In Which I Talk about Food for, Like, Ever

Here are some things about food.

I am always thinking about food.

Around Christmastime I had a free consultation with a fancy nutritionist who cost $300 a month, and I was all geared up to give her $300 a month because I felt like had effectively taken command of my brain and spending $300 on a nutritionist seemed like a really good way to stage a coup.

When I was in high school I spent a summer on the track team. Well, I never actually ran track or on a track, but I did get up for practice, get shin splints and obsessively monitor the color of my urine, so that’s sort of like being on the track team. Anyway that summer I gave up fast food and soda pop, and I pretty much never had them again.

Taco Bell Taco: Zinc Content 0%

In Jr. High, I spent my lunch money on ding dongs (these are apparently "ring dings" if you live in the east, and King Dons in Canada) and root beer. Every day. I added shoestring fries and personal pizzas if I particularly needed sustenance.  I was nutso depressed and had terrible acne and I remember reading an article that said you would get bad acne if you didn’t get enough zinc. I was convinced zinc was the problem.

In high school I knew people with cars who would take me to Wendy’s or Taco Bell for lunch. Every day. I liked that liquid cheese that you got on the nachos. Oh and Arby’s. We did Arby’s sometimes. Then we would go to Taco Bell after school for a snack. The zinc deficiency continued.

My parents were not into this jazz. My mother served us a meal with a white meat and two vegetables every night of our lives. She taught us to read cereal boxes and wouldn’t let us pick anything with more than 3 grams of sugar. (That’s some f’ing parenting right there, by the way.) Sweets came in a regimented time-release/reward system that I still adhere to instinctively like an animal that’s been taught a task for an experiment and then released into the wild. You get a snack in the afternoon and dessert after a meal that you have finished beyond plausible deniability. 

The other day I almost texted my mom to see if eating an avocado warranted dessert.

When Dan was a kid he was only allowed to take two cookies at a time. He still follows this rule. Even if he eats 16 cookies, they come in 8 pairs.

Traditional Canadian Mucus Pie

When we moved to Canada, and each family member’s crazy kicked into high gear, and the food rules got stretched and then broken. We were depressed and feelings were on the menu! My main engagement with Canada was culinary, which is a rare experience I’m sure. But I can remember each and every comfort food: wunderbars and Coffee Crisps, English Toffee, Timbits, Tim Horton’s Red Juice and Second Cup mochas, Crunchie, those Canadian mucus pies that look like they have mucus in them, nanaimo bars, foods we liked just because of their French names: Puffs du Guimave, Biscuits d’erable. Lots of things were d’erable.

Then there were the foods you COULDN’T get. We’d drive down to Buffalo and buy boxes of Ring Dings and Twizzlers and Little Debbie snacks and haul them back. And then one Saturday we were sitting on the couch on a Saturday watching Canadian Lawyers on the Prowl and eating as many Twizzlers as we wanted out of two massive bags (one black and one red) and it wasn’t even 2PM. I did not bring this up, not because I was afraid we’d stop eating Twizzlers if I brought it up, but because the rule was that sacred. Like I imagine people are when they commit a very foul crime out of desperation. They probably just don’t mention it. “Could you put those in the wood chipper?” They say in an even tone, referring to a sack of arms. It’s one thing to do it, and another to say so.

We were back in the states when I “joined” the track team. The coach had told the girls who were really on the team that they had to pee clear, and we were all obsessed with peeing clear and we made diligent reports to each other through stall walls. I just stopped eating fast food and I stopped drinking soda, and my zinc went right up, I guess because so did my energy and ability to ride out my violent mood swings.

I stopped because they were rules. No fast food. No soda. Once it’s a rule, it is. And then eventually, it doesn't have to be. I rarely want fast food OR soda now. The habit has changed and I don't really need it. The hardest and fastest of the no fast food rule pertains to McDonalds, though, and I have not eaten in a McDonalds since 1997. Every once in a while, it will come over me to eat a Taco Bell taco or a Wendy’s hamburger, which I always almost instantly regret both because my stomach hurts and because as soon as I’m done I want more more more. Stopping again if you do it once is the hard part. They have all those studies that say that fast food is addictive, and that is very likely true.

Vegetarian Snacks!

This is not to say that I got awesome at eating. In university, I took my zinc in largely through Cool Ranch Doritos, cold cuts and Strawberry-Orange-Banana juice (this last I sincerely believed balanced my meals, and I usually rewarded myself with Ben & Jerry’s for dessert.) Later I became a vegetarian for some reason I can’t remember now, and removed the cold cuts from the lineup. I was pretty much a Doritos vegetarian.

God bless New York, though, it has all the foods. I had never eaten spinach, brussels sprouts, asparagus, bok choy. There were a million vegetables I’d never heard of and they were all fresh. I learned about Thai food and Xua took me for Indian food, and then there was Dojo and Kelly & Ping. I remember how those restaurants felt looking back now, like they are from some bygone era of New York because they seemed so exotic and brilliant to me then. It’s probably just the wonder that’s bygone. I had never been in restaurants like this.  

Still in my mind, New York appears to me as a subway map of the city with a little red glowing light wherever something delicious is.

Slowly, slowly, I learned to cook. Chris had been bringing his own food in tupperware for years because he knew how to not have money, I tried to follow his lead. The first time I tried, I cut up three crimini mushrooms and put them in a saucepan. That didn’t seem to be working and I guessed some liquid was needed, so I put in a half a stick of butter. Then I ate them then I threw up. I started cutting vegetables and throwing them into steaming pots of Ramen. I still do that sometimes. Oriental seasoning, of course, because of vegetarianism.

Also bygone is the China I lived in, where you could not buy any kind of processed food anywhere. Oh, sure, you could walk down the road and get a hunk of meat off a fly covered slab. You could pull fresh fruits and vegetables off of farmer’s tables and blankets. But you could not walk into a supermarket and buy a box of crackers.

My first month in China I basically starved to death. I was taken with great ceremony on my first night in Yue Yang to the Man De Fu, which is the knockoff Mai Dang Lao, which is Chinese for

Shame on a Bun

McDonalds ™. It was pretty grotesque. We sat on indoor porch swings to eat whole fried chickens off of paper plates. They came with plastic gloves, which provided a strange civility to the tearing of fried flesh with teeth. After that I was left to my own devices.

I ate nightly at the place next door to where I lived, for as long as I still could eat. It seemed to me that I was going through an adjustment period digestively, and while this was true, it was also true that the proprietor of the restaurant would take the food off of the unfinished plates of previous guests and scrape it back into a bowl to serve to the next person (me.) Waste not want not, I guess, but Chinese people were in a better placed to avoid it because they both knew how to, and knew TO say “don’t give me that old food, I want new food.” A few weeks of this and I had to be carried to the hospital.

Tofu Brains

I didn’t know how to eat breakfast. The other working people where I lived started the day with a steaming bowl of noodles and a glass of hard liquor. I couldn't do it. Sometimes the old lady would come around with two buckets of “tofu brains” (why is it called this? I do not know) on her shoulders, and I’d have that. What I wanted was bread. But the Chinese outside of Shanghai were inconveniently resistant to French colonization, and as a result, their bread is totally weird. It’s, like, always kind of wet? Even when it’s dry? And the consistency is kind of like what I imagine the consistency of untrustworthiness would be, if that were made manifest? And much of it comes with terrible surprises buried inside, like half of a hot dog, or this kind of hair substance that I never figured out what it was.

Yuck, China. Why is there hair on this bread?

In the middle of that summer, which was so, so hot and in which there was not only no air conditioning but no industry to distract me during the hours upon hours that my colleagues used to sleep face down on their desks or slumped against the wall, I found a coffee shop that had a milkshake machine which actually restored my will to live. I would go there with my plastic cup to get it filled with cold milkshake. I brought my own cup because there were no disposable products in China at that time, and if you didn’t want to drink it out of a ceramic tea cup, you were SOL.

This flavor is called "ice cream"

I got better at navigating it, but Chinese food is made to be enjoyed by families, not individuals, and so every night I would get one lonely vegetable dish and eat it my lonely self. Over time I built a weird network of walks and bus trips that brought me to coveted just-for-one foods. My Saturday ritual was to sneak away from the family (who were very suspicious of my wanting to go places by myself) take the bus to the Wan De Fu (the knockoff Man De Fu) and eat a "chicken meat hamburger" on weird Chinese bread, a thing of fries and a Future Cola in a hunched over posture that was feral and defensive. I found a store that had O-li-o cookies.

When I think about how much of my time in China that I spent plotting to get food, hoarding and hiding food, waiting for food and purchasing food it kind of blows my mind. Not because it was so much time, my food program is usually running at at least 75% CPU, but because it was so wholly resistant to the abundance of natural, healthy food available. If I could have slightly altered my behavior to eat with others, if I could have eased out of my sugar addiction I would have saved so much time and felt so much better. But my habits were just way too strong.

It’s pretty much always like this. And the food stuff and the feelings stuff are twisted tightly together. If I’m eating donuts, I know that my life is seriously fucked. Donuts for breakfast? That is my equivalent of giving away prized possessions. The amount of processed food going into my body is directly proportional to the amount of depressed I am. The food doesn’t make me depressed, it more like reveals it. When I think of the lowest moments in my life, they all have a scene where I eat and eat and eat. Like that montage in a biopic about an addict, where you think I might get it together but instead I just eat a whole bag of cheeze curlz paired with a whole bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups then fall asleep crying and eating brown sugar out of the bag with a spoon. .

Also, there is no limit to the QUANTITY of food that I will eat if there is nothing to stop me such as needing my mouth to teach or limited availability of edible items. I can be sick to my stomach and it can be pushing up against the edge of my jeans, but I will keep right on packing food in.

I can’t have feelings and not eat at the same time. It takes too much bandwith. To be removed from my brain and heart, each feeling needs a specific vehicle. Sugar, salt and bread are the fastest ones I know. Vroom! Cake! Mostly I snack on free floating anxiety, and that really needs to attach itself to something that is in smaller pieces that I can pick up with two fingers, preferably without looking at the item as they are conveyed to my mouth. The busy transit of bite sized food items from their packaging to my feelings-hole is an excellent way to burn up unexamined worry. Tip: It’s good to have the next piece en route even as you begin to chew the previous. Like a conveyor belt or a ski lift.

The Buddha, seen here not eating Cheez-its

Every ten weeks we listen to the listening passage about how different spiritual traditions fast, and like all listening passages for my class, I have it memorized. The Harvard Professor of Comparative Religions explains that fasting symbolizes a breaking of attachment to material things which we enact every day through our desire for food. The Episcopal priest lays out how fasting is a way to build discipline, to sharpen the heart’s capacity by going through a limited amount of stress that is not completely undoing. I am always moved by these descriptions. Break the attachment! Yes! Capacity! Woo!

But there’s that and there’s cheese popcorn.

And that is why I am on the elimination diet right now, that lovely Sarah Sheen set up for me.

When MK heard that I was going to give the nutritionist $300, she asked why. And I told her the thing about feelings and eating. And she said maybe I should figure out the feelings instead of changing the eating. But I don't know how to do that so much. So for now, I'll eat this pile of kale and see what the feelings do.

Chris' Assignment #3: 20 Lines on Versailles

1. Bienvenue!
2. It’s only sprinkling.
3. The palace of Versailles boasts more than 100 separate rooms.
4. The wait from the palace gate to the entrance is about 2.5 hours on a weekday, and 3 to 5 hours on a week-end.
5. Marie Antoinette kept half her shit in here.
6. The audioguide is available in Japanese.
7. “Paint everything!” She is believed to have said.
8. “Murals on everything!”
9. Notice the rising sun, which was the symbol of Louis the 16th.
10. A scrub-it-down plastic-table Dutch food restaurant with laminated English menus is available next door for your convenience.
11. “Zee ceiling, too!”
12. Put a man in a three hour line, doesn’t matter the nationality, he’s either going to slump over and disappear or he’s going to proclaim shit with jollity for the entire journey, for all men are, in their secret hearts, stand-up comedians.
13. “Get a fucking detailed mural of rich people and zeir silky hounds on zee ceiling, stat!”

14. 

    Versailles: Dizzyingly, Opulently Boring

    This king had a special kind of chair he liked which you may now look at.
15. If you become lost or disoriented while in the palace, follow the endless succession of gilded rooms with gilded molding and draped in faded tapestries until eventually life becomes a pale blue taffeta and tassled blur devoid of any meaning.
16. Although the so-called “Sans-culottes” or “pantsless” did not truly dig this joint, no information is available regarding why.
17. Germans are a trim and they efficient looking people, they carry their items in white fannypacks and they wear tennis visors to keep the sun off of their faces and tame their hair, which is already tame.
18. “I command you to cover it in gold!”
19. You will find that taking a photo is a kind of doing something, and that it is now possible to take a photo with your cellular phone.
20. “Inspect zee palace,” she commanded from out her noble mouth, “and If you discern any variance in zee colour, style or subject matter of zee murals or tapestries, I will torture and kill zee artisans!”

Chew & Spit

Todaon the treadmill I watched Dr. Phil, and I have to tell you, dear reader, I do not think that shit is OK. There was a girl who had an eating disorder where she would chew her food and then spit it into a bag and save the bag under her bed. She seemed very sad. 

Dr. Phil had some doctor with huge, white teeth come on and say that the teenager was in all kinds of health danger. Then some other shiny doctor from an eating disorder place come on and said that she was going to take her away to the eating disorder place and the teenager lost her shit crying because she didn’t want to go to an inpatient program.

Dr.Phil told her that “life is about opportunities and when you are on your deathbead you don’t regret the times you said “yes” you regret the times you said “no.” Then the audience clapped. He said she had a choice whether to take the opportunity or not, and that she had to look him in the eye and say “I’m all in.” Fuck you, Dr. Phil.  

Further, what the fuck does that even mean? Is that what people do on their deathbeds, anyway? Catalogue shit? And also there are plenty of things that you can regret saying “yes” to, for chrissake. Crack? Job you hate? Getting into that van with that guy?

Recovery is about making your own narrative. So I guess television is pretty much antithetical to recovery, since that is about being put in a narrative. Why is that a show? Someone should take his license away if he has one.

Why the Neighbors are in Jail

There is a tan industrial sized garbage can with the number of the house painted on it with black spray paint, not stenciled and not artfully. The black paint has started to wear away, and the tan is coming through in the middle of the house numbers, although not in the sloppy drips that aren’t meant to be there.

Tonight, when I passed by the garbage can, I dragged it out to the curb. I figured it was ok because I knew it, and also I figured that the people in that house didn’t want to take their garbage can out to the curb because it’s 7 degrees out. I sure didn’t want to drag my garbage can out to the curb. It wasn’t so bad once I got into it though. I like to drag out the garbage cans for everyone who lives in the building, and then they always drag them back. So that’s nice. I got really bundled up and then I dragged them all out. Then I went to the store to get a cucumber and on the way back, I dragged out the tan garbage can because it’s on my list of things to remember.

As soon as I walked away, though, I worried that the people whose garbage can it was wouldn’t have wanted me to drag it out. I immediately began to concoct scenarios in which I may have caused major damage by doing it. The most plausible was one in which the people in that house were criminals who had some important evidence of a crime that they needed to get rid of and they were hiding it in the tan garbage can with the spray painted number until they could haul it off to the dump without it’s being connected to their home. They figured that would be a safe place to leave it. Who would move their garbage can? One of them thought it seemed to exposed, but his partner assured him “no one is going to drag out someone else’s garbage can.” 

Now they will go to jail.

New Lang Syne

Well here is the new year again. It feels different but maybe it always feels like this. I do know that of all the things I said I was gonna do, this, writing, has been harder. It’s the only one that I’ve had to really cram myself into. But now Lucas is here and all set up with pretzels, so, can’t really get out of it. I can’t take care of tasky tasks at write night, it’s not the kind of wrong I am.

I was listening to a radio interview with a poet who was saying that when she teaches poetry, the students have to spend two weeks writing ten things that they observe every day, without using metaphors.

When you hear an assignment like that it is hard not to follow it. And describing ten things you see in a day is not as easy as you think it's going to be, which annoys my brain pretty much the same way that writing does. Maybe my write brain is just lazy. 

One
The recycle bucket filled up with water, which hardened into a solid block of ice and couldn’t be thrown into the gutter. If I wanted to take the ice out, I could use heavy cutters and cut the recycle bucket off, and I would have the recycle-bin shaped solid block of ice. It would hardly be damaged by the clippers. If I wanted to take the water out when it wasn’t frozen, I couldn’t do that. There’d be no way to get the water out without pouring it into another container. 

Two
There are a lot of fat wooden poles on my street that hold up electrical wires, which you don’t notice unless you are looking for and at them. They have really thick black cables running along them, looping in big coils and swinging from post to post. They’re unsightly, but if you asked me what’s in my neighborhood, I would not think of them. 

Three
A hedge that’s like a Chinese dragon. Actually, it’s not like a Chinese dragon at all. I call it “the Chinese dragon” so I can remember it because I have turned the poet’s suggestion into some warped obsessive desire to memorize a series of things I pass between Baltimore and Larchwood. At first you think it’s a conical hedge that you can memorize, but behind it is a long trail of hedge, and at the other end it raises up again into another cone.

Four
There is a big thick pine tree so big that it blocks one entire half of a duplex. The whole thing. The porch, the middle windows, the top story windows. And it comes about halfway out into the sidewalk. That’s probably not legal, but no one lives there. The house is for sale. There can’t possibly be any light in that house though. 

Five
There’s some young people’s garden that they made by fencing in the area next to their house. It has some wooden trellises that all have dead clinging to them now, and some bags of mulch and bricks that look like they were maybe part of a plan once. There’s a cooler with stickers on it for the Outer Banks. OBX. Or not the Outer Banks, maybe, but something like that. And for beer. The whole garden looks like the cold came suddenly and they had to abandon everything right there. 

Six
There used to be this big horrible grey dog that was also pathetic because it was one of those big mean dogs but it just lived outside and no one took much care of it so all it could do was woof at people. It was probably woofing for help, but from a dog like that, everything just sounds like “kill.” Then when it got really cold it stopped being there. Maybe they took it inside. 

Seven
There’s a house that had really good Halloween decorations, and now they have pretty good Christmas decorations, still, even though today is the Feast of the Epiphany and they’re supposed to be down by now. There’s still a piece of spider web stuck to the top of the porch, though. 

Eight
There’s another guy on the other side of Larchwood who does one of those nutty Christmas displays with Santa riding in an inflatable helicopter and the propeller turns and stuff. But he took everything right down on New Year’s Eve, which is the real day you’re supposed to.

Nine
On our block are three old tyme lamp posts that are just a little taller than me, and two weird globes, about the size of baseballs, that light up in alternating red, blue and green.

Ten
The saddest thing on our block is our banana tree. Which must be dead. Around November, the banana tree, which in the summer looked really tropical, turned brown and thin and withery. The banana tree had been big enough to block the windows of our house, and the whole porch, but then when the cold came, it just drooped down and browned. When we put up the holiday decorations after Thanksgiving, Andrew cut the giant banana leaves down and just left the green stalks. They were strangely pliable, we could bend them with our hands. Inside, the stalk was layered, like an onion, where every ring of the onion had grown up into a big banana leaf. We didn’t know if it would be ok to pull out the stalks, so we decided to wait for Getnet Getnet, the landlord. But then before we could ask him, and before I could put all the cut brown banana leaves into those bags that you have to use or the garbage won’t take them away, it snowed. Now all the old banana leaves are piled up under the snow, and the stalks are poking out, looking sad and yellow. One or two of them has just folded over. 

John’s beautiful scientist sister predicted that this would happen, but we didn’t believe her. The banana tree looked too strong to wither and die. She also said that the banana tree would be back in the spring, just as big as before, and that it would never produce bananas because the climate here is too cold. 

Maybe these things will also come, or not come, to pass.

There are Robot Arms Under the Front and Back of Every Trolley

The trolley got stuck at 30th Street. Our driver announced “trolley’s broke” and we all had to get off of the trolley and go get on the L. 

While we were waiting for the L we could all see the stuck trolley. 

A 13 came up behind it and then the driver of that got out and put on some white gloves. He pulled this robot arm out from under the front of his trolley. It was really heavy, our driver had to come out and put her foot on the elbow of it and brace herself against the fence it while he tried to pull it out. Is there a third rail in Philadelphia? I do not know. T

hen our trolley driver went to the back of our trolley and pulled out a robot arm from the back, and then the L came, so I do not know what happened next.

34

It was a long time waiting for the trolley. Or maybe it just felt like a long time. I kept walking, backwards to 50th street because it’s warmer walking, and because the further back you get the trolley, the more likely you are to get a seat.

Sometimes someone gets on after me with a baby or some other burden, but I don’t give them my seat. I’m like that in the morning. Not so nice. I feel incapable, although I’m pretty sure that I’m not. I try to keep my face buried in my book or something so that I don’t notice them or so that I could plausibly not have noticed them.

I have hidden from people I know in the morning to avoid having to ride together and make conversation. Including John. If hidden from friends in the bushes, and I hide from John in our own house.