“I am listening to brain concentration music on YouTube.”

“Hoping that it will make me be able to finish this project.”

“But I am finding the brain concentration music boring.”

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“Scary.”

“What’s scary?”

“I started listening to the Pop station on Grooveshark. And then I couldn’t make it stop.”

“Why is that scary?”

“I was going to have to listen to Kelly Clarkson.”

“I understand where you’re coming from now.”

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Recently, a good friend of mine said,

“You guys are so judgmental.”

If I had been a few years younger, this might have bothered me. I might have spent hours in my room worrying about how to keep my foot out of my mouth, how to please everyone and how to make everyone like me. But now that I’m pretty much 30 and kind of cynical, I just think “meh”. Well, that’s not entirely true - initially, I don’t think anything because I take it as a statement and not an accusation. I know it’s true, and I’m old enough now to not worry about whether or not being judgmental makes me a bad person.

But I did begin to think around the conversation that had led to this statement. It got me contemplating what being judgmental actually means, and what makes us so. To me, it seems as though it’s a desire to paint a perfect world - striving for beauty and acceptance based largely on how society tells us the way things should be, and loosely on our sentiments. It’s an opinion that we feel the need to have when we see or experience something that we believe is out of the norm.

But what is the norm? Where are these benchmarks coming from? They’re completely arbitrary, because they’re all based on opinion and there is no defined norm. Our search for beauty and perfection is never going to be the same as that of somebody else, so we judge them for doing something their way which we think would be better done our way. It’s completely meaningless, and I find it amusing how often humans create conflict between themselves when they are striving for the same goal.

Sometimes, it’s nice to let your ego go and look over from the other side of the fence.

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The benefit of having a Nosh within walking distance is that I can have sashimi at home, which I’ve been doing quite a lot this week. Although my sisters may have once called me endearing terms to the effect of “bookworm” or “nerd”, I think I’m a practical person at heart: I don’t really “get” something unless I’m doing it myself - and this was certainly the case when it came to slicing sashimi. Sure, I’ve watched cooking shoes and sort of half paid-attention to the technique, but until I started slicing my own sashimi on a regular basis, I wasn’t really that interested.

What I have noticed is that the knife plays a very important role. (Duh say all you sashimi aficionados - but give a lowly home cook a break!). We all know how I feel about raw fish, and this week I’ve decided 2 things:

1. I love having it at home
2. I’m going to get proper sushi/sashimi knife

So I looked, as one does, on the internet for knives in New Zealand and found these Yamato knifes. Okay, I would love these - they have a custom blade forge! But unfortunately I don’t have $1600 to spend on 3 knives right now. Instead, I emailed our good friend Mo, a budding Japanese chef, who was able to offer some very useful advice on buying sushi/sashimi knives for home use. I thought it was worth sharing - thanks Mo!

lol Priya, are you turning Japanese? I think you are!

well, for sushi/sashimi we use a knife called Deba knife and sashimi knife. Deba is mainly for when you are fileting, removing scale&skin,chopping up the bones. Sashimi Knife is for slicing

sashimi knife I personally find useful for home is about 15cm ~ 20cm & slim shaped… This one will be very useful for anything not just for sushi and it is easy to handle. (15cm as in the knife part..not the whole thing)

make sure it’s super sharp at all times. It makes a huge difference to the taste….very important

I think some where around $100 is good price for home use.

did you visit kappabashi here in Japan? it’s a street that only sells culinary good for lower prices.

Kappabashi, here I come! Soon.

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As part of my insurance claim, I have to pick a jewelery store that I want to go to. This part I dislike, because I don’t like buying jewelery, and I don’t like going to jewelery stores. “But I’ve seen you wear jewelery!” You might think - and yes, it’s true, but it’s more than likely that the stuff you’ve seen me wear was picked up at a street market at a festival somewhere, and all of my stolen (worthy) jewelry was gifted to me by my jewelry adoring mother.

So perhaps I should clarify: by jewelry stores, I mean the ones where people go and spend a small fortune on little gold necklaces that look like rockets. I mean, seriously, who buys this stuff?

As part of the good fortune resulting from the bad, I thought that I may as well try to find a suitable item that I would never, under other circumstances, indulge in. Unfortunately, the one that I found that I really liked was slightly over my budget.

I did learn a thing or two about NZ jewelery store websites though: they suck. They don’t work unless you download Silverlight (Michael Hill, seriously? GTFO), open in a pop-up window and play you cheesy music, or are amazingly unhelpful.

Please - I just want to browse through your range. Does it have to be this hard?

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