Some words of advice...

if you are ever trying to get me to taste something, a good starting point would be NOT telling me you thought it was congealed blood.

My mom took me for a belated birthday dinner at this place that is a bath-house-slash-fancy-restaurant. I didn't know what kind of food would be served and when I'd asked her on the train ride there what kind of restaurant it was, she told me, "Nice*." It ended up that we were slated to have a kaiseki meal. Not to be overly suspicious, but once a long time ago we had such a meal and one of the dishes consisted of a small 'pile' of slimy, white ooze. Poking it with my chopstick, I had asked my mom what it was, and she looked at me with her crazy eye and said "fish sperms;" so, needless to say I felt a little bit of, shall we say, reservation toward what might be served. Generally speaking, however, everything tonight was quite delicious. Of course, I had also just got out of a nice, hot bath and was working on drinking an entire (small) bottle of sake by myself. There was, however, one thing that I couldn't pop into my mouth with ease. This was it:


It wasn't just how it looked, though. The look of confusion and concern on my mom's face when she took a bite of it was about enough for me NOT to try it.
"What does it taste like?" I asked her. Puzzling, she took another small bite.
"I don't know!" she said.
"Well, is it vegetable? Fish? Meat? (she raised her shoulders, baffled, after each suggestion) Blood?"
"It might be blood. Taste it and you tell me."
At 31, I can finally kind of tell what I need and what I don't need, and what I don't need is to try a cube of blood. Do I even need to tell you I said "Hell, no"?

* My mom has always been this way, using qualifying words instead of quantifying words to describe things. Actually, hers are probably better choices, though they are seldom what I am looking for. Like here when I was wanting to know what type of food, not what quality of food. One time she had bought me sheets with horses on them, and I wanted to know if they were cartoon, or what. When I asked her what kind of horses they were, she replied, "Running." Maybe I'm too like the adults on the planets the Little Prince visits in that book. Maybe, though, it's also not too late to change...