ZLM_MatesOfStates

At least now you can add self-pitying to your resume's special skills section.

Zero Like Me #185:
Mates of States

Easter Eggs: "Yale" on menyu, the Magikarp salesman's been working out (still a fishmonger, though). Today's setting is actually the first place I ate at when I arrived here, and I was so relieved the food was actually pretty solid, for a soup! The shoulder puff in panel 2 is Umezawa. I don't believe I've ever heard Mates of State, but I do enjoy their name. The classmates in the states mentioned in this comic are fictional. Some are not.

Fun Facts: This restaurant is actually three fused together--the second panel is a from-memory of the exterior shot's eatery, and the third panel is a combination of an octo-ball-and-ice-cream joint mixed with my favorite pizza shack. I contemplated going back into the exterior shot restaurant for photo/gastronomic research, but decided it wasn't worth the culinary risk. I do see eating (particularly at restaurants) in Japan as a quasi-gambling experience, you know.

Irasshaimase, by the way, is something shopkeeps and clerks of all stripes shout at you to get your business. It's like, "Welcome, please let's do bizniz," so it's supposed to be inviting, but sometimes they say it reeeeeeeally loudly and it freaks you out. And by "you" I mean "me."

Baa: No matter where I am on Earth, I hate eating with people. The squishy sounds they make as their lips and cheeks smack pockets of food, the way they have to push their witty vocal diarrhea from behind globs of undigested food, the way they constantly click-clack at their food with determined chopsticks and jerk the precarious load of food into their saliva-swinging mouths...I imagine the sound of chopsticks must fill many people with fond foody memories, but I only associate them with a hassle-y technology that makes it harder to shovel food down my gullet at my usual lightning pace so I can get back to not having to orally dodge creepy textures and flavors apart from the nescapably sampled fleshy chunks of my own tongue. I feel so primitive eating with chopsticks, like a monkey stabbing sticks into an ant mound hoping to luck out and acquire grub when not losing out to gravity most of the time. But sometimes the food is great. Have you had Japanese stew? That's money. Instantly makes me think of my imaginary childhood growing up in Japan when my mom would make us stew on chilly autumn--or best of all winter--days. And everything felt safe.

Man, I miss being an imaginary Japanese child.

Reuxben