The Snickers Snare

If you ever catch me buying Snickers bars again, please kindly remind me that I don’t like them, that I’ve never liked them, even if they’re the best selling candy bars of all time.

Somehow I keep forgetting that Snickers=peanut butter nougat and I often get fooled by the image of thick caramel oooozing out into thinking that it’s delicious. My hand will drift over and before I know it, I would have bought yet another Snickers bar, only to regret later.

I’m not a fan of peanut butter. When I was younger my nose would run whenever I had peanut butter sandwiches (and other oily stuff like roti canai). As I grew up and ate more unhealthy food, my body reacted less and less to junk. Well, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so they say. But I’ve always associated peanut butter with unhealthy food since then. (The voice of my mum constantly nagging at dad to reduce consumption of peanut butter helped.) Whenever I eat it, I can almost feel the peanut butter clogging my oesophagus, which is not a pleasant experience at all. 

Alright, I think I’ve pretty much convinced myself to avoid Snickers for now. But I can see how a little bit of advertising can just easily sway me again.

It is, after all, an industry of well told lies.

Mind Your Eeenglish

A month ago, I was at the DVD shop when I saw a pirated copy of 27 Dresses. This quote was displayed in huge font on the cover:

Bland. Hard to believe this came from the writer of The Devil Wears Prada.

Oh dear. BLAND. I almost felt sorry for the person who designed the cover. It’s as if the DVD is whimpering, “I’m lousy, please don’t buy me…” Who would want it? 

If you don’t know the meaning of a word, you can’t just lift it and use it liberally. In fact, when I come across a new word, I like to see it applied several times in trusty sources before I use it, to make sure I get it right. Besides, surely the designer must have known that not every movie review is complimentary? How could he commit such a big boo-boo? 

But nevermind, it was just a cheapo pirated DVD (and I bought it anyway).

On another occassion, I bought this made-in-China correction tape that had “Do not the edibility” proudly printed on it’s body.

Note: it wasn’t even “Cannot ate” or “Don’t eaten”; of all erroneous phrases it had to be the most complicated “Do not the edibility“!! It made my eyes pop out and I fell about laughing.

Seriously, don’t pepper everything you write with bombastic words if you don’t know how to use them. And in this case, if you’re so paranoid that people will mistake your unappetizing ribbon of correction tape for sotong strips, why not write it like they do on silica gel bags? DO NOT EAT! Loud and clear. And easy for a 3-year-old kid to understand.

Haih.

p/s: I think I’m really going to do journalism. No more changing of minds from medicine to psychology to business to tourism management. (Note the downgrading.) If I don’t get into NUS/NTU, should I go to Monash, or Taylors? Hmm? Can anyone tell me? Or maybe, even if I do, by a sheer miracle, get into Singapore, should I go back to the land that taunted me for 2 years? For some reason it seems attractive all over again.

 

:)

That has become my favourite smiley.

When I first encountered smileys, I was in form 3 and still new to whole email/icq business. You might not believe me, but I seriously did not know what smileys were. I saw patterns of colons and brackets in emails and my brows were furrowed in frustration as I tried to understand why people commited the same kind of typing errors over and over again. The “)/0″ key is so high up on the keyboard it seems unlikely anyone would hit it by mistake anyway.

Cautiously, I concluded that it must be some sort of code I was not privy to. I dared not ask for fear that I would be called a noob. (Imagine! You draw a smiley during a chat get asked what it is. Wouldn’t you just be dumbfounded by the question? I would, I think.)

Until one day, I tilted my head to the left while figuring out the meaning of ; ) and oh, it was a moment of epiphany! A face was staring straight at me, a face was smiling back at me! I finally understood. I began hunting down those patterns in my inbox and deciphering exactly what emotion each combination was trying to portray. Haha, so stupid la.

Anyway, the reason I’m suddenly writing about smileys is because I no longer like the long cartoonish eyes of “=)”, once my favourite smiley. A bit too fake la. Small eyes look better to me now. It’s a simpler and more genuine smile, although I’m not sure how I’ve let these smileys take on personalities.

What do you think? :o)