Short Internet Poll

Ugh, my mouth tastes...metallic? Maybe?

INTERNET QUIZ

DID I ACCIDENTALLY BITE MY CHEEK?

(Please circle one.)

YES

NO

Achievement Unlocked: I'm Eating Food!

Check it out:

That's food made out of plants, mostly, right there. Also the 360 controller that's small enough to fit my hands. It's not food, and I can't play XBox one-handed or while eating, but it's pretty. Grimy, but pretty. So, I took it's picture.

Update:

My "holy moly, I feel horribly malnourished, I only crave sweets when I'm hungry, plants don't look like food anymore, and my clothes are too tight" problem is actually responding to the intervention that I've intervening into my own life with. The fresh-faced, well-nourished kid I once was, who substituted zucchini for pasta--just because zucchini is delicious and goes with everything--has all but faded away, and been replaced with some kinda moralistic casualty from a Roald Dahl children's novel.

Yesterday, as you will recall (or if not, you can just look at the last post), I started my day with a big package of garlicky, smelly, frozen, corporate-creamed spinach, straight out of the microwave. IT HAS BEGUUUUUN!

I don't remember what I ate in the middle of the day (cereal? frozen mac 'n' cheese?), but it was insufficient, and I felt dizzy and had a headache by 8:45pm. Failure of planning. 

But all was forgiven once I ate a salad in a bag for dinner. One of those huge, bacon/blue cheese/cabbage things. Dole brand? Probably? It was about as caloric as a few slices of pizza; pretty calorically dense stuff. But unlike most pizzas could have, it maxed out my daily cabbage nutrient requirements, whatever the fuck those are. (Is that even a thing?!?!? What IS cabbage, anyway?!?!?) 

Cabbage is crunchy, and it has stuff(?) in it, like, vitamin C probably, and whatever. Eating it balanced my blood sugar out, and took care of my urge to eat everything in the world at that time, because it was a very physically big meal. Just, like, the bigness of it all.

For dessert, I continued to push my ability to eat directly plant-based foods, by eating sweetened, dried cranberries and a slice or two of Dubliner cheese. I mean, yeah, it's pretty much been Dubliner and candy for a long time for me. But even though that box of Craisins had twice as much sugar as a Laffy Taffy rope has (20g vs 11g), at least I was getting essential cranberry nutrients (?) in me, now. Whatever the fuck those are. 

(Aww yeaaaaahr. Cheese and fruit. Dubliner is the best cheese, and I am going through a Craisins phase, because fuck you, that's why.)

So far, so good. It is no longer yesterday; it is now yesterday's tomorrow, today.

I feel like person whose body finally remembers that it can also eat things that aren't candy. 

My appetite's finally broad enough to include "real" food (I will probably eat grapes later!), instead of being dangerously limited and overspecific, like a goddamned one-food-ever koala bear. 'Cause, like, I'm not a koala bear. 

I can't just eat a finals week candy binge every day. That nasty habit's gotta be for all-nighters only, because somehow the sugar helps with that. Maybe because sugar gives quick energy, maybe because I find it comforting, or maybe because I know it's a vice and vices provide a little feeling of control in a bad situation. 

(Something a lot of people who quit smoking often get tripped up by, if they don't have a contingency plan for. You can't replace a bad habit with "good" habits only. There need to be some practiced, beloved, love/hated vices at the ready, for when shit gets shitty. Like, don't have a cigarette, instead carry a Sharpie with you and use it to vandalize a public bathroom stall, or write "FUCK" on the knuckles of your right hand and "OFF!" on the knuckles of your left hand, or write it on your toes if you gotta go to work later, or something. Just don't smoke, because fuck the tobacco industry. Fuck those guys, fuck 'em, fuck 'em all. But not "fuck" meaning "engage in hearty, friendly sexual congress." Instead, "fuck" meaning "use your dollars to vote for something better than the tobacco industry, like upbeat, pornographic comic books, and/or Etsy stuff." This is a massive digression, but I used to work for the best damn tobacco quit organization in the world, and even though I'm a grad student studying other things now, I still think about the cancer patients, diabetic amputees, pregnant smokers, and other folks who let me help them quit tobacco more easily/effectively/comfortably. They were exploited, injured, and sometimes killed by a shitty, addictive product that's available almost everywhere, and therefore, I'm perma-pissed at the tobacco industry, always and forever. I didn't endorse things like vandalism or unhealthy eating when working as an addiction counselor, of course. My personal and professional identities are two very different roles, and nothing I say in this blog should be taken as medical advice or role modeling. Obviously! Obviously? Obviously. Art and science occupy different philosophical spheres.)

But whatever. 

What I'm here to describe is that rght now, my ability to eat actual-actual, real-real food-food is coming around.

Today, I woke up and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast, because fuck if I'm gonna wash a goddamned spatula, for fuck's sake. I wanted to fry up a "toad in the hole," (an over-medium egg inside of a slice of toast), but grilled cheese sandwiches can be flipped with a fork, or even with your hands if you don't mind getting burned a little bit, whereas eggs require a spatula (at least in our skillet) to flip. So, grilled cheese is what I ate. Besides, the mustard and bread were already out, because I'd packed a ham sandwich lunch for my spouse, because it was morning.

ANYWAY!!!!!!!

Right now, I'm eating lunch, and I am LITERALLY eating hummus and pita chips. Literally. Literally! 

Look at the photo at the top of this bloated, overlong entry! That's one starch, whatever, but it's paired with chickpea purée, and I am eating it. I am eating a food that's made by taking bits of plant, like, something you can grow outside, and then mashing it up a little, with seasoning and oil and whatever. Badass!

I am also going to eat applesauce soon, too (see it in the picture?), and I am not going to feel weird about it. Not even one tiny bit.

(I'm aware that the foods depicted all use more packaging than is good, and I'm not a fan of doing that. But I'm choosing my battles, while I curse the limitations that DeQuervain's tenvynosis is currently putting on my hand usage. One thing at a time.)

Oh man. Frozen creamed spinach has a strong smell.

I'm weaning myself off of an all-starch-and-sweets academic crunch diet, and forcing my body to remember that produce exists in more than just "topping" formats. 

So, I've decided to eat this for breakfast, right now:

This is a photo of the bag that I took with my phone. Let's pretend that the glare and illegibility was intentional.

So, I microwave the bag, vents-up like the instructions said, while making my husband's breakfast. We have an egalitarian chore balance, and my husband is typically the main household cook. (Imagine that! I mean, you've read this blog. I don't see why anybody would prefer their own cooking to mine. Really!) However, because I'm a grad student and he's an associate producer for a game company, working on a project that is HUGELY TIME CONSUMING AND DOESN'T LEAVE HIM WITH AS MUCH TIME OUTSIDE OF WORK AS I HAVE OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, I wake up with him and pack him both his breakfast and his lunch, while he groggily showers and lurches to the car. I've also been making our dinners lately, despite both of us knowing better, because he's often working 13-hour days, or longer. (Curse you, games industry!)

I have, like, sleep superpowers. As adventurers should. I fall asleep quickly, and wake up from even wholly, dangerous inadequate sleep pretty easily. So I make a pretty good ally in the morning, just like I'm a good ally on red eye flights, and during up-all-night medical emergencies. Besides, on weekdays, I have the opportunity to go back to sleep if I need to, so waking up a few hours after we went to bed doesn't impact me as heartily as it impacts my perma-tired husband. Giving him that boost in the morning, to help him head into his marathon-paced working environment, suits us well.

So!

This morning, I peeled him an orange, made him a little snack pack of frozen blueberries, filled the travel mug with fresh, sweetened and lightened coffee (French press, what?!?), and buttered two slices of blueberry bread. As we do. 

With my partner's breakfast accomplished, I sat down on the couch to play video games and wait for my experimental spinach to cook. It was at this point that the cats snuck into the kitchen.

(When stalking our food, Leonard will walk slowly. If he catches us watching him, he'll pause to sniff the cookbooks and floor, and maybe curl up and shut his eyes, to make it look like he's just standing around aimlessly. It's really cute! Hard to stay mad at someone so keen to demonstrate that some nonhuman animals use hunting strategies that appear to utilize metacognition. It's like, he knows. He knows what's up.)

Once the cats had snuck into the kitchen, I heard a rustling sound, stood up, and shouted "Caaaaaaaats!!!" like I was shouting "Flintstoooone!!!" from, like, the old cartoons. Leonard and Greg (cats) ran out of the kitchen, through the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom as fast as healthy cats can go. Which is pretty fucking fast.

I scramble after them at a sprint, shouting and flailing, because we live in a house, and shouting at 6am is a luxury that comes free with rent. The cats bolt back out of the bedroom, past my feet, almost tripping me. Neither had the blueberry bread with them. Instead, I found it on the bedroom floor, still protected in its lunchbox packaging, unharmed but in need of new packaging.

...Unfortunately, being raided by small, fast animals who love a good chase was not the WORST thing that happened to breakfast this morning. The worst part was the goddamned garlicky smell coming out of the microwave as my corporate spinach cooked.

I'm eating it right now, and it actually tastes pretty good. Smells bad. Smells so bad. I don't know that a culinary purist could get it down without growling, because it's prepackaged artificial whathaveyou. But it's a decent way to start easing myself back into vegetable use, if I don't want to mess up the kitchen by making a homemade white sauce. I CAN cook, I have the skills and the education, but I am not good at dishwashing. So...y'know...I'll eat whatever makes the smallest mess.

Oh man, the smell, though. The smell! The smell is not the sort of thing to smell when trying to appreciate blueberries, early in the morning. My husband was so grossed out that the smell (it saturated the whole house) almost put him off of breakfast. "Luckily," he'll eat breakfast in the office, because I don't think that he could have done it at home.

I'd say that I learned my lesson this morning, but I really haven't. Like, at ALL.

Update: I've finished the spinach and I'm still hungry, so I'm probably going to have some cereal. Leonard is stalking the bowl that the spinach was in, because he likes cream sauces. I'm like, YEAH I SEE YOU, "falling asleep" a few feet closer to the spinach bowl whenever I look away for a second. Fuzzy little bastard. 

HE IS A BIG FAKER.

Update: LOOK AT THAT. I TOLD YOU HE'S A BIG FAKER! Look at that!!!!! Sleep-reaching for my bowl. Bastard.