The idea of a fad to me is interesting. By definition it is something cool that is sadly destined to go the way of the dodo in a very short time. There are people that latch on to fads as soon as they come to the fore and spend a large portion of their time practicing to become the best at whatever fad is in. This elevates the fad freak to instant celebrity status in the eyes of other fad freaks who are not quite so freaky. Until, inevitably, the fad loses it's steam and the fad freak, like an aging celebrity, tries in vain to cling to the fad just that little too long. They are therefore instantly shunned and even mocked for trying to hold onto their stardom.

Once the fad is over, the people who leave with their cool status intact are the ones that let go of the fad first. Or even better, were never seen to be interested in the fad in the first place. This is something I imagined was universal until I travelled to Asia and realised that this entire continent was obsessed with fads, and fad freaks held on to their fads until they came around in the next decade. My mate recently informed me that the latest Japanese fad is for girls to wear ridiculously larged framed glasses, reminiscent of The Big Chill, with no lenses in them. Apparently the bookworm look is in.

The reason I'm writing this, like usual, is to have a little rant. I was in Japan you see at the time of the natto and banana fad diets. Some brilliant dietician had developed a diet where you could eat whatever you wanted throughout the day as long as you ate only natto in the morning. Natto is fermented soybeans that smells suspiciously like fart and is so sticky you need to act out interpretive dance moves in order to cut off the stringy bit that hangs from the bottle to your plate. So when the natto diet went big I was relatively unaffected ecxept that I was forced to spend hours of my day talking about it in classes filled with image obsessed housewives, but then when the banana diet came out I was severely put out. You could not find a banana in any supermarket in the city. People were lining up every morning at opening time and buying up every banana in the store like they were flood victims stocking up on canned goods. When the fad died down a little but the supermarkets were still trying to make money off of it I tried to buy a bunch of bananas and found that the smallest bunch I could buy was a bunch of 40.  Nice. Brown banana city at my place.