Sushi with Royalty

So I had dinner with a woman in London at a fancy sushi place. We ordered a service of chef-selected special nigiri, very artfully put together, very expensive. She snarfed it up like takeout from her corner sushi shop, downing eight of the nine pieces in 2 minutes flat.

Smiling, with gentle encouragement, I urged her to maybe slow down, because we presumably wanted dinner to stretch longer than five minutes. She gave me a look that signaled that she was in no way done with dinner, so while I'd expected the exorbitant nigiri to be sufficient, I realized, startled, that she needed more.

I lunged for the menu, which I held out before her. As the, I supposed, gender-compelled host of this meal, I felt nervous flop sweat eyeing her final piece of nigiri which signaled a 15 second countdown to some kind of breakpoint.

She peered at the menu blankly. "I don't want cooked food," she pouted, "I thought we were having sushi." I asked whether we should repeat the platter, and she was quite agreeable, so we requested another round of special lacquered nigiri, as the waiter tried to conceal his "geez-never-saw-that-before" face.

The bill came, I paid a spine-tingling $300, and we said goodbye. And the next day she sent me an excoriating note, saying I'd made her feel like a pig for eating too fast.

I rolled the proposition around my mind a few times, as I do. She was obviously averse to being thought of as someone who eats like a pig. Fair enough, but this leaves me surprised that she'd eat like a pig. If this is a sore point, then the issue is on her end, no?

If I'd hate to be thought of as someone with dirty hair, I'd shampoo daily. If I considered "stubbly" a disgusting epithet, I'd shave constantly. This is how we shape our existences, no? We take pains not to do the things that would make us doers of those things. We sidestep horribleness in order to--well, to sidestep horribleness.

I tried to compose that last sentence to make some sense, but there are realms of nonsense so baffling as to resist even the most artful rhetorical surmise.

Eating like a pig, if one doesn't mind being seen as a piggish eater, is a fully respectable choice. But the notion of maintaining an elegant feeling while eating disgustingly by taking prickly umbrage at any hint of an implication that one might take longer than three minutes to consume one's supper, that boggles my mind.

I often note that citizens of the first world currently are bona fide aristocrats, but this isn't aristocracy, it's royalty. The king and queen are only to be viewed in the most flattering light, despite disgusting, slovenly, or dodgy behavior. Beheading is too good for commoners who fail to maintain game faces as seamlessly composed as high-end nigiri.

I guess it's nice work if you can get it--where you eat like a pig without ever feeling like a piggish eater because everyone pretends you're a vision of stylish grace while diligently keeping your trough full. The only blemish in this scenario would be the person across the table with no harsh words, but who might be so impertinent as to urge a more deliberate pacing for a more enjoyable experience lasting double-digit minutes. The problem--the only problem--was me.

From this perspective, I see her point. As the sole blight on her vaunted, stylish, elegant landscape, I deserved to be scornfully shamed for unintentionally making her feel ashamed for her shamelessness. I get the logic.