In which I eat incorrectly

I went to the deli at my local supermarket for lunch today, and noticed that they have poke bowls as a food option now. Poke (pronounced po-keh, which I didn’t know until I started searching for images) is basically deconstructed sushi in a bowl, only with a few other ingredients (in mine, cucumbers and tomatoes, for example) that typically aren’t found in most sushis.

I grabbed a tasty-looking poke bowl and some grapes and a Pepsi and headed to a table to eat my food. Now, this is important: I’ve gotten pretty good with chopsticks, to the point where I really don’t have to pay attention any longer when I’m eating with them, and I had a very busy afternoon ahead of me (I’m still taking half days every day due to the Ongoing Medical Disaster my family is experiencing) so I really wasn’t paying attention to what I was eating. I mixed everything up to what I thought was a satisfactory degree, removing the pile of ginger slices from the bowl as I went, tossed some soy sauce on top of it, and went to town. This is rice and tuna and salmon and some vegetables and a few stray pieces of fruit. It’s light and delicious. I don’t need to pay attention. I was looking at my phone and planning out the optimal order for the ten thousand things I had to do this afternoon. My brain was elsewhere.

And then, because I wasn’t paying attention, and because it was hidden under a Goddamn pile of lettuce and cucumbers rather than being somewhere where I could see it, I put an entire fucking ball of wasabi into my mouth without realizing what I was doing.

And. Well.

So, first of all: don’t eat an entire ball of wasabi.

Second: if you do eat an entire ball of wasabi, just suck it up and spit it out onto something and then quietly clean it up the mess you made, burning with shame the entire time.

Third: if you don’t spit it out, because spitting out mouthfuls of food in public is not something you do, don’t panic and fucking try and use the Pepsi you bought for a drink to cut the heat. It’s not going to fucking work.

Pepsi, as it turns out, when poured onto a mouthful of fucking wasabi, has a reaction not far from the reaction Diet Coke and Mentos do, only in this scenario, the Mentos are made of pain and suffering and fire.

I got it all down without vomiting or spitting a mountain of wasabi and aspirated cola all over the dining area. I don’t know how. And then, tears streaming down my face and my nose running and visibly fucking suffering, I went up to the poor fuckers at the checkout line nearby and told them to go have a word with the goddamn sushi chef and tell him that I was mostly blaming myself for this disaster but that he should never hide a pile of wasabi in a poke bowl again.

You put that shit on top, where motherfuckers can see it.

It wasn’t a good day.

I did finish the rest of the bowl, but only after making sure there wasn’t any more goddamned wasabi hidden anywhere.