I'm married to a man with nerves (and a gut) of steel

This is our second trip to Tokyo together.  Last time for their first lunch together, my mom fed John the benign-from-a-Japanese-perspective lunch tororo soba.  If you've never had it, look it up.  There are worse descriptions one might think of, but John was generous and described the experience like 'eating a bunch of booger-covered noodles.'  I've been eating tororo since I was a kid and its disgustingness would have never occurred to me, but I see where he is coming from (and appreciate his discretion in not going further with the description - bukkakesoba was never more aptly named, unfortunately).

On that first trip John ate so many weird things, like the obligatory natto as well as barbequed skewers of chicken hearts, skin, livers and whatnot.  I can't remember if he ate chicken fetus, but if he didn't it would have only been because the yakitori place was out and not for lack of courage.  Needless to say, on this second trip to Japan John's motto remains: Bring it on.

We arrived in Tokyo in the late afternoon, surviving a particularly turbulent final 1/2 hour and landing.  A combination of the motion sickness and the 'meals' served to us on the flight (including such combinations as undercooked rice pilaf with some weird beef sauce as a main, with a side of salad and a roll.  And two pieces of sushi) made the nausea upon landing very hard to shake.  Of course the three hour car ride from the airport paired with my mom's driving and navigation ('Oops, I just made a wrong turn') left us with churning stomachs even after we'd arrived safely home.

Luckily, dinner was gentle enough - pork and veggie nabe cooked at the table kind of like a hot pot.  It looked good, smelled good and I started to feel more human.  That was before my mom brought out Ogura-san's 'specialty.'

"You should try it!" she said as I dubiously poked at the dish of slimy pink pieces.

"What is it?" I ask doubtfully.

"Ogura-san made it.  It's my favorite!  It's squid in its own sauce."

"You mean, ink?"

"No, sauce from its..." (she gestures around her abdomen).

"Guts?" I shudder.

"Yes.  It's squid in innards sauce."

John, bless him, ate three pieces and declared them delicious.  

I graciously passed.

Cat pee will not make your skin beautiful and more youthful

To cure my dish-pan hands, I grabbed a small amount of lotion from a container my mom keeps near the kitchen sink and rubbed it into my hands. I immediately noticed a suspicious smell. It reminded me of a combination of a hotel pillow mint and cat pee.

Before I continue with this story, I have to tell you about this daily noon-time program devoted to giving seemingly pointless 'tips' to the Japanese public. Tips like if you rub sesame oil into your hair before you wash it, it will get cleaner, or how to improve your health by eating grapefruit chunks in curdling milk. Things like this which my mom totally buys into, thus disgusting concoctions in the fridge and the bottle of sesame oil in our bathroom. Knowing that she has the penchant to take such strange advice only made the smell coming off my hands more worrisome. I sniffed the backs of my hands again. "What's in this lotion? It smells like cat pee and mint."

Her gaze came back steadily to me. "It's ur... urrr.......," she begins stammering.
"NO! Don't say it!"
"Ur....urr....," she continues.
"Don't say 'urine!' Please. No!"
"It's urine," she declares matter-of-factly.

Thankfully though, it was not a home-made addition. She meant urea which, though I suppose chemically the same, I can handle a little better than extract from Tokyo cat box.

she knows just how to put my mind at rest.

So, I went to the Doc's just out of convenience really, but she told me that it didn't look like a spider bite and her only other guess (given how much it swelled and hurt for days) was that it might be the dreaded Japanese mukade. Or, centipede of doom, as I like to call them. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where in my home I got bit because I can't find out how long it takes to feel the first effects of such a bite (damn you internet! Though I did find this cute blog entry from 2005 about this kind of bug by some young boys. It was informative). But it definitely happened in the house. Possibly downstairs in the music room, which is where I felt the effects. But, there is a chance it happened in my own room, which pleases me NOT AT ALL. I can hardly relax for fear of the dreaded mukade falling on me from my ceiling or crawling into my mouth while I sleep, biting my tongue or throat, it swelling up and me asphyxiating to death. Well, that's dramatic and probably won't happen, but I did find a mukade in my closet. It wasn't alive but it was horrifying nonetheless, with its blue legs and black body. BLECH. Well, here. See for your self.Anyway, it was pretty tiny - maybe 2 inches long, but enough to give me the heebie-jeebies for a while. I was whining to my mom and she said that she hadn't known they came so small. She continued, "The one I saw crawl under the house a few weeks ago was at least 6 inches long." It wasn't the same type, though. It was the deadlier, red legged version.

Dude. I am never sleeping again.

First victim of the Japanese Ninja Widow

This morning I got some kind of insect bite. I did not see it, so I don't know what it was. But it wasn't a mosquito. Or, if it was a mosquito, it was a mosquito on steroids. It swelled up at the location at first (pictured), but now my whole arm is slightly bloated. It's been nearly 6 hours but the effects are not gone. In fact, I am having some trouble typing since my arm is sore and my brain isn't functioning to its highest capacity. I think I might have a slight temperature and was mentioning this to my mom. "It's possible, you know," she told me. "Because of the venon." It was cute. Steve asked me if it was a black widow. I don't think so. He suggested grey widow. Maybe that was what it was. My mom said she thought it was something invisible since I didn't see it. Clear widow? or maybe it was just that I didn't see it. So, I guess it was a ninja widow.

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...

It was "The Blair Witch Project" redux

Do you remember the scene where the kids find that little bundle with something suggestive of inner workings and something suggestive of teeth and the horror that perhaps swept through your guts when you saw it?

Well, yesterday I was browsing through a tin that contained several medals my grandfather had been given, as well as some other miscellaneous items that had hitherto not been examined. One of my favorite pastimes at my grandmother's house had always been to hunt for treasure. The treasure being old photographs which my grandmother had kept all of out of what I can only assume was a sense of duty, though I must say her organizational methods left something to be desired. But that's part of what made it exciting for me; every time I visited, I went through forgotten drawers and found treasures of photographs that I still feel desperately attracted to. Perhaps they give me a sense of history, of something beyond my self and my brief life. I would feel a thrill as deep as the archetypal archaeologist discovering Tutankamon's burial site when I would find a photo of my great grandmother on her 20th birthday (20 is a right of passage in Japan), or the high and then low of finding a photomat sleeve inside a box, at the bottom of a drawer in the storage room, only to discover a perfectly preserved, never been opened disposable rain poncho from what appears to be the late '70's by the look of the model. So, poking around old storage tins and boxes has a certain allure for me.

In this tin was a small wooden box. I opened it. It contained a weathered envelope. In this envelope was a paper with writing on it folded around something slightly bulky. I looked at the squiggles (please recall my illiteracy) and could make out my grandmother's maiden name but nothing else. So I unfolded it. Out came another, tinier package also wrapped in rice-paper. I gingerly unfolded it to reveal its contents. In my hand I saw something grey, like a bit of rope bunched up; then I noticed something fleshy and creepy among the ropey. The sensation I had was identical to the one I had seeing that bundle with teeth. Feeling slightly vomitous, I ran down stairs to show it to my mom.

"What is this?!" I asked, showing her the writing on the bundle.
"Where did you find this?" she responded, laughing a little.
"WHAT IS IT?" I said, close to hysterics, "It's Baba's umbilical cord, isn't it?! ISN'T IT!"
She laughed at me. But, I was right. I just knew it the minute I saw it. Man, how I wish I had been wrong! Why couldn't it have been a poncho! (vomit)

If my ego was a zeppelin, it'd the Hindenburg

So, today when I went down to have some lunch, the housekeeper was just getting ready to leave. She's in her 70s, the one who is fast. At any rate, we were making small talk and just as I was reaching in to the fridge, she says, "I always thought you were skinny, but you're not really so skinny, are you." I froze. Yes, I've put on a few since I've been here (and yes, sadly in Japan they use the metric system); also, I don't think she meant it as a criticism, but rather some weird post WWII-type compliment in my granparents'-era-style. Needless to say, I reached past my original lunch item and grabbed for the plain, low fat yogurt. Anyway, later when I got home, I told my mom this story and she laughed with me about it. As we were laughing, the cat started to beg for more dinner, and my mom says to him, "You can't have any more. You're fat, too."
"Fat, TOO?!"
"Well, you just said it," she started to back-peddle, "We're all kind of getting fat..."

Anyway, I can't say much because, well, the scale doesn't lie. Also, I think my mom confuses empathy and sympathy sometimes (I guess they do sound alike...) and she wasn't trying to make me feel like a whale. Needless to say, I think I'm going to go on a diet. Failing that, maybe just a day long 'cleanse.'

Maybe I'm a culiary prude

Since I've been here, from time to time I'll notice this concoction my mom makes sitting in the fridge, looking disgusting. It's always in a bowl, covered by some saran wrap, and it looks like chunks of grapefruit in yogurt that has gotten watery and a little curdled from the grapefruit juice. This morning, I finally saw her eating it.

"I don't know why anyone would want to eat grapefruit that's sitting in curdling yogurt," I said maybe a little more rudely than I intended.

"It's not yogurt," she informed me. I look again...the grapefruit chunks are definitely sitting in something milky. "It's plain milk that's curdled. I saw it on TV. It's really healthy for you."

I can eat a lot of things, fermented beans, stinky cheese, foie-gras, I've even eaten ris de veau, though that is an experience I'll likely never duplicate. But I have to draw the line at curdling milk. I had a traumatic curdled milk experience when I was young...my dad can attest to that!

mchjd post 3, or, the world's worst stubbed toe

The pain is still so acute that I feel the need to post this. This is not for the squeamish - who knew a pinkie-toe could bleed so much. Also, why is it that whenever my mom leaves town, I injure myself? Oh, right. 'Cause I'm her crazy half-jap daughter (dot blogspot dot com).

"The Damage" - after cleaning with ethanol...ouch!


"Post-Self-Conducted-Minor-Surgery to remove skin flap"


"The Final Look"


Now I'm in pain and limping like crazy everywhere. Karma much?
In the words of Ren Hoek, "I am hurting."