Sushi Stories 3

While I was still in training at the sushi bar, the Vietnamese kids who worked as hosts and servers were trying to get to know me a little bit. Here is the weirdest part of our conversation:
"So, do you have a girlfriend?"
"Yeah, I do."
"Is she Asian?"
They all looked at me rather expectantly.
"No," I said, "she's, um . . . white?"

When we were younger I used to tease my sister because whenever I was talking about someone I knew who she did not, she would invariably ask me, almost immediately, "Are they nice?"
What was I supposed to say? "No! I've never met a bigger jerk in my life!" Most people tend to be nice in my experience, at least on the surface. I'm sure my sister was only trying to learn more about these people that I knew, but she repeated the "Are they nice?" question so consistently that it seemed like she was desperately seeking confirmation of basic human goodness in the world.

I am less sure what the sushi kids were seeking in asking if I was dating an Asian girl. But it would be funny to ask that with the frequency Elizabeth asked about "niceness."
"So I was talking to Bob from accounting about clearing your paycheck today . . ."
"Oh really? Is he Asian?"
...
I guess I could keep going, but this only seems half-way funny in my head. I'm sorry. I have realized that I am bad at remembering a couple of things. I am pretty good at remembering general concepts, story-lines and philosophies, etc. Abstract stuff tends to stick with me. For this reason I never took a whole lot of notes in my classes. Abstract concepts were things I knew I would remember, and more specific details seemed like trivial things I'd never need to know anyway.
In some ways, it seems amazing that I passed college. But really I just made sure to take a lot of honors classes, which reward abstract thought and not silly mundane facts. Pshaw!
Anyway, so I have never been good at memorizing times tables, or names (I have just learned to say basically "Hi, I'm Aaron! If you tell me your name, I probably won't remember it in two minutes, but miracles do happen, so let's give it a shot anyway." when meeting someone), or, to my deepest lament, jokes. I can, and do, make up jokes and puns on the spot all the time, and occasionally say things that other people think are actually funny. Or I will see or hear something funny, and think "oh man, that's great!" but a week later I will have forgotten it completely. I'll have an abstract, intellectual notion of what made it funny, but there's not a whole lot of humor in theoretically generalizations. Details and specifics are what makes things funny, and those are the things that I cannot seem to hold onto.
So there's an un-funny story about not being funny. Shouldn't that create some sort of humor vacuum that funny things will rush in to fill? Man, I really really hope so. If not, sorry everyone. :{( <-- sad man with mustache
...
and wow, this isn't really about sushi any more, is it? I just had two stories that I wanted to tell about the restaurant, and I've yet to get to either one of them. Maybe tomorrow!
xxoo

(also, today's True Tales of Bravery and Honor I think might be my favorite so far . . . until the next one on Sunday, that is! What do you all think?)

Sushi Stories 2

I grew up in a small, Oregon town where there wasn't a whole lot of racial tension because there weren't that many races to begin with. This isn't to say that there wasn't racism or all of that, because there definetly was, but when there are eight black kids and 20 asian kids in your whole high school, you don't think about "demographics" a whole lot. There weren't really any racial cliques because there simply weren't enough people to form them.
Here in California, there is of course a lot more diversity, and also more "clumping," and it's been interesting to see how race, which was something I mostly just read about in textbooks in Oregon, plays a part in people's personal identity down here.
For example, at the sushi bar he front of the house staff is pretty much entierly asian (although not entierly Japanese) and everyone who works in the kitchen is hispanic. I don't think about it much, but as far as I know, I'm the only white kid working there.
My biggest cultural dilema there is how to talk to the cooks and dishwashers, who all speak English, but are clearly more comfortable speaking Spanish. I can speak Spanish, but am much more comfortable speaking Spanish. When I was in Spain I wanted people to speak to me in Spanish, but I guess part of that was because I was trying to learn the language at the time. Now that I'm back in the states, I usually speak in English, partly because it is the lingua franca, and partly because I am afraid of messing up in Español. I don't want to make a fool of myself, so I say "good morning" instead of "buenos dias" at the resturant. Sometimes I say "hola," but once I was asked "que pasa?" and replied "nada mucho," then spent the next fifteen minutes kicking myself because I should have said "nada mucha." I think.
I guess it doesn't matter that much, since I don't have a whole lot of contact with the guys in the kitchen except for when I am ordering food from them, where the difference would be between "two piece shrimp tempura, please" and "dos shrimp tempura por favor."
Do they even have a word for tempura in Spanish?

New Tales of Bravery and Honor!

There's a new full-color episode of True Tales of Bravery and Honor up today, so make sure you check it out!

In case you missed part one of the serial that we're running on Sundays, you can find it here, and there are also laffs to be found on the black and white strips we run during the week.
You have no excuse not to be entertained today!