Oh, hello there. Where have I been for the last two weeks, you ask? Only in my most favorite place in the world, the much-maligned, traffic-ridden, smog-choked, season-less, crazy, wonderful Los Angeles. I watched about a million movies (actual figure: 14 movies), knit a cabled hat (see below), became addicted to Animal Crossing on my new Nintendo DS Lite (Rob!!!), slept in until 10AM every day and spent some time with friends and family (hi Joanna, Jenn, Kelly, Meg, Sarah, Jon and Therese!). I also ate a lot. But that's nothing new.

One of my favorite Christmas gifts came from my mom -- I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, Amy Sedaris's hilarious and surprisingly practical guide to entertaining. I would give you quotes from the book about how to comfort grieving gay men and flatter rich uncles, but the gigantic hardcover didn't make the trip with me to Japan. Just trust me that it's good.

I knit a cabled beanie in cream-colored Tweed Bazaar, a cute Japanese yarn, over the course of the trip. I used this pattern, but made it bigger to fit my possibly-gigantic head and tweaked it a bit. I'm not normally a beanie person, but it's really comfortable and I love the yarn, which has little flecks of blue and orange. And it's also my first cabled thing ever!

Now I'm back in Japan, marveling at the impossibly clean, quiet trains and watching my breath puff out in the middle of my impossibly frigid kitchen. Winter as usual. Thank god for my kotatsu and the 24: Season 5 DVDs I just bought.

MEMORANDUM

From: The Nobel Candy R & D Department

To: The Candy-Eating Public

Re: Our Amazing Breakthrough

We are pleased to announce the release of our newest addition to the Nobel Candy line, Mitarashi Dango Gummy. For those unfamiliar with mitarashi dango, it is a popular Japanese festival snack consisting of five small skewered rice balls covered in a sweet shoyu-based sauce. Our research has shown that kids love the things. It has additionally shown that 82% of adults, 95% of whom were once kids, also love the things. Therefore, we have spent the past five years developing a patent-pending Shoyu Injection System in order to provide you, the candy-eating public, with the millions of soy-sauce filled gummies you undoubtedly crave, at the staggering injection rate of 5.2 gummies per second!

We hope you enjoy the fruits (or should we say salty condiments?) of our labor. In the meantime, we continue to wait hopefully for the day when we might receive the namesake prize we believe is our due. Especially now that we have this whole Shoyu Injection System thing (patent pending). Thanks in advance. That's all.

Sincerely,

Nobel Candy

MEMORANDUM

From: Giant Jeans Parlor, on behalf of The Candy-Eating Public

To: The Nobel Candy R & D Department

Re: Your Fateful Mistake

I received your memo and sample of the recently-released Mitarashi Dango Gummy. You should be aware I tried it out of morbid curiousity, not out of a burning need to fill the shoyu candy hole in my life. While objectively I can admire your impressive gummy-injection rate, I also must ask the question certainly on the minds of all who have read your memo: why? Quickly followed by this imperative: please stop! Just because you can turn something into a gummy candy doesn't mean you should.

I will concede that your product is not as terrible as many others I have tried while working on behalf of The Candy-Eating Public. The mochi-like texture and combination of sweet and salty flavors is indeed reminiscent of an actual mitarashi dango. I'll even admit that I've been absentmindedly munching on the gummies all afternoon, trying to figure out what makes them so very wrong. I don't yet have an answer for you. All I can say is, if prize-winning is your goal, I'm afraid injecting candy with soy sauce will surely prove fruitless (or should I say salty-condiment-less?).

Yours truly,

Giant Jeans Parlor

When I left my boring desk job nearly two years ago to move to Japan, I immediately made it a goal to never hold a full-time office job again. Now, as I am starting to ponder Life After Japan, I feel it is important to remind myself again how depressing and mind-numbing it is to be locked inside eight hours a day, five days a week. So I dug out the following, a writing exercise I did for a workshop three years ago. We had to write about five minutes of our daily lives, any five minutes. I chose to write about the five minutes I spent every morning getting from my car to the front door of my office, the last five minutes of freedom I had every day. (We were also randomly assigned first/second/third person and singular/plural, which is how I ended up writing from the "we" point of view.)

If this is interesting to you, I recommend trying it for yourself. It's like a written snapshot of a certain time in your life; rereading this has inspired me to write another about my current life. And if you do write your own, please share!

We turn the key that kills the engine, but not all the way; the CD player is still on. Stop button: beep. Turn off the little white transmitter that broadcasts the signal from the CD player to the car stereo – don’t worry, the science of it doesn’t make sense to us either. Static blares loud from the station in between stations, so we twist the knob all the way to the left, then turn the key completely and take it out. Keys into pocket, so we don’t forget. If there’s no pocket, we tuck them into one of the many bags we carry.

Plastic handle of tin lunchbox goes into our hand, unless it is a day that we have brought something in a large container that does not fit in the lunchbox, in which case twine handle of the wider lunch bag goes over our wrist instead. Cell phone is pulled from its little cubby and the tiny button is pressed off: boop. Then into the cozy that we crocheted and into the purse that we chose to carry today.

Open the door. We struggle with the two or more bags and feel ridiculous and wonder if anyone sitting near the windows can see us. The sky is gorgeous – bright and swept clean – and the air is fresh and good, so we breathe in deeply because this is it until 6 PM. The plants that line the brick walkway up to the double glass doors have been watered; they sparkle in the morning sun. There is always at least one squinty old guy lurking by the ashtray just outside the building, staring at our kneesocks or ass.

We dislike the people who push the handicapped button in order to open the double doors automatically, so we never use the button on principle, even though some days it would really come in handy. We wipe our feet on the rubber-backed carpet. We adjust our eyes to the silvery fluorescent lights. We sigh, not on purpose.

This is it.

Feeling blue? Winter got you down? Something terrible happen in your personal life that you want to forget about for a couple minutes? Hey, me too! Why not watch this video of what has to be the most amazing penguin ever and remember that the world is actually a pretty great place?

I didn't have high hopes for Happy Strawberry Crunky, I have to tell you. Crunky is a big name in the Japanese candy world, and while I had never eaten an offensive Crunky bar, I had also never craved one like I do, say, Almond Chocolate Fried. Also, unlike other discerning candy eaters I know, my love of things strawberry-flavored peaked at age seven with Strawberry Quik and quickly plummeted. But strawberry is the flavor of the moment for Japanese candy and I picked Happy Strawberry Crunky from a pink wall of at least eight strawberry spin-off snacks. Mostly for the name. If a happy strawberry couldn't change my solidly indifferent feelings toward strawberry-flavored candy, I figured nothing could.

Lucky for me, it turns out happy strawberries make a compelling case. Instead of smelling like my Strawberry Shortcake doll circa 1984 the way so many strawberry snacks do, the bar has a gentle berry scent and is flecked with bits of a substance which was most likely once strawberries. Crunky bars are like Nestle Crunch bars packed with about fifty times the crunchies, but good crunchies, crisp, flavorful crunchies that add a toasty bite to the milky strawberry chocolate. And that chocolate, instead of being just "good...for a flavored white chocolate," is rightfully, actually good, no asterisks necessary. It has a fresh, slightly tangy taste and the flecks are, I think, bits of actual freeze-dried strawberries.

I'm happy with Happy Strawberry Crunky. It's been a long time since I've reviewed a candy I actually would buy and eat again. My Candy Corner is getting ridiculous, to tell you the truth, packed with so many half-finished boxes of candy I can't imagine ever eating all of it. So in an attempt to clear out my backlog, I'm officially announcing the next Giant Jeans Parlor Japanese Candy Friday Candy Giveaway. This one is the Happy New Year: Take My Candy, Please! edition. I will send THREE lucky, randomly-selected winners two types of (new, unopened) winter/early spring candy, plus a selection of various individually packaged candies I have reviewed recently. To enter, please comment on this entry with your email address (visible only to me), telling me which Japanese candy intrigues you the most and why. Is it because it looks disgusting? Delicious? Do you love the packaging? Nan demo ii, people! (Anything is okay!) It doesn't have to be a candy I have reviewed, by the way. This is open to anyone in any country, but you must comment by noon JST, next Friday, January 26. I look forward to your responses!

I spotted a guy carrying this bag at the train station tonight, a truly gigantic bag decorated like an old-school '80s boom box. It was big enough to carry a small child inside...or maybe an old-school '80s boom box? Either way, I wanted to steal it.

Well, here it is Sunday and I am only just posting the Japanese Candy Friday for this week. What a terrible candy correspondent I am. I hope you'll excuse the lapse; I was just too busy with an eighth-grade-style all-girl sleepover on Friday and an American-Brazilian wedding on Saturday. Candy couldn't compete with hours of making daikon-leg jokes and dancing shoeless with my favorite knit club girls (who I know are reading this...stalkers). It was a good weekend.

Now back to the candy! First, the winners of last week's candy giveaway are Sera, Jhoanna and Sasha. They will all soon be receiving some winter/early spring candy as well as an assortment of candies I've reviewed lately. Thanks for taking my candy, you three!

No formal review today, but I did want to share one of my favorite recent finds: Cubyrop Gummy. When you were a little kid, did you have grand dreams of snack mash-ups you wish so badly existed, like maybe a version of Swiss Miss hot cocoa dotted with Lucky Charms marshmallows or something? (My own snack mash-up ideas were usually disgustingly sugary.) Well, when I first tried Cubyrop, I wished so badly a gummy version existed, so much that I even mentioned it in the comments, but I had little hope that my dream would come true.

Lo and behold, I found a small packet of Cubyrop Gummy the other day and have been happily eating them ever since. They aren't exactly what I had hoped for, since there are only three flavors (grape, peach and lemon) and I could do without the sour powder dusting each piece, but I can't complain. It's not often my candy dreams come true.

Since discovering the 3-story fabric store Otsukaya in nearby Gifu City, I haven't been hitting the Craft Heart Tokai in my town very often, but today I was passing by and stopped in on a whim -- only to find they were having a huge sale, with a big display of Shinzi Katoh fabrics front and center. I didn't have a lot of money on me, but I did manage to buy a meter each of these canvas fabrics:

A Shinzi Katoh elephant taking a bath, with help from a tiny, toothbrush-bearing elephant. It says "I wish I could melt into the water like a mermaid!" on the tub.

Various postage stamps.

The Decole mushrooms.

Plus three fairy-tale-themed cottons:

The only problem with buying cute, special fabric is that I feel like it's almost too good to use. I don't want to waste it on something less than incredible...any ideas?