Well gang, it looks like everything is going to come to a head soon. Tomorrow I'm going to visit my brother until Sunday, then I'll prep for my trip for two weeks, then on April 7th I leave the country.
Forever.*
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Currently I find myself possibly as far removed from the lights of Japan as possible - watching MTV in a Holiday Inn, my stomach battling a plate of chopped steak.
Chopped steak, incidentally, is totally nothing like what it sounds like.I imagined a
flank steak, medium rare, 'chopped' into slices and served alongside sauteed mushrooms.
Something simple and delicious. What arrived on my plate, however, was horrible - something
sinister and
disgusting.
As I would learn chopped steak
at its best is a depression era relic -
a gravy soaked fossil from a time of foul meats and fouler gravies. Smothering a week-old hamburger batty in heavily salted gravy, onions, and mushrooms makes a lot more sense when your primary concern is the lack of unsoiled meat to cook with.
The plate that was handed to me, however, has no place in this decade. As I forked through the rancid hockey puck of salted meat in front of me I weighed my desire to not insult the waitress versus the possibility that the gray matter in front of me would find its way to my heart, take root, and kill me.
"Just think of it as protein" my mom said, sawing a chunk off the rock solid "chicken parmesan" that swam in a sea of swollen noodles in front of her.
But instead I thought of my grandmother's nursing home. The food there was worse than terrible - so bad even my 94 year old grandma could tell it was crap.
I think I once saw some poor attendant try and feed her some similarly grim chunk of reconstituted, gravied scrap-meat. Grandma was never one to take any crap. She cursed at the food, cursed at the attendant, and demanded we take her to outback steakhouse.
Good call, grandma.
*totally not true, I just have a penchant for the dramatic. I'll be back in August.
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