It's My Fault; I Broke the World

Let's supply some context, shall we?

There are those things that, when we are young, we swear we will never do. Or was that just me?
Well, no, I remember being in 5th or 6th grade and there being some kind of conversation about smoking and how bad it is for people... Just to be clear, this was not health class or anything like that. It wasn't a class lesson. It was a conversation that involved our teacher and was, maybe, initiated by a question from a student? Look, it was a long time ago, and I don't really remember how that happened, but I do remember basically every kid in the class swearing how they would never smoke. Ever. And I never have; who knows about the rest.
[And, hey, smoking is just a very hard line for me. Like being a Republican. If you want to kill yourself slowly, you're free to go about doing that, but leave me out of it.]

Most of those kinds of things I swore off were more personal kinds of decisions. Like deciding, when I was somewhere around the age of five, that I was never going to drink. Let's just say it had to do with my step-dad and his drinking behavior and leave it at that.
Of course, then, the idea of drinking being one of the three mortal sins was strongly reinforced by my Bible Belt upbringing. Drinking, dancing, and smoking, the three things that would send you to Hell faster than a greased pig on a water slide.

Then there were the gross things. Things like avocado. Broccoli, which had such a horrible smell when it was being cooked, being cooked meaning being boiled. And sushi.
Sushi.
I mean, it's raw. Raw fish. I was raised to be against pretty much anything raw except fruit. And lettuce. Iceberg lettuce. Maybe tomatoes. All the other vegetables got boiled.
Not to mention the fact that sushi had other things in it, frequently, like avocado.
And eel. Which I have no good reason to be against, especially considering that I'm very interested in trying snake.
Sushi was like the epitome of all gross foods to me. If there was one thing I was never going to eat, it was sushi.

I started eating broccoli when I was in my 20s.
If you do things to it other than boiling it, it's pretty good and doesn't smell nearly as bad.
I came to an intellectual understanding that drinking wasn't a sin while I was a teenager but, still, I looked around at the way other teenagers acted when alcohol was involved and still decided it wasn't for me. I was pretty firm in that decision until some time in my late 30s when I finally tried a bit of wine. Then there was the post on Facebook I made a few years ago about how I had gone to Trader Joe's to pick up some things and only come out with a six-pack of beer. My friends from when I was a youngster just about lost it.

Which brings us back to avocado. One of the barriers to avocado had always been guacamole. I'd tried guacamole, but it was always bland and rather tasteless and the mushy consistency was kind of off-putting. I didn't understand why anyone would eat the stuff. I'm not sure what took so long but, finally, my wife said, "I bet I can make some guacamole you'd like," and then she went on to do that. Now, I'm guacamole make supreme. And I like avocado.

I still find it weird.

But! But!
None of this is sushi. Because... sushi... raw! fish!

Unfortunately, I have to admit that my introduction to sushi came through Guy Fieri. Look, he used to just be this local Santa Rosa guy who had some restaurants, one of which is a place called Tex Wasabi that is a weird kind of sushi bar. My wife took me because she thought I might like it because, guess what, a lot of the sushi is... fried. I grew up in the South, at that point, it's just fried fish. At any rate, it opened the door to, yes, even sushi. Not that it was my favorite or anything, but I was willing to eat it every now and then.
Regular sushi. We've never been back to Tex Wasabi.

All of which brings us up to how I broke the world.

About a year and a half ago, we tried this new sushi place in town, Yireh Sushi, and it is fucking amazing. Yes, "fucking" is required in that sentence to convey the extent of the amazingness of this place. It's one of our favorite places, now, and we often get sushi from there for the car when we're going to the opera. It's so amazing, in fact, that that's what I chose to have for my birthday dinner (which was last week as you may have noticed if you've been around this week seeing the Alcatraz pictures I posted). Sushi. Raw fucking fish. Some of which had avocado in it. And I had a beer to go with it.

My brain is still processing this data because it doesn't really make any sense, but I'm sure this is proof that the world is broken and it's probably somehow my fault.

So there you go...

Changing Life (Change: part 3)

Weight:
Some number of years ago (no, I don't remember when, but I'm sure my wife could tell you), my wife and I dropped sugar from our diets. This was a significant change, especially for me. I grew up drinking soda and, when I say that, I mean I grew up drinking only soda. From a very young age, actually. I moved from apple juice to Coca~Cola, and soda was pretty much the only thing I drank for the next 30-odd years. Cutting sugar meant cutting the soda, which was one of the hugest changes I've made in my life. Ever.

The immediate result of that change was that I lost weight. A lot of weight. About 100 pounds in less than a year. At the time, I dropped to under 200 pounds for the first time since I was in high school. I kept all of it off for a while but, over time... well, you have to really stay focused, I suppose. At any rate, at my physical last year (during January or February), it finally hit me that I had let myself creep back up to about 245.

Well, that was enough of that.

So I started exercising again, something I'd let slide for a couple of years. [Seriously, why does exercising have to take up so much time?] And I started monitoring my portion sizes. When you don't eat sugar, it can make you feel justified with eating more. Well, me, anyway.

The short of all of that is that I am, now, under 200 pounds again, for only the second time since high school.

Coffee:
I think I have probably come off as a coffee drinker on here for years. I mean, with posts like this, I totally sound like a coffee drinker, right? But I was only barely a coffee drinker as I would only drink coffee if it was in chocolate. It took my wife a while to work me up even to that, because I grew up sans coffee. See above with the soda thing.

Basically, we could go to the cafe together because I could get a mocha, but my wife insisted that that wasn't the same thing. I... really didn't understand.

What we couldn't do, though, was sit around having coffee together when we went out for breakfast. My wife would have coffee, but I would just have water. (And, then, go to the cafe after for a mocha. heh) Again, I didn't get the big deal, but she assured me it wasn't the same as us sitting and having coffee together.

Well, she was right.

Long story short, I finally agreed to to try having coffee (just plain, old coffee) with my wife when we were out for breakfast one Sunday morning. No, I don't drink it black, but, I did buy her an espresso machine, something she has always wanted but didn't feel like it was worth it if she was going to be the only one using it. Now, we have coffee together every morning.

Beer:
As with coffee, I also grew up not drinking alcohol. Of any kind. My wife spent some number of years converting me to drinking wine (it was a slow process), but I still stayed away from beer. No, not on any kind of principle or anything; mostly, I just didn't like the way it smells. And not that my wife wants or likes to go hang out in bars but, every once in a while, she likes the option of going to share a beer in a bar. Except you can't do that when one of the people won't help share it. But, you know, I've been open to trying and tasting things over the years but, really, nothing ever really did it for me. Well, there was this one time years ago we got some blackberry beer at a local brewery, and I liked that, but they never had it again, and you can't buy it at the store or anything.

All of that changed this year. We were at an open mic night (probably the one where we first saw Parcivillian), and my wife got a beer... with the understanding that I was going to taste it. She got something called a Bitch Creek (because she liked the name). Well, we both loved it. Yeah, it was the first beer I ever really just liked. Or liked at all, but I liked it from the first taste. What we've discovered is that I like dark beers, especially stouts, which Bitch Creek was. That was not ever a thing we'd ever tried before. As it turns out, my wife tends toward darker beers, too, so that has really worked out, although she does have a broader palette than I do when it comes to beers and ales.

At any rate, we can now share a beer over dinner or grab a beer to share when we're out or whatever, so that has been a whole new thing for us, too, sort of like with the coffee.

Also, I have a new appreciation of the fact that some of the best breweries in the country are right here where I live.