $63.40, $63.45 ... oh dear, I lost count, I need to start over ...").

So I'm excited by the commissary's leap into the 20th century. I do, however, wish the software vendor had run the produce lookup menu past an editor:

At the top left: "Aplles".

It's possible that this is the only typo in the entire produce menu (this page of the menu covers anise through avocados). But as any editor will tell you -- where there's one mistake like this, there's usually more. And worse. Because you have to wonder, if the programmers couldn't be bothered to run spellcheck before shipping this software to the Defense Department, did they bother to ... debug? Beta test?

And yes, I'm totally going to start buying random produce so I can look for more typos on other menu pages. Because I'm an editing geek, and that's what we do.

Something like the opposite

It's not every day that you take a job in another country. Or a job that was vacated by one of your best friends. Or both. But if you do, you should know -- you'll end up living a slightly surreal, Trekkian Mirror Universe of that person's life.

This is how the word "coincidence" gets misused -- it's not a coincidence that Stacy moved from Japan to the States as I was moving from the States to Japan. It's exactly by design, because I moved to Japan to replace Stacy. (Except I can never replace Stacy. She's irreplaceable. to the left, to the left ...)

But it is a little odd.

Stacy recently wrote a great post about feeling her life in Japan slipping away. It almost blew my mind to read, because I'm going through the same thing in reverse. Even though I miss my friends in the States, and my TiVo, it's astonishing how quickly I've gotten sucked into my new life in Japan. I feel strangely disconnected from things that mattered so much two months ago. I'm no longer part of our D.C. office; I'm part of the Tokyo office now, and the people in D.C., who I worked with for six years, are "them." My house, my car -- those seem like memories of things that belonged to someone else. And in a way they did.

I started to write that I'm a different person now, but that's a bit much with the hyperbole. I'm ... not sure how to explain it. I can't find the word. I'm living outside my comfort zone, and loving it. I eat different food now. I live without a car, and don't miss it at all. I spend my spare time learning kana instead of watching TV, and it's exactly what I want to be doing. (So I'm totally dismayed that Stacy says she's already forgetting kana -- am I putting all this effort into something I'm going to forget two months after going back to the States? Yes, probably.)

I mass e-mailed my family the other day about my adventures in apartment hunting, and someone wrote back "you must feel so far from home." But I don't, at all -- this IS my home now. Of course there are things about the States I miss (chicken biscuits), but there's more than enough awesome things here (lack of open-container laws) to make up for those things.

To my Mirror twin: enjoy life on the flip side, and thanks for leaving those Q-tips in our desk. Gotta love that they're individually wrapped! God bless Japanese overpackaging.

Things I can say in Japanese now:
Whose cell phone is this?

Things I can't say, but need to:
Do you have any boots ...
... in black?
... in my size?
... for less than $600?