Graychalk.com | Misplaced Pieces
Lost in Translation
Posted on Sunday, May 03, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Out of nowhere, my sister and I decided to catch a movie at the theater today- something both of us have hardly done since moving here. We went for 17 Again, since we wanted a light movie where we could just walk in, get a few laughs, and walk out without having to overwork our brains. In that aspect, the movie did a fine job at fulfilling its purpose. I did, however, walk out of the theater feeling a bit disjointed and remembering why I sometimes don’t enjoy going to the movies in Taiwan.
- If you’ve ever watched a movie where you could understand the spoken language but the rest of the audience is relying on the subtitles (especially comedy movies), then you may know where I’m coming from. In short, if you’re lucky, then you get to laugh several beats after everyone else has finished laughing because either the timing of the subs are off or they’re reading it much faster than the actual spoken dialogue. The worst thing that could happen there is you end up looking like a slow idiot who caught onto the joke a bit late. Now, if you’re unlucky, everyone will still be laughing when the actual spoken dialogue is taking place, which then causes you to miss the whole damn thing because you can’t hear what’s being said over the laughter. Frustrations all over, I tell you.
- On a whole different note regarding laughter issues, here’s something that’s bound to happen when I watch a movie in a theater here. Nothing funny is happening on the screen, but the entire audience is laughing. A higher WTF factor that occurs occasionally is laughter all around when something kinda depressing is happening. And then when something that’s actually funny finally comes up, I’m the only one laughing (along with any non-local friend I may be watching said movie with). I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone whisper, “What is she laughing about?” and how many times I’ve given myself wrinkles by scrunching up my face and wondering, “What the hell are they laughing at?!”
- I suppose this part doesn’t just cover Taiwan, but I really wish parents would stop bringing their kids to totally inappropriate movies. It’s annoying, wrong, bad for the kids, and… well, inappropriate. While watching 17 Again, I started noticing that there were kids talking, giggling, and whining throughout the movie, which is irritating in itself… but why are they even there? These kids are probably 6-8 years old max, and while the movie may not have explicit bits, it’s still PG-13. Seriously, I don’t care if you really want to watch a movie but can’t because you have kids. Find someone to babysit your kids or do whatever else you need to do, but for God’s sake, don’t bring them into the theater with you just so you can fulfill your own selfish desires to watch a movie that your kids have no business watching!
Of course, watching a movie on the opening weekend probably didn’t help. More people usually ends up making the aforementioned issues all the more apparent. Nevertheless, I left the theater today thinking yet again about how much stuff gets lost in translation. Sometimes, if it’s bad enough, I can’t help but wonder if they’re even watching the same movie I am. And it makes me wonder how much of the movie they’ve missed without realizing.
My ability to read Chinese isn’t all that great, so I can’t read a lot of the subtitles. But sometimes, when I do catch the subtitles, I find myself thinking, “What? That’s totally not it.” That’s not to say the subs are completely off- it’s just that sometimes, it’s not what it really means. Other times, it’s something cultural, like a joke that you wouldn’t really get unless you’re familiar with the Western culture, an idiom that doesn’t get translated right or at all, an innuendo that doesn’t come across, etc. It makes me wonder how much I’ve missed in all the foreign films I’ve watched in the past.
The Aging Milestone
Posted on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 03:52 am
Earlier tonight, I was in the elevator with my sister when she quite suddenly gave a little squeal (perhaps in triumph?) and dove her fingers into my hair. It scared me a bit in that “do I have bird poop stuck in my hair” way, except she probably wouldn’t be wading and digging through the strands had that been the case. She was, in actuality, looking for that glimpse of white hair she thought she saw.
The verdict? She wasn’t hallucinating and I do indeed have my first strand of white hair. I know it really isn’t a big deal, and I’d probably forget all about it in a few hours… but I still stood in front of the mirror for 10 minutes, holding out that one single strand and gawking at the clearness of it anyway. Of course, my sister was standing behind me and cackling the entire time while I babbled something intelligent like, “Oh my God, I have a white hair!” She has every right to laugh, of course, since I have been seen and heard waving her “concerns” off in the past whenever she made comments about her white hair issues. She has about 7, a number I’m always poking fun at and insisting that they sprouted from the first white hair she pulled out… which brings me to this myth:
Don’t pull out your white hairs, because for every white hair you pull out, seven more will grow back in its place.
I don’t actually believe in that myth, and even if 7 more white hairs were to appear on my head, I’d be okay with it… so I do have to wonder why I freaked, overreacted, and slapped my sister’s hand away quite ferociously when she reached towards my single white hair with an offer to yank it out. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like baby milestones where you’d mark the first step, word, etc. and this is like a part of my aging milestone. My first white hair and all.
Having milestones for aging sounds a tad depressing, but in the recent years, I’ve really started to notice the signs. And I mean real signs and not the kind that’s being thrown around by a 23 year old wailing “oh noes, I’m getting oooold!” type of thing. Signs that (took me a while to realize) was due to me not being all that young anymore. Because unlike the young girls moaning about how they’re getting so old now, I’m the exact opposite in that I kept forgetting I’m no longer as young as I used to be. In fact, you’d probably often find me mulling over some “weird” issue or another only to have a friend roll her eyes at me when I bring it up, with a retort along the lines of, “It’s because we’re getting old, Téa.”
Still, I don’t really think being in my early 30s means I’m old... but lately, I do think it’s certainly the start of being old. I can almost hear Rebecca’s ominous voice going off in my head with, “And it only goes downhill from here…” It’s not the being old part that scares me, I don’t think. Rather, it’s how fast the whole process is suddenly starting to happen. Well, at least it’s sudden to me. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t tend to pay close attention to my appearance nor am I the type who uses a lot of beauty products. As a result, I’m the last person to spot that particular wrinkle under my eye or the scattering bits of sun spots I have on my left cheek (something that others have apparently already noticed before me).
My point, though, is that I feel like it’s coming all at once. I’m finding myself unexpectedly starting to feel like I better be taking care of my health and looks ASAP while I still have a fighting chance at slowing the process down a bit. Just 2 years ago, I had thought I looked much younger than my age (and have often been told so as well)... then all within the span of one year, strangers are suddenly able to correctly guess how old I am, and these “aging” milestones are not only popping up one after another- they’re becoming increasingly obvious to me as well. So while my white hair may simply just be a stray hair that had lost its pigment (and I realize plenty of young people have white hair for various reasons other than aging), I can’t help but recall Rebecca’s words. Is this yet another milestone I’m reaching in this supposedly downhill process of getting older?
Paranoia in Epic Proportions
Posted on Sunday, April 05, 2009 at 09:56 pm
Sometimes, it really scares me how paranoid my mom is. She handed me some mail today, one of them being a couple of promotional coupons sent by a hair salon I used to go to, and I made an offhand comment about how it’s probably for my birthday (the birthday on my ID is not my real birthday, hence it’s now and not in January). But anyway… my mother kinda freaked and it went something like this:
Mom: You shouldn’t be giving them your ID number! Do you know what they can do with your ID number??
Me: I didn’t give them my ID number… I just gave them the birthday, so they can look up my member info when I go.
Mom: You shouldn’t be giving them your birthday either!
Me: It’s not like I gave them my birth time. Besides, it’s not even my real birthday, Ma.
Mom: Still, you don’t know what they can do with that….
How did my mom ever get this paranoid? In her defense, she wasn’t always like this. I mean, she had minor doses of paranoia… nothing really all that out of the ordinary, but if I have to track it back to a time when it got really bad (and then steadily worse), it was probably right after my dad passed away. Still, this birthday thing is getting ridiculous. What the hell is anyone going to be able to do just by knowing my birthday, and a fake one at that? Seriously, she must realize it too inside somewhere… except she’s too blinded by her paranoia. Sigh.
As a side note, that birth time thing I mentioned to placate my mom- that’s in reference to the common Asian belief (especially with the older generations) that you absolutely should not reveal the time of your birth to just anyone. Something about black magic, voodoo, and how it could affect your spirit- the latter being more related to if you give your birth time to a “dishonest” fortune-teller or those who are in contact with a “little ghost” in order to foresee the future. Something like that… yeah.
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