the_wasabi_incident birdmad January 1989, midway through my senior year... Slowly putting my head back together after the events of the first semester helping a good (and coincidentally ridiculously cute) friend and classmate catch up on some work she missed due to family issues back in California Walk down from campus a few blocks to the library and decide to have a late lunch before getting back to work on her Econ paper Blue fin She dares me to try sushi since i had never had it before...i counter that i'll do it if she'll let me teacher how to properly use chopsticks...it's on... i order the variety tray, six pieces, 1 california roll, 1 eel roll, one shrimp roll, yellowtail, salmon and one inarizushi She orders the teriyaki chicken bowl i decide to be bold and start with the eel roll piece... I taste a small piece of the pickled ginger first, it is lemony and kind of weird, but i like it I see the fairly generous dollop of green paste and mistake it for avocado, i take a spot of it the size of a large raisin and drop it right on the area of the eel roll i intend to bite first My head goes blank for a few seconds, my breath leaves me in one giant exhalation and the interior of my sinuses experiences a nuclear shockwave i fall out of my chair giving myself away as a "wasabi virgin" to the yuppie couple at the table by the window Brenda's face is somewhere between concern and laughter and it takes me a minute and the entirety of my large coke to compose myself But, on the upside, i did get to spend a good portion of the meal holding her hands while teaching her the finer points of how to use a set of chopsticks a year later, coincidence would see she and i dating on and off for another two years when i was in-between crime sprees and she was in-between on-and off instances with the guy she eventually married c'est la vie 081219 ... unhinged when we took my brother out to hawaii, one night for dinner we went to a seafood buffet where i tried sushi for the first time. i took a big ball of wasabi paste to go along with and gave it a little taste. no stranger to horseradish, i put a good size ball on the first piece and had a pleasant tingling. having several painful run-ins with horseradish as a kid, that particular paste was no big deal. the first time i ever had fresh grated wasabi on the other hand....i too had much gulping of the glass of water at the table, but no one was there to witness my eyes bugging out because there was some serious stinging happening right between my eyeballs, kinda like when you get water up your nose when you're swimming. a tear escaped down my face before i could stop it and my nose started to run. i shook my head a little and blew my nose and thought of all the easter family dinners where one or another of my family members would get a particularly potent spoonful of beet horseradish and wiggle their nose and cough and pat at their eyes 'well, now my sinuses are clear.' 081219 what's it to you? who go blather from