pink.
what i think about when i eat sushi
i didn’t grow up eating sushi. i was a meat and potatoes or fish n’ chips kinda gal. so i never ate the fresh fish until i moved to the city in my late teens. even then it was a slow start with california rolls and deep fried spicy tuna.
it wasn’t until i worked at a sushi restaurant that i truly gained an understanding of the cuisine and the culture surrounding it. they had me take a quiz before i started and i had no idea that “sake” also meant salmon, although with a slightly different pronunciation. regardless of my sad understanding, they hired me for my supposed charm and so i helped them open their first sushi restaurant. she had worked front of house and he had trained as a sushi chef. eventually i would be there till we had a solid crew of regulars, an impatient crowd waiting outside, and a Michelin star. i would learn the names of the all the daily fish in japanese. i would watch the chefs slice, dice, and prepare all the delicate ingredients to make their masterpiece of a nigiri sampler. i would develop a taste for different fish and cultivate a discerning palate.
but i’ve meandered from what i really think about when i eat sushi to what i think about when i write about sushi...
what i think about when i eat sushi... is all these different fish with a bite taken out of them. one perfectly-measured-bite-size piece of a fish on a precisely packed cylinder of rice. i think of the inversion of that piece of nigiri. i think of that fish on my plate. of all those fish in front of me. so that when i take my piece of nigiri and place it in my mouth i feel like i’m picking up one of those fish and taking a chomp out of it. just one bite, and then on to the next.
it’s distorted my enjoyment of eating sushi. i feel painfully aware of my place on the food chain, perched on a bar stool at a hip sushi bar with soft music, mood lighting, and me taking just one bite of all these fishes.
i know that there are many people taking their respective bites of each fish eventually eating the whole, but still… i get wrapped up in it.
*sushi drawing by Mark Dingo Francisco
new year
lists. lists lists lists. i love lists because of how they organize my jumbled thoughts or tasks. a list neatly externalizes what seems so internally overwhelming and cluttered. and i love saying a word over and over and over again until you can feel it in your mouth. its meaning lost— now foreign and simply acoustic. lists lists lists lists lists lists lists.
a new year always calls for a weighty list of "resolutions." but that word has a begrudging feeling to it. a weariness before the task has even been started. i prefer to think of that most serious list as a list of intentions. a mindful setting forth. conscious steps towards goals.
a new calendar year also holds special intention because it's close to a new birth year for me. i'm embarking on a new lap around our burning star and i search within myself for that special star dust to warm my hands by. with notoriously cold hands (as my boyfriend can shiveringly attest to) this is the yearly reminder that i can warm my own.
so another year with me, another year with this world, and a list of long term intentions that perhaps i'll never get to check off, but have pulled out of myself to view and try to own up to. one of which is to write. to write because i want to, just for me. to write because i like words and i want to be better at manipulating them. to practice. to remember the satisfaction of creating a piece of writing.