So, Saturday night I was headed to Shibuya to meet Noriko for dinner. She mailed me and said "Shibuya station's crazy right now, so I'll be waiting at ???." I just thought she meant it was busy, but no, it turns out it was actually crazy:

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外国人参政権@渋谷


These guys are protesting the newish law that (if I'm reading all this stuff correctly) would grant Koreans in Japan (and simultaneously Japanese in Korea) the right to vote starting April 2012. If you're not familiar with the status and history of Koreans in Japan, it's a long and complicated subject, and the wikipedia page hardly does it justice. I know very very little about the status of Japanese in Korea, but I don't think that there are many, so I'm pretty sure that (at least for now) the reciprocity of the Korean law is more of a symbolic gesture than something that's going to make a real dent in Korean politics. For Japan, however, this affects a fairly large number of people, as this page claims that there's about 3 million Koreans in Japan who will be eligible to vote under the new law (which is a lot larger than just the "special permanent resident" numbers as this law is kind of EU style in that it doesn't matter what the status of the resident is).

I don't pretend to be terribly up to date on Japanese politics, but I'm surprised this one slipped under my radar. At the time I hadn't heard anything about that law, so I could only guess what the actual content was based on their signs and shouting. Because when I walked, lots of them noticed the foreigner in the crowd and glared at me and pointed their signs right at me like it was a cross and I was a vampire or something, I figured maybe some politician was proposing I should have the right in Japan (not a crazy idea. I've lived here for almost 6 years now, I pay taxes, my work ties into a sizable chunk of Japanese science projects/funding. If someone told me "you should vote!" I'd believe them). But listening to the leader guy on the van/megaphone talk it was all about "Chinese and Koreans are trying to take over Japan! *boos* Japan is losing its identity! *boos* Japan is by Japanese for Japanese! *cheers*" Basic boiler-plate hate/fear of Koreans/Chinese/foreigners-in-general stuff... I was very tempted to stop and pick an argument with these guys, but I was on my way to meet Noriko and was already late, so not today. Fortunately, I think these nutjobs are a fairly small minority (this poll however disagrees), but given how relatively hard it is to rally Japanese to a political cause, it was disturbing to see that many of them out there, all shouting random hate at foreigners. Jingoism's still alive and well in Japan...

When making chocolate chip pancakes, M&Ms are way better than chocolate chips. With normal chocolate chips, when they melt they do some bad things like dry out and become pockets of gross, or soggify the surrounding pancake giving you some unevenly cooked pancake, or sink to the bottom and become burnt gross. The hard candy shell on M&Ms seem to solve this almost perfectly. They get soft but retain their shape and concentrated chocolateness, and maybe I just got lucky but I had no burnt sinkers. The dye in the shell does seeps into the batter though, which I think makes a kind of nice rainbow swirly pattern, but if you're one of those people who are like "Food should never be blue" then maybe you should find some non-colored hard-shelled chocolate (or stick to pancake colored M&Ms).

Sorry no pictures this time.

And the Mark Bittman inspired recipe, makes about 4 pancakes:

• 1 cup flour
  
• 1 tbsp baking powder
  
• 1 tbsp. sugar
  
• 1 tsp. salt
  
• 2 tbsp. melted and cooled butter
  
• 1 egg
  
• 1 cup milk
  
• 1 pack of M&Ms (about 45g)

Also, driven by Sims 3, I tried making Apple Pancakes. Same as above, but use chopped apple instead of M&Ms. Also works great with sauteed apples on top (those would probably be great on the M&Ms pancakes too ;)

PS. Sauteed apples (sautee until beautiful):

• 1 apple (thinly sliced)
  
• 4 tbsp butter
  
• 1 cup brown sugar
  

So, in Japan　(and I think at least China, probably other asian countries too), lots of doctors use 粉薬[Konagusuri] (powdered medicine. as opposed to like gelatin capsules or hard sugar-based pills, etc). Looks like this. And I don't get it. What's the deal with that? I recently had a sucky cold with much coughing, sore throat, and headache fun, so I went to the doctor. He asked me:

Doc: 粉薬飲める？ (Can you take powdered medicine?)

Me: はい。 (Yes.)

Had I been less sick, more adventurous, I probably would have gone for a joke (粉薬 "konagusuri" especially with my doctor's pronunciation sounds like "komagusuri", so I was tempted to say "Nono. Not coma. Just a cold." But I dunno if he would have found that as funny as I do).
Anyway, he's a fairly old doctor who also prescribes me 漢方薬 (chinese herbal medicine) whenever I go in for something, and this time had me lie down, felt my stomach-area and pressed his hand under my ribcage and asked "does this hurt?" (duh, yes) "Yeah, when you have a cold this hurts." So I think he might have some "not so modern" beliefs about medicine, and thus the 粉薬 and 漢方薬. That said, the stuff he prescribed seemed to work, so I'm not calling him a bad doctor or anything. I just don't get the point of 粉薬.

Here's my beef with 粉薬: You basically have to somehow get the medicine, and water in your mouth and swallow it and try not to let too much of it stick to your mouth/teeth because if you don't get it all down afterwards it tastes really awful if you happen to brush some of it with your tongue or something (or eat something which dislodges it, and then eww gross! medicine apple!). So it takes like a full glass of water to do properly, and even then is not the most pleasant taste sensation. I still never seem to get all of it out of my mouth in one go. If you could put the same stuff in a simple gel cap, why not just do that?? I mean, sure, water is good for sick people, but lets just stick to the water and try to make the drug delivery as convenient as possible. Also because 粉薬 gets (I think) mixed with some other stuff to make it less gross in your mouth, its really bulky, so a week's worth of medicine is a pretty hefty bag. If there's one good thing about 粉薬 it's that if you have several medicines to take at one time you can mix them all into one bag and drink it in one go. But you can do that with gel caps too with a little experience...

Actually I suspect that because 漢方薬, by it's nature as "herbal medicine" is mostly bulk and if you had to say "distill that down to its critical ingredient so I can put it in a tiny gelcap!" you simply couldn't, and that's why the 粉薬... *sigh*

Anyway, that's my whiny rant for the day.

Also, anybody else see Harry Potter in 3D? I felt pretty let down by that too. I mean, I paid like an extra 800円 ($8) for IMAX tickets, but only the first 10~15 minutes was in 3D! Kinda lame =p

Then again I'm not sure I would have really enjoyed having the whole movie in 3D. When movie-style cinematics go 3D, depth of field gets confusing (at least it didn't work nicely in Harry Potter). Things out of the focal plane are out of focus and in a normal 2D movie you'd tend to naturally not focus on them, but in 3D I found myself focusing on them (cause hey, they're jumpin' out of the screen at you!) but then finding they're still out of focus even when I look at them. Kind of distracting.

One week post-op checkup done and done! All looks well, left eye kicks ass all the way to the bottom of the eye exam chart. Right eye is apparently at 1.5 now, but my left eye has always been better (though requiring higher correction). I was poking around my data yesterday on 23andMe and noticed that I have a SNP that puts me at a somewhat elevated risk for a certain type of uncool glaucoma, and someone else with the same SNP was posting about how when they were given steroid meds for eye surgery their intraocular pressure jumped (IOP) jumped from 21 mmHg to 40 mmHg. I wondered if there was a correlation between that SNP and maybe a hypersensitive reaction to the steroids, so I looked up my pre-op and post-op IOP, both 7 mmHg (which seems actually crazy low, so good news I guess!).

Also, I asked for a copy of my exam data, but all I got was sort of a summary and vital statistics (thus how I know my IOP, and could tell you my cornea is (or at least was) about .5mm thick). What I really wanted was the shiny stuff I'd never seen before and is like uniquely me, like the corneal topogram or the corneal surface microscope image. Kind of a silly goal since neither probably reflects my current cornea anyway, but what can I say? I like collecting data about me. =P

As for headaches, I talked to the doc there, and he just recommended taking more frequent breaks, and that I would probably get used to it (though theoretically the reason for the headaches in the first place would probably only get worse, not better), and that the $1 crappy reading glasses at worst wouldn't do anything bad for me. So decided to cover both bases and picked up some $1 +1.00 glasses, and some ibuprofen and see how each goes. Lens wise the $1 glasses are pretty crappy and the wild warpiness of turning my head with while wearing them is pretty unpleasant (not your friend for a dual-display system). So I'm taking the ibuprofen road for now. Also, I'm pretty sure I still do have some glare issues. In really dark rooms there's definitely some halos, and overhead fluorescent lighting still has some noticeable bloom going on...

Overall feels great now though. Good job z-lasik ^^

ps: If you're in japan and want lasik/other-corrective-surgery too, I have some 1万5千円引券 coupons to give you!

Woo. Finally finished off the last of my antibiotics. There's still a little bit of the steroid solution left.
Halos are almost completely gone. Night vision is back to normal (and crisper than contacts, very cool). I'm still routinely amazed at how now I can pick out individual leaves on trees and can see the grain of a marker on a whiteboard from across the room. It's like someone increased all of my texture resolutions ^^

Pain/itchiness is hardly ever a problem (though yesterday I got an eyelash in my eye, that was pretty annoying, and it seems like the more saline solution I dump in my eye the more likely I am to stick bend another eyelash into a funky position). Tonight will be the first night I get to stop using the plastic eye guards when I sleep (yay! haven't been sleeping too well with those things stuck on). I think my brain/muscles/something is still adjusting to this new super-vision because I seem to be getting headaches after looking at the screen for a few hours. It might be that I'm still sensitive to glare. I'm not sure... my new minimum focal distance seems to be about 10cm, so it doesn't seem like my monitor would be too close (it's at about 50cm usually, but right now I've pushed it back as far as I can on my desk). Anyway, hopefully that gets better. Apparently my vision is expected to fluctuate for the first 3 months or so, so I might buy some of those $1 granny-style reading glasses while my eyes reprogram their microcontrollers so to speak. Or would glasses screw with the retraining? I dunno. Maybe I should go for ibuprofen instead? I'll have to ask tomorrow at my 1 week post-op exam.

Only other complaint is dry eyes in the morning when I wake up (eyes feel "sticky" and hard to open until I put in some eye drops), but in theory this should keep getting better. On the plus side I've gotten pretty damn good at aiming eye drops into my eyes now =P

Just finished my "day after post-op exam." Apparently I'm doing fine with no complications, and my vision does officially kick ass ^^ Went from 0.08 to 2.2. w00t.

Still seeing some haloing on bright objects, moreso when in the dark. Hopefully that goes away soon.

Also, confirmed that the hinge of my flap is on top (ie. at 12 o'clock). I'm mildly impressed with myself that I was able to correctly pick out (and remember!) which direction the flap was folding during the surgery (despite the mild panic induced by all the funky sensations from touch, sound, distorted vision, and the giant bone-crushing suction cup LDV laser).

Woke up, still haven't really experienced any dry eye, but this gunk on my eyelashes got in my way I think. Bright light is still kind of painful (or is that just always like that in the morning?). I can't feel any scratchiness or any discomfort in my eyes anymore. Amazing.

Something in one of the hourly two eyedrops ("Vegamox Opthalmic Solution" (antibiotic), and "DEX" (anti-inflammatory)) kind of stings for a minute, but other than that, discomfort is now almost 0 (only inconveniences remaining: eyelashes covered in sticky medicine + tear goo, having to sleep with eye guards on, can't get eyes wet in shower). Oh and it looks like I still have some halos/starbursts/trouble-focusing on lights in the dark, but the halos/starbursts are already less than what I had with glasses =P

Ahhh, the constant backwards-contact-like pain has finally subsided into a forwards-contact-like minor annoyance. I can now make it between my hourly doses of benoxil without wanting to claw my eyes out. After only 6 hours! Not bad! Good job z-lasik! Also halos and glare have subsided considerably so I can see what I'm typing properly. I dunno why dry eyes are supposedly a problem, mine keep watering like crazy. Waste basket full of kleenex. Also eyelashes covered in gunk, but I'm prohibited from wiping them and/or getting water in my eyes. There's gotta be a way....

Anyway, I was supposed to stay awake at least 5 hours after leaving the clinic so I could keep dosing myself with eye meds, but now finally time for sleep! Gnight!

Operation finished about 2 hours ago. Hurts like a bitch. But already I can tell my vision just got awesome! Bright things are still very halo'd and glarey. In fact now I see why they say "don't use a computer." It doesn't really hurt (thank you benoxil!!), but I can tell I'm straining to see the screen. So this will be brief, and likely full of typos ;)

Having done my homework and already watched a few surgeries the actual operation had very few surprises and was over way faster than I thought it would be! The most surprising part was the pressure applied to my eye during the flap creation by the femto LDV thingy. I wanted to ask what on earth was actually going on my eye, but it felt like it latched on to my eye socket and clung to my eyeball. Also I couldn't see at all while that was going on (but saw some kinda funky light affects that changed throughout the countdown (they were like 21 seconds left, 15 seconds left, 10 seconds left, 5 seconds, all done!). That was definitely the most unpleasant part. The opening of the flap was pretty cool because I could see the little instrument, it didn't hurt at all, but I could feel it, and I could see my vision warp and deform as the flap was peeled back. The eximer laser part was totally painless, though the center of my vision got cloudy as the eximer went along (disconcerting, but I read that that would happen, and well, it did!). Then replacing the flap was again pretty cool, because I could see everything going on, and the little wipe thingies look really cool up close, and feel as soft and actually cooling, kinda strange.

Afterwards however, it hurts like a bitch. It's a lot like having a contact in upside down that you can't take out. And it doesn't stop. They gave me some more pain meds, but wow, the muscles around my eyes feel tired from glaring under the strain. Especially my forehead. Very strange. THe train ride (and the walk) home really sucked as the pain meds started to wear off and I'm sitting their huddled in a corner of the train, tears running down my face, I probably looked fairly disturbed. Actually I was constantly amazed at how quickly my vision was improving and was pretty happy, except for this incessant pain in my eyes (right eye especially for some reason). THank god I didn't go for PRK. I don't think I could take this for more than a few days.

Anyway, head hurts, time to quit. Mmmm meds....

So, about a year ago one of my lab mates (八谷) got LASIK. We all thought that was pretty cool, he was really happy with how it turend out, and shortly thereafter another of my lab mates (長名さん) also got LASIK. Around that same time I was getting quite annoyed at my glasses, trying to move them around my nose to see the screen at presentations etc. so I was like "awesome. I want lasik too!" as they were both raving about how well they could see. However, after some research, planning, and preparation, the money I set aside for LASIK got eaten up by moving (doh). And by then I was like "hmm, do I really want a permanent flap in my eye?"

But this winter I got a new contact prescription to make glorious snowboarding fun, and have since been amazed at how much better the world looks through contacts rather than glasses (my old contact prescription was so old that, well, lets just say I really shouldn't have been using those contacts). And even contacts aren't without their issues (going fast on a snowboard down a hill is a bad time to have a contact slip out of place leaving you blinking desperately trying to regain your vision), and they do get annoying after about 8 hours or so.

So, recently I decided it was time to stop fence-sitting and just go ahead and do it!
Today was my preliminary screening. I'm going to the same place 八谷 and 長名 went, 品川近視クリニック. I was deeply impressed by the efficiency of the place! You might think "how many people could possibly be getting LASIK per day??" and expect a little clinic about the size of a dentist's office, but no! This place was huge! Based on the number of lockers (yes, they had lockers!) it looked like they were set up to run about 100 people simultaneously through the preliminary screening. They put me through about 10 different eye exams, and they had about 10 of each exam equipment, all lined up so if the place was absolutely packed (and if they had enough staff) they could shuttle people through assembly line style. It was really quite awesome. Some of the coolest tests that they did included a microscopy photograph of my cornea (I kinda want a copy of that. I'll have to ask for one later!), and somehow measured the thickness of my cornea using some ultrasonic probe. The ultrasonic probe was by far the coolest because it actually caused my vision to "ripple" like some 80s flashback cut. The worst parts were of course the intraocular pressure test (the one where they blast air at your eye. that always makes me jump + blink so hard my eye lashes feel like they get tangled), and pupil dilation bits. Having dilated pupils there in the exam room is fine, but it sucks not being able to focus on anything closer than 10 feet, and of course the subsequent headaches that bright light causes. Eyes are pretty freakin' awesome though. It always amazes me that with pupils dilated I don't perceive any difference in brightness.

I came back to lab, hoping that the dilation effects would have faded, but no. I inconvenienced everyone in the lab (all two of them) by turning off the overhead lights. >_<

Anyway, antibiotics in hand, now I just start the countdown until operation day!

Also, I really suck at putting in eye-drops. I think maybe I should get some saline drops and practice... =/

I went to Kawasaki today for pants shopping. While I was there I thought I'd see a movie. We're in movie the doldrums right now, so I had basically only a few choices: "Burn after reading" (which I figured would be best saved to see with someone), or "Gran Torino" (while I've never really had a good Clint Eastwood experience, the glowing 79% reviews at Rotten Tomatoes gave me hope). So Gran Torino it was. While it did have a moment or two, and I'm not sure if it made me cry or my allergies just suck, overall there was just too much self-righteous fist-waving mixed with peculiar racism to really make that a pleasant experience. I mean, what was the point of the gratuitous racial slurs and blatant racism in that story? Lets imagine we took that out, and the core story doesn't suffer at all. Walter can still be a cantankerous old curmudgeon. Seriously, there were so many racial slurs, and so many I'd never even heard before (reading the japanese subtitles was perhaps "educational" but not really informative (what I'm pretty sure were racial slurs often got translated just as "moron" or stuff like that)), I can only assume that Clint Eastwood thinks that this kind of old timey "harmless" racism with a smile is cute and adds depth to what is an otherwise one-dimensional old vet filled with contempt at a world reliable only for letting him down.

I don't usually demand that my movies carry an enlightened message, or tread lightly to avoid offending my "fragile sensitivities" or some such, but what I find so disturbing here is positive response the movie got despite the fact that the messages that this movie drags out over 2 hours are "racism with a smile is ok, as long as you're an equal opportunity offender" and some murky hard-to-distill messages about guns and violence (but you notice how our protagonist gets the biggest guns?). In Japanese we have a word 自己満足 (self-pleasing or self-congratulatory) which describes this movie very well. If there was any doubt in your mind about whether this Walter character was supposed to be a mixed bag (a dark troubled hero with issues and weaknesses), or a silver knight (paragon of virtue and perfect role-model), you need look no further than his death scene where he strikes a christ pose with blood running down his hand. "Navel rings and cell phones? No! Religious superstition, institutional sexism and racism? Yes!"

Rotten Tomatoes perhaps should not be my movie filter of choice...

Then again maybe I missed something. Another strange thing about this movie was that whereas in most Japanese movie theaters, usually I feel a little self-conscious because I'm laughing louder than everyone else, the Japanese audience was surprisingly vocal and laughing way harder than me. It didn't occur to me at the time, but it could be that the prevalent "racism is just normal and to be expected" attitude in Japan actually left them more at ease, whereas I was on edge for most of the movie... Strange strange...

Oh, and Clint Eastwood singing in the end credits? That's just going too far!

Other linux users are no doubt familiar with the BSOD screensaver which the feigns death throes of various operating systems from linux, to amiga, to good old Windows. I have two monitors on my desk, lately one has been permanently attached to my linux box, and the other permanently attached to my windows box (devoted basically entirely to games). it happens fairly often that I come in and see a BSOD on the linux box which usually just makes me smile nostalgically. but tonight I came home tonight to find a BSOD on the windows box which didn't just go away after 30 seconds to be replaced by old fashioned amiga Desk graphics or something. This makes us very sad. Sadder still, rebooting leaves me with:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

*cries* either filesystem is fried or hard drive just choked on a big dust bunny, either way, not good news!!!! (泣)

update: upon inspection from linux, my ntoskrnl.exe is still there (sha1=97819038dd0b8b5b8cb00942504a31f2cfec54c6 md5=ca4e17bdbe7eec410298f637e62aed1e), seemingly intact. windows apparently just decided it was time to kick the bucket? *sigh*

update 2: ok, hard drive backup took a long time (stupid old drives...). and me, like an idiot, ignored the warning signs of not being able to boot off the install cd ("couldn't load ntstmp.exe error code 4" or some such), so dug up a 32bit install cd instead. 32bit cd at least booted, got me to the disk partitioner which for some reason showed my disk as completely empty (strange), so i decided to reformat it, but after deleting the old partition it showed my disk size had shrunk by half!!! "wtf?" we say, and see how far the install gets anyway. the install fails soon after starting to copy files. I'm now pretty sure that the ram is borked, and indeed memtest86+ says so too. Just one dimm though. I was all excited to use this as an excuse to upgrade lots of things, but if it's only 1 dimm that's bad....now I'm torn...

I already fried the old partition, so now that i have to reinstall windows anyway, do i go 32bit? 64bit? xp? vista? Or just say screw it and upgrade everything first?

update 3: I have free stuffs to giveaway! GeForce 7800 GT and a PC-3200 DIMM which magically turns every highest bit in a 32bit word into a 0!

CMU just sent me an invite to their pre-college program.
Honestly, what are they thinking?

While it is only Spring, it is never too early to start thinking about summer plans. Have you considered how you'll spend your summer vacation? Would you like to:

• Take college level courses for university credit?

...blahblahblah...
If you're going to be a junior or senior in high school, we hope that you will consider spending your summer with us!

I mean..seriously. How do you go sending pre-college recruiting mail to the alumni list?

Obnoxious meme warning: ( Your life in song titles. )

I have no idea how I got on these people's list (I can only assume my address was pulled off of some paper submission or something), but this just showed up in my inbox. Seriously??? hawking a book about "how intelligent design and creationism can be considered on equal footign with science" to evolutionary biologists??? Honestly, you'd have better luck with "personal enhancement" spam...

And today some new words go into the bayesian spam filter... *sigh*

On a somewhat random note, everyone probably knows that drinking orange juice before brushing your teeth (or brushing your teeth before drinking orange juice) makes for a really funky unpleasant taste. Today I discovered that chewing some mint gum until your mouth is good and mint-saturated (not tasting the mint anymore) then using some mint tooth paste also makes for some funky flavors. Mine suddenly tasted really herby, kind of like licorice. Very strange...

Also, losing my concentration while trying to do research is one thing. Losing my concentration while riding my bike, that's getting dangerous... =(

Flying back to japan, Wall-E was on on the in-flight entertainment system (ps: unless you're in first class, JAL's entertainment system is kinda lame (movies are all on loop, so unless you're very alert/dedicated, basically you always start in the middle)). ( Wall-E spoilers within ) I'd like to believe that that's some personal progress, but it may just be that watching the same thing 10 times just doesn't make me that sad anymore. It feels better to believe that it's personal progress though =P

On an almost completely unrelated note, I had the most awesome seat ever on the return flight. The plane was a 747-400 which has two levels, my seat was exit row on the upper level, and the space on the exit row was huge. Seriously they could fit 2 more rows in here (sure, it'd block the (massive) exits and the flight attendants wouldn't have seats, but that's how much space there is). Plus there was no one else on my row, so I get to spread my stuff out across the seats (unfortunately the armrests couldn't retract to make it a couch, otherwise it would be absolutely perfect). Got very very lucky!

Back in the US, land of a thousand megaplexes (seriously, my home town logan, has about 35,000 people and approximately 35 movie screens). For some reason my mom and sister wanted to go see Marley & Me. They've read the book, they knew what they were getting into. It's like asking to be kicked the kidneys. (Almost like going out of your way to find and watch Audition except that you are rewarded with a good 1.5 hours of laughs and warm fuzzies before it starts tightening the screws (incidentally, FYI Audition offers no such consolations. just pure agony start to finish)). Lately I feel like I get emotionally involved in movies and such far too easily. Marley & Me registered almost as many tears as Wall-E. Almost. Time-wise marley might have been longer in terms of total crying time, but that's just because they drag it out. Wall-E on the other hand actually drove me to audible sobs (I don't think I've done that for any other movie ever). Now what does that say about me? Anthropomorphic robots get more tears than dogs!! *sigh*

Anyways, I don't think I'm a complete emotional basket case. Last night they watched "The Holiday," which despite having a thoroughly lovable character for Jack Black, was quite possibly the most formulaic romantic comedy ever. I mean, I have a long history of enjoying romantic comedies (perhaps more than I should), but mostly I just wanted these characters to die. If I'm developing some misanthropic tendencies, fine, so be it. That was doomed to happen anyway for a while now perhaps. But I refuse to turn into someone who cries at Hallmark cards.

edit: That said, here's a relevant quote from Dennou Coil that I kept thinking of during the movie (from Yusako's mom):
お母さんも昔飼っていたのよ。一年ぐらいで死んじゃって、すごく泣いたわ。なんとくいけなくてさ。何で小ちゃい生き物ってすぐ死んじゃうだろうって。ペットって人間よりたいてい寿命が短いじゃない？なんでそう決まっているの？ペットが人間より長生きだったら、この思いをすることもないのにって。
そしたらね、金沢のおばあちゃんがこう言ったの：飼い主がペットの死ぬところを見たくないように、ペットだって飼い主が死ぬところを見たくないじゃないか？ってだから悲しみに耐えれる人間の方がペットの代わりにその悲しみを引き受けるのよ。だって人間の方が体大きいもの。

[I had a pet once too you know. It died after about a year. I cried so much. I just couldn't accept it. Why does such a small thing have to die? Pets usually have a shorter life span than people, but why is that? If pets lived longer than humans, we wouldn't have to feel this way. Then my mother said this: Just like the owner doesn't want to see pet die, the maybe the pet doesn't want to see the owner die? That's why humans, who can endure sadness, feels that sadness instead of the pet. Humans have the bigger body after all.]

Watching Wall-E even a second time still makes me cry waaay too much.... I think I'm broken.