Vegan Blog???

So, I wrote this: http://www.theflamingvegan.com/view-post/Vegetarian-For-A-Year I guess my new pen name is Ugawa Sagara. If you make an account on that website and upvote the post, I will be very happy =).

How (Not) To Cook A Shad

Ask the guy behind the counter what he can tell you about the cheapest fish he sells. Ignore him when he tells you that the shad is incredibly difficult to cook. Marvel at how cheap it is to purchase an entire three-pound fish, complete with the head still attached. Ignore the man who warns you that there are so many bones in a shad that it is known as a “porcupine turned inside-out.” Feel confident that even though you have never deboned a fish, it should be no problem at all. Be terribly wrong.

Bring the fish home and stare at the size of the creature you have just purchased. Feel the weight of the bag, and how the paper surrounding the fish has dampened with fish blood or guts or whatever seeps out of a dead sea creature.

Unwrap the fish and hold it triumphantly in the air. Continue your feeling of confidence as testosterone buzzes through the air.

Watch a YouTube video that oversimplifies the process of removing the bones from the fish and forget it all the moment you pick up your knife.

Start by chopping off the head.

The man in the YouTube video was able to chop through in one swift motion, so attempt to recreate this. Realize that your knife is not nearly as sharp as his, and saw back and forth rapidly for a few minutes as gracefully as you can.

Eventually, cut through the shad and remove the head.

Feel bad about beheading this innocent fish, and decide to give it a little loving to make up for your murderous ways.

Start your first cut at the end of the fish, near the tail. Vaguely recall that this may or may not have been the first cut made in the YouTube video you watched earlier, but proceed with confidence nonetheless.

Realize again that your knife is much duller than the one used in the video, and struggle to stay in line with the spine as you cut down the shad’s back.

Save every small piece of boneless fish that you accidentally cut off, for there will be many, many more pieces you will remove that are littered with bones. Every bit counts.

Continue to cut down the spine until you can open up the fish a little bit.

Remove the top fillet, feeling happy despite the many mistakes you have made up until now.

Again, save every small piece. You will thank me later. Otherwise, you may have nothing to eat after this ordeal.

Repeat and use masterful knife skills to cut the fish into the remaining fillets. Try not to mess up too much. Mess up a ton anyway. This will become more evident later.

Attempt to remove small pieces of meat from the spine. Remember that every little bit counts. Surprisingly, the spine piece will have the smallest amount of bones, so take advantage of this.

After giving up on the spine because you think it has a lot of bones (oh, you will soon be surprised), dump the spine piece as well as the fish head you removed earlier into a large pot of water to make fish stock. Forget to remove all the gross stuff in the fish head so your fish stock comes out extremely bitter and disgusting. Don’t worry, you didn’t need fish stock anyway. Fish stock is only for real cooks.

Attempt to remove the meat from the next smallest fillet. Quickly realize that every inch of fish contains 2398130298 bones and decide to try and boil one piece of fish in water to see how many bones are actually in it. Also, you are getting hungry, so it may be good to get some food cooking soon.

Take the boiled piece of fish out of the water and try to eat some of it. Discover the millions of tiny bones embedded in each piece of fish, and decide that you are going to have to remove the meat from the bones as planned. Or get impaled by fish bones.

Taste the fish stock you are making and realize you did not take out all the weird stuff in the fish head and that it consequently tastes horrible. Throw it all out and put all of the fish pieces with bones and now-cooked meat onto a plate. Remember there are a billion bones on this plate, so do not eat any of it.

Get incredibly aggressive with your knife and remove as much fish as you can from the remaining raw pieces.

Look at your haul and become terribly depressed at the small amount of usable meat you have recovered. Realize why this was the cheapest fish at the market.

Take all of the cooked pieces with bones attached to them (recovered from the death fish stock) and realize that it is incredibly easy to remove fish meat from bones once the meat is cooked. Proceed to manually take all of the cooked meat off of the bones.

Decide you now can make three iterations of fish. Proceed with iteration one. Take pieces of cooked fish still on the bones and put it in a pot with salt, pepper, herbs, and a bunch of other tasty things to make a stew. Try it and remember why you decided to remove the bones. Your mouth is now full of sharp and pointy things.

Proceed to iteration two. Use the cooked meat you removed from bones and put it in a pan with some chicken stock and a bunch of other tasty herbs and stuff.

Spoon this mixture into small bowls. It tastes so much better than iteration one, and you only get one or two bones per bite! You did a pretty good at manually removing bones from cooked fish, but still not good enough.

Time to bring out the wine. Iteration two wasn’t bad, but you are determined to make something good out of these three hours of work. Drinking some alcohol always makes everything better, so bust it out!

Use the meat with no bones that you had previously put into a Tupperware and add it to a pan with onions. Inhale fumes of deliciousness and hope that iteration three turns out okay.

Add herbs and stuff, but taste the mixture and realize that it doesn’t really taste like much. Scour your kitchen for anything else you can add, and start to get depressed that you don’t have much else to add.

Remember that you recently purchased Louisiana hot sauce, which is completely delicious!

Add a bunch of that as well as an Asian basil/chili pepper mix to give it a bunch of flavor.

Congratulations! You are kind of a chef.

This Is Not A Love Story

The cool mountain air invaded his lungs, clinging to his insides and refreshing his soul. The hike to the top made for a considerable adrenaline rush, and he was running on borrowed energy. He opened his canteen and inhaled half of its contents in one swift gulp. He paused and looked out as far as he could see, peering past the rocks to take in the tops of trees from the forests below. Turning to his right, he mouthed a single word to the woman standing beside him: “Wow.” It was a simple word for the amount of beauty that befell the two of them from the top of the mountain, but the woman knew exactly what he meant.

He lay down on a giant slab of rock, resting his back on a soft bed of moss. She sat down next to him, taking in the mountain air.

“We made it,” he breathed towards the sky above. He inhaled triumph and exhaled another item from their collective bucket-list.

The woman smiled to herself. “It took us forty years to get up here together, but we finally did it,” she whispered. She stared off into the distance with the man, reflecting on what the past forty years had amounted to.

The man smiled a goofy smile, proudly showing the crooked teeth of their childhood. “Do you remember when I asked you up here on a date in high school, only to find out you had a boyfriend?” he laughed.

The woman laughed back, “And when I asked you up here the next year and then found out you had a girlfriend?”

They smiled, sitting in silence, letting the years wash over them like a warm blanket.

“You know,” the man said, “after I graduated from college and was living back here in our hometown, I used to come up here by myself and think of you. You were always on my mind back then.”

“When you went to college and I stayed in this godforsaken town,” the woman confessed, “I came up here and thought about you a lot too. I guess we never really got the timing right…” she trailed off.

“We had so many chances, but we were never on the same page at the same time it seems,” he said. “This place sure brings back some old memories. I’m kind of glad we never got together though.”

“Who knows what something like that could have done to us? Do you think we would have made it?” she asked. Silence answered.

They looked out at the trees below and the cloudless sky above, thinking about everything that had brought them to this moment. They had each longed for this hike for so many years, but under different circumstances. But this particular day, this particular circumstance, and this particular friendship was perfect the way it was. Maybe in the past they would have held hands or hugged or kissed in the very spot they sat today, but instead they just smiled knowingly at each other and appreciated the view. “We finally made it up here together,” they repeated in unison, and stared off into the horizon.

Their silence was broken by two voices emerging from the forest, addressing the two old friends. “The next time you two lovebirds want to go do some intense physical activity like this, leave your spouses at home,” the voices joked, gasping for air.

The man’s husband and the woman’s wife exited the woods and onto the worn path to the mountain’s peak, exhausted. The man ran down to assist his stumbling husband, and the woman followed suit. They walked their respective spouses over to the rock and lay down beside them.

“We didn’t mean to tire you out, but we wanted to take you guys up to this spot. There’s a lot of history here, and we wanted to bring us all out here together,” the woman smiled.

The two couples lay on the top of the mountain, wrapped in each other’s embrace. They looked out towards the horizon, happy with the way everything managed to fall into place.

Victim of a Good Night's Sleep

You wake up before your alarm goes off, without anything telling you to get out of bed besides the ringing of your mental clock. Consequently, you miss the six-second segments of “Matty in the Morning,” your choice morning talk show, that you are regularly able to catch between the ten to twelve snoozes you have grown accustomed to. Now you will never know what Matty said to Billy when he tried to plug his home cooking show.

Because you have time before work, you are able to eat a healthy and balanced breakfast of plain oatmeal, a banana, and a glass of milk. This means that the ten doughnuts you keep at your desk that you purchased at the beginning of the week will be untouched for the day. Your daily ritual of eating two doughnuts every morning will be thrown off, and you will have to give your two doughnuts to a random coworker so as to not become a glutton tomorrow. Now your coworker will think you are nice when you have actually been trying to emit a “bad boy” vibe lately. Why do these things always seem to happen to you?

For some reason, when you get to work, you are wide awake and feeling productive. So awake, in fact, that you don’t even need to have your morning cup of coffee. Little do you realize that this means you don’t get to enjoy your ritualistic morning coffee dump at precisely 10:32. 10:32 passes without a trip to the toilet, and you don’t get to read chapter five of A Walk to Remember, which you keep in your desk for such an occasion and have recently gotten rather attached to.

The rest of your morning feels like an out-of-body-experience. Instead of sipping coffee and going through the newest Thought Catalog posts, YouTube subscription uploads, and forums you follow, you are actually doing work. It turns out that you are pretty good at your job, but the price of the morning’s success is that you now have to catch up on Thought Catalog in your own time.

Lunchtime comes and seeing as you are not behind on the morning’s assignments as usual, you decide to join your coworkers for lunch in the break room This turns out to be a bad idea, as the conversation turns against you when you accidentally insult someone’s children while making a joke about onions. This could have easily been avoided if you hadn’t been so productive earlier in the day and were catching up on your work at your desk instead of joining in on the office socializing.

The afternoon does not go much better, as your boss sees what a wonderful job you did on the morning’s projects, and he decides to give you more assignments. You quickly realize that although this workload may be plausible for someone who has had a good night’s sleep, it is not sustainable by your regular living standards. To create the illusion that you have begun to work slower and that this morning was a fluke, you begin to browse Thought Catalog to avoid finishing your new assignments in a timely manner. Of course, your boss walks by, and misinterprets your internet browsing activity as an indicator of the completion of his previously assigned projects. More work is given out, and in your newly-frenzied state you panic and use your mental alertness and productivity to finish everything by the end of the day.

Before you leave work, your boss commends you on a job well done and hints that your responsibilities may be increasing in the coming weeks because you have “proven yourself.” You shudder when you think about what this might mean and make a mental note to try to be more disappointing in the future.

Rather than picking up some takeout on the way home from work, you decide you want to use your energy to make a home-cooked meal. You pick up ingredients from the nearby grocery store and cook a delicious meal from a recipe you find online. However, you realize that you now have a fridge full of fresh ingredients that will go bad in the coming days if you do not use them up, which you are not anticipating on doing because you never cook on a normal basis. What a waste, and nor you’ve got an extra trip to the trash chute you have to plan late on this week.

You take your normal after-dinner shower, and upon drying off and putting on pajamas, you realize that you are sleepy. It turns out that shopping for ingredients and cooking a meal takes more time than picking up takeout, and though it is only 10:00, you feel like you need to go to bed. As a result, you fall further behind on the Netflix shows you have been trying to marathon lately.

Fatigue takes over you as soon as you hit the bed, and you begin to doze off. You fall asleep thinking about what a terrible day you had and that you hope you do not get another goodnight’s sleep tonight.

Weird Games I Used To Play As A Kid (Part 2)

The Spasm Game

Not only is the name of this game slightly offensive, but the concept is completely off-the-wall. Imagine Harry Potter meets creepy kidnapping and attempted murder. Now you have the spasm game.

The premise of this game is actually relatively simple. Give your opponent a spasm, and then while they are lying and convulsing on the ground, try to drag them into the nearby closet and shut the door on them. One point attained.

This game was played in teams, with each team consisting of an even number of people. Each individual was then given their spasm-ing device, which they could then use by pointing the device at an opposing player and yelling “Spasm!” As a result, the opposing player would then have to drop to the ground and shake around for a bit until the spasm wore off. While someone was shaking on the ground, it was then the job of the spasm-er to take his victim and drag him into the nearest closet, shutting the door behind them, while it was the other team’s job to give the dragger a spasm, so as to rescue their fallen team mate and create an opportunity for their own closet kidnapping.

Toilet Paper Roll Game

If you remember the popsicle stick game from the previous post, this game was the exact same, except played with the cardboard toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls that remained after using up the actual paper wrapped around them. Essentially, we just threw these at each other until we became tired or realized how bizarre this game must look to outsiders. The only other difference was that there were less resulting injuries from throwing toilet paper rolls at each other than popsicle sticks, and this game was usually played in the basement instead of upstairs.  I don’t know, something about upstairs screams popsicles and something about basements screams toilet paper.

Ball On Pool Table Game

Out of all of the games we played as children, this was probably the most like an actual sport. It was played with a large bouncy ball (I think people use them to exercise nowadays, but we used them as toys back then) and a covered pool table. The pool table cover must always be on while playing this game.  Please, we are not savages.

The game was played with a king-of-the-hill-type setup, with one person standing at each end of a pool table. It was basically ping pong except with a huge ball, no net, and you would use your hands instead of paddles. The end result was a mixture of bouncing a large ball back and forth across a pool table, only using your hands to hit it.

This may seem relatively tame, but if you think about a pool table, it’s got edges, so you could bounce the ball towards the edge and have it bounce off at a completely new angle, causing many children to be beaned in the face with the large exercise ball. If you were able to master the angles right, you would be a master, but if you didn’t know what you were doing, it was very easy to just hit the ball off the table.

If the edges didn’t add enough of an edge (heh) to the game, the stakes were infinitely increased by the fact that this game and the pool table were located right next to my friends’ parents’ fine china. We had a spotter who had the glorious job of hitting away any large balls headed towards these delicate glasses and plates, but we were kids and sometimes this didn’t work out. I don’t think we ever broke any of the plates or cups, but I do remember several instances where the ball hit the shelves and the glasses scattered and hopped like their feet were on fire.

25 Things I Learned In Puerto Rico

1. Nipple chafing as a result of boogey boarding is real.
2. There are no churros here. Or moose. This is Puerto Rico, not Mexico or Canada.
3. If you walk on the beach at night, you will get mugged. And you will die.
4. If you want to see old white people dance, go to The Ritz.
5. The only towel necessary for vacationing is a hand towel. For both the beach and the showers.
6. Mofongo, though incredibly delicious, is very difficult to replicate. Do not add a banana.
7. While watching fire dancers perform on the beach, look out for the man dressed as a clown, for he will try to get your money.
   
8. Just because a jazz music festival is over does not mean it is time to leave. Often, this is the best time to arrive, since you can stick your beers in the leftover ice dumped on the ground from the festival vendors.
9. Octopus pizza is not one of those pizzas that tastes better cold the next morning.
10. There are no other Chinese people in Puerto Rico.
11. While watching someone teach another how to boogey board, it looks like there is much crossover between boogey boarding and having sex. Except the nipple chafing part. Usually.
    
12. If there is no hot water and you are forced to take a cold shower, do not blast the air conditioner.
13. While leaning backwards in a kayak to avoid hitting your head on a low-hanging branch you deem dangerous, make sure you lean far enough back to avoid the branch below it as well.
14. When directing lost hikers back to their car, do not follow them once you have directed them to the road. You will walk 30 minutes in one direction, rather than 10 feet in the correct one.
15. Bioluminescent dinoflagellates will make you feel like Nicolas Cage.
16. If you urinate in a public restroom “urinal table,” make sure you stand outside of the splash zone when rinsing off the table of all residue.
17. All animals hate me and want to kill me, but jumping a fence seems to keep me safe from the deadly fangs of small dogs.
18. The restaurant’s name is “Lupi’s,” not “Lupis.”
    
19. If the sign says the historic landmark has 98 steps, it has 98 steps. Don’t bother spending the time counting them out for yourself or trying to convince other tourists that they counted wrong.
20. Catering to the American tradition, each hiking trail in the rainforest features a burger stand somewhere along the trail.
21. Eight years old is the correct age to board a party bus.
22. Any restaurant claiming to have the “best Chinese food in the area” probably shouldn’t be trusted.
23. If you give of the vibe of not having any money, you can ride the bus for free.
24. The smoke shop does NOT carry illegal substances and does NOT know where to get them.
25. The gift shop sells hard liquor in Capri Sun pouches.