Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Chopsticks

I tried to clean my room and found eight pairs of chopsticks instead.



Not the disposable kind, mind you.  These chopsticks were built to last.  Some of them were even still wrapped inside an awkward package of five marked "For Special Guest."  Engrish aside, this is probably the first dining set that has provided dining accessories for five instead of four or six.  It almost made me want to buy a pentagonal table, until I realized exactly how impractical that would probably be to store.

Perhaps the five sets of chopsticks with the flowers on them were intended to be used exclusively for special guests, meaning I'd have to use different chopsticks for myself and for ordinary guests.  It'd suck if the special guests decided they didn't like flower patterns on their chopsticks.  If that's the case then I'd be able to provide the special guests with an alternative of red or green chopsticks with fish on them, or brown chopsticks with paper cranes on them.

I suppose, though, that if I had a number of special guests over, the most common complaint wouldn't be the pattern on the chopsticks as it would be, "Don't you have any forks and spoons around here?!"

For the record, I think I owned one spoon specifically to get through my Chef Boyardee Dinosaur Pasta phase in my second year of college, but it was cheap and tarnished quickly.  The chopsticks, like I said, appear to be built with durability in mind.


In fact, yeah, I totally had a mug filled with even MORE chopsticks at school.  When I raid the storage center after getting my own place I will probably be able to feed a small army with JUST chopsticks.  I'm not sure I ever bought myself chopsticks at any one point, either, but I did put them to good use writing a speech class report on how to use them to eat instant mashed potatoes.  It's actually easier than using them to eat rice.

I guess the best course of action here would involve just eating everything and anything with chopsticks, to see if they can be effectively used up.  Maybe I should try eating jello with chopsticks next.  Or discount Easter candy.

Nailed it.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Awkward Comparisons

In the past year and a half, while I was too busy getting glasses and shortening my hair to blog, I must've glossed over a dozen eerily similar internet articles condemning the practice of comparing yourself to your peers while you're still trying to settle into a career and what have you.  While most of them actually have a point, especially with all this social networking out there, now that I've been twenty-six for a while I've started...thinking.

In particular, I've been thinking about how I'm the same age as Sushi Man, who was a character that I drew a lot in middle school.  In an unprecedentedly cynical move I set the bar so low in describing the harsh and often awkward realities of J.C. Sushi's mid twenties that I figured comparing myself to him would probably just wind up making myself feel way, way, way better about where I stand in life right now.

So I did the only thing that seemed appropriate and pumped out some visuals:



...I swear, I was absolutely definitely in no way thinking about dressing up like Sushi Man and running out to a nerd convention when I bought that shirt.  Maybe if I slept upside down and paid someone to program a video game about him or something so more than three people know who he even is, I'd consider it, but I'd need money for that first and don't really like the convention atmosphere much anyway.

I also really ought to stop thinking too hard about the exact mechanics of that relationship with Mrs. Butterworth.

You know what?  Even though I am unquestionably more prepared to deal with the real world than Sushi Man would have been if he hadn't been conveniently swept up into an alternate dimension so he could actually live out his superhero fantasies, I am approximately 62% creeped out by the amount of similarities there are between the two of us.  With that in mind I can only hope that turning twenty-nine and a half is nowhere near the acid trip I expected that to be when I was thirteen...


Actually, I hear this is a pretty average reaction to realizing you're
about to hit 30.  If anyone's put up with my shenanigans long enough to know who this
crackpot is, you get somewhere in the realm of four million bonus points.


So yeah.  Final verdict, Zelda Vinciguerra officially beat Sushi Man at life, and I probably just slid down a few points on that scale for talking about myself in the third person.  I'm still beating Sushi Man, though, and that feels pretty awesome.