Deep-fried Food Phobia

There's absolutely nothing on the schedule at school today, yet it looks like everyone is at work. I guess most teachers are getting ready for the upcoming school year. Nevertheless, I know that some teachers are still finishing up paperwork from the last school year. That just goes to show that there's such a short break between school years that they actually blend together in more ways than one.

One more example of that: Just a couple weeks before the juniors went on vacation, they started memorizing vocabulary from a textbook that they received at the beginning of the year but had yet to use.

You just can't convince me that the teachers need to be here. If they took today, tomorrow, and Wednesday off (the students come back Wednesday evening), would they really be that much worse off heading into the first day of school on Thursday? The answer, my friends, is a resounding "No." I'll tell you why later in the week.

In the meantime, I've decided to try to eat less deep-fried food. Believe it or not, that goal will not be easy to achieve, unless all I want to eat is raw fish, rice, or a bowl of noodles. (No, thank you!) Deep-fried food is everywhere!

Two of my favorite Japanese restaurant dishes, for example, chicken nanban and tempura, are deep-fried. (As a matter of fact, about two-thirds of the dishes at most restaurants are deep-fried. In a way, I'm exaggerating, but in a way I'm not.) When I have a bento, I eat deep-fried food. When I go to parties, I eat deep-fried food. When I eat in the school dormitory, I eat deep-fried food. All this deep-fried food must be doing damage to my body, so I need to stop eating it.

During the vacation, I've been eating at my favorite restaurant almost every day, and every time, as part of my new "diet," I've been ordering the same thing: fried rice. That's the only meal they have that isn't deep-fried. It tastes great, but it's getting old in a hurry. Still, it's better for me than what I usually have there.