I was savoring some sushi and feeling sad about turning down our initial teaching-in-Japan offer; I was also feeling strange. (Everything that I was doing or eating or feeling started with an 's'! You never realize these things at the time...) I've always felt I could crave sushi even when in a coma. Other people crave cookies, or hamburgers or chips or Mars Bars or coffee or any number of other things I could do without forever... and I crave sushi. Specifically. It's an expensive habit. Sometimes I even crave specific pieces of fish, or (even!) just the taste of soy sauce with gobs and gobs of wasabi. Being a vegetarian would be no problem for me if things that lived in the sea didn't count as animals, but they do and so I'm not.

(Aren't food cravings linked to ancestral lands, and the fat of them, what they lack and so on? If so, what possible reason could my largely Ukrainian blood have for firmly demanding fish prepared in the Japanese style? Somehow I'm doubting very much that the Black Sea is crawling with hamachi, anago, shake, toro, etc.)

In any case, I was eating and my body felt split in two; my mouth and heart and stomach and eyes blooming and beating and filling deliciously and closing in ecstasy, and my limbs slumping in weakness. A tetanus shot reaction. My mind, cloudy, mourned the loss of the possibility of walking a block from my door and finding phenomenal sushi for a reasonable price. I kept forcing it to reconsider. Hey, could one live in a large house overlooking the ocean and the mountains in Japan - for free? Hey, now, come on. Could one enjoy summery weather year-round? No... I don't think so. Plus, who wants to teach 30-hour contact weeks? Nobody.. that's who. Who wants to be forced to buy a car and have expensive health insurance and live in a 10x10 box on top of thousands of other people living in 10x10 boxes? NOBODY, that's who. SUSHI IS NOT WORTH THESE THINGS.

Oh, but it's so hard to believe that when you're eating an unagi-wrapped salmon, tobiko, and cucumber roll spread with nitsume. Or simply cut fresh hamachi.

Please, Indonesia: have good fish. You are an island nation. This isn't too much to ask, is it?