Some very American phrases or sayings:
1.) "Don't meet your heroes"- I hear this a lot recently nowadays because most of the most famous people in America are not great people! This phrase warns kids or idealistic people who idolize people they see on TV not to shatter that image of their favorite superhero or movie hero by actually meeting them in person; it's usually a disappointment and your positive image of them is lost forever as that celebrity is unlikely to be as charming, as handsome, or as friendly to other people as he or she appears to be on screen. I've led a pretty boring life without many heroes who inspire me (maybe comic heroes) but I did meet one of my favorite Survivor players ever, Yul Kwon, the first Asian winner, at USC during law school, and I was in fact disappointed......I told him I liked him on Survivor, he pretty much disavowed his whole existence on that show as an Asian stereotype, and talked about his political agenda (I think he was aiming to run for political office). MJ, however, did just go to a Jason Mraz concert (in Busan, South Korea of all places) and reported that he seemed like a down-to-earth guy. Let's hope so!
2.) Canary in a coalmine: a phrase I just recently learned because it's often talked about on political talk shows as people warn about danger signs in the White House or in climate change. Named for the practice of taking birds down into coalmines as a gauge of how toxic the air is and whether the miners needed to get out (if the canary died, it was time). Unfortunately in the case of climate change, I think the canary has definitely been dying for a long time now and those in charge are not getting the world out of the cave.
I just saw a news article that Asia, where much of America's recycled items used to go, is no longer accepting American recycled goods, and sending them back to America.......completely blowing my mind in terms of changing my idea of what we do with recycled goods. MJ is big on recycling, which is correct (she would like the world to be a better place) but I had heard before that sometimes recycling can actually be bad......turns out, it can be, if recycled in the wrong way, especially with plastic goods like plastic bottles........a lot of people don't recycle the right way. When we put plastic bottles into the recycling bin, we're supposed to take the cap off, and also to take the little thing at the bottom off........didn't know that! I've been recycling the wrong way this whole time! So now the question is, what does America do with all those recycled goods it's getting back from Asian countries! It probably can't put all of them back in circulation, so I wonder how much recycling actually just gets converted into trash anyway. It's a shame.
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