Notable Milestone
Today I bought a tree, specifically, a Cypress. Canadian Tire had them for cheap, and I figure a drought-resistant swamp tree should stand a fairly good chance of surviving my horticultural skills. This is not a milestone so far as I am concerned, but it does make a decent, unrelated, introductory paragraph.
After buying the tree I went for dinner and attempted, with a limited amount of success, to use chopsticks. I do not touch type or play the piano, or guitar — or any musical instrument, really — because I have lousy fine motor control in my hands. It’s not bad, just not very refined. Touch typing or using chopsticks ends up generating a fairly painful cramp at the base of my pinky finger. It is perhaps possible that this would go away with more practice, but I have yet to bother to find out. In addition, I have thick fingers, which makes it somewhat difficult to actually get a decent angle of incidence between to two chopsticks. Still, I managed to muddle my way through.
The reason I was using chopsticks at dinner rather than my more common choice of European flatware (knives, spoons, forks, hands) is because I was out for sushi. This also marks the first time I have had sushi. My reaction to sushi is much like my reaction to anime. Anime strikes me as, well, TV. Some of it is enjoyable, some of it is painful, most of it is uninteresting. The concept of watching something simply because it is anime is completely foreign to me. Likewise with sushi: it’s just food. Yes, some of it is very good, in fact I didn’t dislike anything I had tonight. To reiterate: I liked the food, some of it quite a bit. (I like salmon, it’s not a secret, I just really like salmon. Especially smoked.) But, in the end, it’s just food. I buy into a lot of things from the ’80s, but Japanophilia isn’t one of them.
One final note: for some reason green tea tastes like stale rice cakes to me. Explanation: unknown.
2005-02-12: I did in fact like everything I tried and have amended the body text to correctly reflect this. I made a silly typo.
