duck-shaped pain

The selection is still pretty decent for a town of this size and location, though. It's easy for me to be jaded when it comes to Asian grocery stores -- I used to work right near the enormous Uwajimaya store in Beaverton, Oregon and got used to it all too easily. But the store here had a lot of stuff I wanted to get in it.

My goal was to obtain some kombu -- I bought some miso the other day at some other store, but forgot to get the ingredients to make the dashi in order to make miso soup.

I was distracted from my kombu search momentarily when I walked through the door and noticed that the store's long-standing lack of Pocky had ended -- both plain chocolate Pocky and Milk Pocky were now being stocked.

I bought one of each. I'm not the biggest fan of Milk Pocky -- white-colored coating on anything makes me suspicious -- but I bought it out of Pocky desperation.

The package of the Milk Pocky is much more interesting than that of the basic chocolate pocky (which, for lack of a better description, I'm going to start calling Beginner's Pocky, because the box includes a basic Pocky definition: "biscuit sticks covered with chocolate"). It's blue as opposed to red. It has a odd, misshaped drawing of a cow. The box is in Japanese, whereas the Beginner's Pocky box was clearly made for the American market. [1]

Easy way to impress people: be able to tell them what the Japanese characters on the top of the box mean. Then they'll think you're smart. They don't have to know that you essentially just guessed, that with common sense and two months of college Japanese under your belt, you were able to figure out that the kana on top of the box says...... Glico Milk Pocky.

Both boxes now feature a brave new corporate logo that I hadn't seen before. It's a tiny picture of a man running with his arms outstretched. His shirt says "Glico" on it, in English or katakana, depending on the box. On both, a semi-coherent slogan is below the running guy -- "A Wholesome Life in the Best of Taste." Hmmm.

It's too bad they didn't have any other types. I would have liked some Men's Pocky or Marble Pocky. It would be too much to hope for if they ever got in a shipment of Giant Pocky in the enormous box. I've always wanted some, but have never found any. (hint: if any of you out sharp-eyed readers out there know where to find Giant Pocky, let me know). I would also like this. Or, I could try to obtain some of the odder, Japan-only Pocky flavors, such as wine and melon.

A few months ago, I was looking through the annual report of the retirement fund I have some money in. They included a list of every company the fund bought stock in, and there, on the list of stocks, was the Ezaki Glico Company. So I guess I actually own a little teeny tiny bit of Pocky, in a way.

I never ended up buying any kombu. They didn't have any. Besides the Pocky selections, I bought some fermented black bean and garlic sauce and some vegetarian stir-fry sauce. Yum.

On my way to the appliance store this morning, I drove by a house that, at first glance, appeared to have four police cars parked in front of it. As I got closer, I saw that they were cars from four separate security companies. It's good to know that all the mall cops live together now.

I get a lot of writing done at the appliance store, because it's sort of slow there right now. I sit in the back near the parts which is pretty quiet and isolated. I've covered many more pages in the journal than I thought.

Today, my aunt came in the back to look for a part. She looked at me writing and said, "You know you don't talk much, but you do write a lot. Maybe you should talk about what you're writing about instead of writing it."

Since I was writing an even more detailed comparison of the two Pocky boxes than the one above, I figured that might not be a very good idea. People would think I was compltetely insane.