Overhyped Terrifying Life Experience

This saturday I went through a couple of different terrifying life experiences. One by choice, kind of to face a stupid fear.The other was not by choice at all, so it felt a bit like a violation.I will discuss both of these terrifying experiences now that I've had a couple of days to mull over my reactions to them, as I now understand a bit more about why I reacted as I did. I'm a firm believer in the value of a little bit of time when it comes to understanding a problem.

First comes the experience that I chose to undergo.Ever since I've been a seventeen year old vegetarian, I've developed a somewhat natural fear of "strange meat:" I came to placing the fear though, when I was reading Phillip David-Guerovitch's account of the Rwandan Genocide: "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families" that the meat I feared eating the most (outside of raw fish a fear I conquered already) is goat. I'm not sure why, probably some kind of lame American imperialist idea of the meat not being clean, or being inherently poor. I had this idea that it would be gruesome, that the texture would be wrong, and any other kind of worry.

On saturday night I tried goat meat for the first time at the "Bombay Bistro" in downtown Minneapolis. I ordered a Goat Korma, basically goat meat in a really tasty hot curry sauce. The dish was red, or at least redish.
I got an order of Naan with it, basically indian flatbread, or as Vanessa and her brother referred to it, an Indian Tortilla. (Also note the similarities to Ethiopian and Somali food.) The sauce was amazing, complex, and hot enough to force sweat to collect on my brow. I dipped my bread in it alot, and ate as much of the sauce as I could.

My approval for the meat though, wasn't really there. I wasn't prepared for it, and was a bit stunned by the consistency. There were tendons, fat, tough muscle and even the bone. It felt the most like eating a real animal, a former living thing of any meat I've had in years. More than beef knuckle, more than a whole roast turkey.
It was good, alot of it. I'm a little sensitive to texture, so the sudden switch from fat to connective tissue to muscle was jarring, but I ate a lot of it. I enjoyed it, but just couldn't bring myself to finish it.

Once I had faced the goat devil. The money devil came. I don't know what creates more anxiety than money, so it's probably the most boring thing to mention. It did cause a problem though. When we finished, I quickly gave my check card to the waiter, he went over and ran it, and told me there had been an "error" with my card. I took that to mean it had been declined, and slipped into a sort of deadbeat zone of terror that I haven't been in since I was 15 trying to use a giftcard for something worth more than the card.

I was worried that somehow the 800-some dollars in my checking account were gone, the result of some bad decision on my part. Vanessa had to pick up the bill. I felt emasculated, weak, and like a child in a place for adults. I left angry, claiming I wouldn't come back to the Bistro (not to the waiter but to Vanessa) almost in a tantrum.

My cards strip is just bad. I have no money problems. They probably could have gotten it. I was worried over basically nothing, and the goat was a worthwhile thing to try, and has taught me that I should try a vegetarian or chicken Korma next time. In retrospect I realize I was being a bit of a baby.

song of the day: Muppet Babies Theme