They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore, which, rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more peaceful.
-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Level 0

I remember when I started sfØ, I said: "Death Kava-- this is exactly the kind of task I am never going to do."

In my mind, this statement basically immediately condemned me to what follows.

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To help you through, here is some music to listen to while you peruse.

I saw this performed just before accomplishing this task⇑
and I listened to this on the train back, as I wrote up the deed⇓

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So

So. This is too much. Too much about me. Too much about me, this isn't a character, like it should be. I am afraid of lots of things. One is fish. Or rather, the eating of aquatic life, I'm afraid of that. I like looking at fish fine. Whales, Jellyfishes, Jawses, et cetera; however, I have developed a fear of the eating of flesh, and the forbearer of this germ within me was with seafood. I stopped eating that way before birds or mammals and whatnot. (I mean, wtf? You eat flesh? From the sea, no less?)


Well, enough prelims; shall we?

Seafright

Fishes, and other seabeasts, good god. They are from another world, which to me makes the ingesting of them so much more wrong. Have you seen this shit?


My grandfather is a fisherman; I had more than my share of fish-food as a kid. Why anyone would want to eat something from where these monsters come from is beyond me.

Anyhow, I was recently privileged to be in attendance at a dinner for the Big Onion Linguistic Society, invited there by Markov, cuz he's all smart and crap, and in linguistic societies. We ate here, riverside.

The gently rising tides of trash wafting by on the surface of the Chicago river flanked our table to the south, and put a peculiar idea into my head. I was there, eating and drinking on the tab of UofC, and I felt strangely that I might earn it somehow (or at least not enjoy myself too much). In the name of composure, I declined a pre-meal drink.

At this point, I hadn't eaten the meatflesh of any flavor/terrain/species for 8+ years. Fish, I probably hadn't ingested in over a decade (though I told a white lie to Markov about this when he saw what I had ordered; I was attempting to stay reasonably calm and unnoticed in my epicurean adventure, and at the time, impulse-lying to Markov about how long it had been since I had eaten fish worked to convince me that it wasn't that long, wasn't that big of a deal to me).

I stopped eating all meats to show someone up who had failed to become a vegetarian after they were momentarily impressed by a standard college-freshman PETA video like the one below; not eating things from the sea came well before then.

Animal Slaughter from Jasmine Sarin on Vimeo.

I still eat cheese and jello and what-have-you, it's not like I care about cruelty. But at this point, so far removed from participating in the culture of flesh consumption, it pretty well grosses me out, fish especially.

I ordered this:

Balsamic reduction, sounds great, no?

When the appetizers of crabcakes and calamari came to the table, I politely declined to partake, and was a good bit unnerved.

Mahi Mahi

I love any titled thing which is the same two words repeated. Or at least, I love the name of it (poor, poor naming).

Mahi-mahi is from Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, for Coryphaena hippurus, commonly known as dolphin-fish. They live four to five years, and the typical catch weighs in at 7 to 13 kilos. Removed from the water, this beast changes color, hues altering from their live-golden, bright green and blue to the yellow-grey of their death rattle. They grow super fast, and like to hang out in warm oceans amongst seaweed. They eat other fish, and they themselves taste similar to flounder and tilapia.

From the second it went in my mouth, there it was, I recognized flesh. To me its taste is basically filamented flush, strung in bodyjuice. Maybe that sounds good to you; not me. From that moment until now (long after I've actually accomplished this many, many times over), I wanted nothing more than to floss my teeth. And brush them. And repeat.




I appreciate the fact that this game-universe attempts to get kids to do creative activities which they would normally not approach. I have found many of the tasks/prompts conducive to modes of storytelling that I would not normally approach, such as first person narration; for the most part however, I haven't really done too many activities within this game which I wouldn't normally do anyway. This task is way-totally-definitely-decidedly-absolutely-entirely an exception to that.

Thankfully, when I finally got to it, I found that the crap I desperately wanted to floss out from between my teeth was actually just delicious delicious spinach. (Sadly, somewhat soaked in fish-juice.) :o~

The End

Too long, didn't read
You should vote for this;
:o~ is my emoticon for vomiting.