Eating a Japanese bento is like that opening scene in The Naked Gun with OJ Simpson. You’re just trying to do a simple thing like spy on some mobsters, then something shitty happens, and it just leads to one shitty thing after another until your hands are burned on the damn stove and you fall in the lake with a bear trap eating your ankles.
Like the damn bento. You try the fried chicken, but end up gagging on some heavy cartilage action. So you try to choke it down with some rice, which leaves a really dry sticky sensation in your mouth, so you try some of that pink shit next to the rice. But holy crap, it’s the most rancidly intense flavor you’ve ever experienced. So you much down the cabbage strands to flush it out, but it’s not working…which leaves the potpourri of whatever it is that’s next to the cabbage bits, so you try that but it’s like eating soggy fish entrails with eyeballs and gills bunched in. After all this shit you feel like your stomach’s had the contents of your sink strainer emptied into it, so you make the call to just pack it in and toss the shit out.
Which of course only leads to comments from the other teachers like, ”Oh…you did not eat all the rice?” And these people wonder why I choose to walk down to Lawson’s every day and buy the processed shit.
