Sushi and Paris

I went for sushi with my college roommate Tracey and her friend Matt at RuSan's in the Dilworth area of Charlotte. While we were sitting there eating I just spontaneously decided I was going to Paris for culinary school. It was something I had considered but by speaking it to someone else, verbalizing it, I made it real. Verbalizing a thought is always the last nail in the coffin it seems. I know that whenever something bad happens once I talk about it, once the word leaves my mouth, it is alive and out there existing beyond me. Like hearing someone say that a person is dead. There is that second where you hear the word and process it and in that moment while it is still running through your head it is not yet real. I don't know maybe this is getting too abstract...
But there with the smell of Sapporo and soy sauce rising from the table and the comfortable feeling of salty rice resonating on our tongues, I decided I would go to Paris. Like so many other dreamers, artists, etc. I have had a life-long fascination with France. It began when I was little and I went around speaking with a French accent at the mall, thinking people might actually believe I had been beyond the 100 mile radius of my home town. I'm sure the girls at the Lancome counter were undoubtedly deceived as I asked about le wrinkle creams. It was always fun to pretend I was fooling people.
Later at Disney World's Epcot I entered the mini-Paris and was in love. Maybe it was the ham and cheese croissant or the chocolate mousse or the pretty french girls selling parasols, but the city of lights was aflame in my heart and I new one day I would live there.
So after being a hippie-ish student in the North Carolina mountains for five+ years I came home and began to think about culinary school. I thought of New York, a city which has probably replaced Paris as the culinary capital of the world. All but signed up to go to NYC, I read about Le Cordon Bleu, the famous culinary school I had never heard of in Paris and I considered it.
And suddenly after the "Punk, Rock-n-Roll" sushi rolls and the warm feeling of beer in my cheeks I thought, to be a student in Paris...eating and drinking all that I was learning. My thoughts were overcome so I said it, "I'm going to culinary school in Paris next year" with Tracey and Matt as witnesses to the dream spilling from my mouth.