No matter how poorly I have eaten during the day, or how unhealthy I may be feeling, or how much weight I have put on during the previous week, I always feel better about myself after standing in line at a 7-11. The cigarettes, the corn dogs, the Big Gulps filled with Mountain Dew, the sandwiches, the candy bars.
It made my Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich look like spinach salad sprinkled with vitamin water.
Here is a list of the eight most common stroke triggering behaviors, excluding persistently high blood pressure.
This sucks.
Angry and startled are my two default states of being. Having suffered from PTSD for years, I am the most easily startled person I know. My nervous system, according my therapist, has literally been trained to startle easily.
And angry?
I can’t tell you the number of things that annoy me.
Not to mention that when I’m not startled or angry, vigorous physical exercise, sex, and drinking Diet Coke are three of my favorite things in the world.
For those not keeping track, that’s five out of the eight triggers.
Thankfully, my normal blood pressure is exceedingly good (they always check it twice, assuming the first reading was incorrect), and I don’t drink coffee, but this list does not make me happy.
In fact, it makes me quite angry.
See what I mean?
Elysha and I enjoy Five Guys Burgers and Fries quite a bit. Actually, we like the burgers a lot but no longer order the fries. They’re okay, but nothing great.
But since everything is cooked in peanut oil and they offer free peanuts from boxes positioned around the restaurant, we cannot take our peanut-allergic daughter there for lunch.
It’s like a death-trap for anyone with a peanut allergy.
Still, we love the place and look forward to opportunities to eat there.
But one thing bothers me:
The amount of self-congratulatory advertising that they plaster over their walls.
It borders on ego-maniacal, and it seems fairly pointless.
We’re already in the restaurant, eating your food. At that point, just make sure the food is excellent and we’ll come back for more. This is the kind of advertising that one uses to bring customers in the door.
It’s not supposed to be used to assault our senses once we are inside.
In fact, it strikes me as slightly under-confident, which in my mind is one of the worst things a business can be.
There is one and only one correct way to eat a Cadbury Crème Egg. Allow me to explain. In case you have been living under a rock for your entire life, the Cadbury Crème Egg is a brand of chocolate constructed of two parts: a thick, chocolate shell and the liquid, candy interior.
It is candy perfection, but it relies upon the consumer to ensure that this perfection is achieved.
The key to properly eating a Cadbury Crème Egg is to consume the egg in three equal bites. If done properly, this allows each bite to be equally and appropriately delicious.
This is the key.
In order to achieve three perfect bites, one must ensure that each bite contains equal portions of both candy components, for it is through the blending of these two components that perfection is attained.
To finish a Cadbury Crème Egg by consuming only the chocolaty tip of the egg, for example, would be to deny its potential perfection.
It would be both wasteful and inane.
It would be a tragedy.
This is why three is the ideal number of bites. Three bites allows for the requisite distribution of chocolate shell and liquid interior in each bite. This is essential. To consume the chocolate exterior without simultaneously ingesting the candy interior defeats the purpose of the candy and fundamentally debases the entire experience.
When in doubt, here is a good rule of thumb:
If eaten properly, the consumption of a Cadbury Crème Egg should result in at least three sticky fingers.
If your hands are clean upon the completion of a Cadbury Crème Egg, you have failed the candy.
You have denied yourself an opportunity at perfection.
Perhaps my vegan friends can leave the poor, defenseless plants alone and eat this instead, as Slate’s Nathan Thornburgh suggests. Do the world a favor and help eliminate an invasive species of fish and stop devouring the only living beings that are actively engaged in the battle over global warming. By removing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, plants help to reduce greenhouse gases as they have been doing for millions of years.
This is more than I can say about most Republican lawmakers.
Yet we continue to kill them at astonishing rates.
The plants, I mean. Not the lawmakers.
With this in mind, I suggested that a vegan friend consider switching from field greens, spinach and broccoli over to a plant like kudzu. If you’re going to kill and devour benevolent plant life, at least make it a point to murder an invasive species in the process.
“Is kudzu edible?” you may ask.
Apparently so.
Appalled by how much the government spends fighting kudzu, Juanitta Baldwin, author of Kudzu Cuisine, started looking for culinary solutions to the problem more than a decade ago.
"Kudzu is a hidden goldmine," says Baldwin, whose book includes innovative recipes for kudzu, including breads and jellies.
See? It’s practically an all-in-one plant. Throw in some peanut butter and you can use kudzu to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Don’t get me wrong. As invasive a species as it may be, I still think it’s a shame to kill kudzu. It’s still a plant, and it’s still actively removing carbon from our atmosphere.
But if it’s a choice between benevolent broccoli and pacifist parsley or the plant that ate the South, why not try kudzu?
Not that any of this will matter. I fully expect that scientists will one day discover that plants are sentient beings, capable of thoughts and feelings, and all this kindness to living things fortunate enough to have feet and flippers will go right out the door. Vegans and carnivores alike will finally have to accept that no living being is more precious than another.
Either that or a plant-based species of alien life will visit Earth and become enraged upon discovering that there are human beings who have dedicated their entire lives to the consumption of their distant plant cousins.
And you just know that these leafy aliens will be armed with death rays and exploding tree nuts.
For a man who despises broccoli, this whole incident was downright frightening.
Cooler heads finally prevailed:
Two interesting aspects of Asian culture popped up in my Twitter feed today.
The first was regarding No-pan Kissas, popular Japanese cafes in 1980s with mirrors on the floor and waitresses who wore skirts and no underwear.
The second was an article in Time describing the surging popularity of McDonald’s weddings in Hong Kong.
I know the Chinese have become our biggest economic competitors, recently overtaking the Japanese, but isn’t news like this enough incentive to hold back our Asian adversaries?
For the sake of the world, America must remain on top, if for nothing else, to at least stem the tide of Asian restaurant insanity.
The Coca Cola machine at Goodwin College has eight rows of Coke, six rows of Sprite, eight rows of Powerade, eight rows of orange juice and no Diet Coke.
What the hell?
My daughter refused to eat macaroni and cheese and hotdogs tonight.
For a moment, I thought that she might be the only child in the history of the world to reject food like these.
Then I heard my wife reminding her mother over the phone that she wouldn’t eat pizza until she was ten.
So the lunacy clearly runs in the family.
I brought a bag of Swedish Fish to the Patriots final regular season game two weeks ago. New England was playing the Miami Dolphins, and the symbolism behind eating fish while the Patriots pummeled the Dolphins appealed to me. We dined on mahi mahi (commonly known as the dolphin fish) in the parking lot prior to the game for similar reasons.
In discussing how my strategic consumption of the Swedish Fish undoubtedly contributed to the Patriots’ victory, a friend contended that the candy was so named because the words Swedish and fish rhyme.
I did not think the words Swedish and fish rhymed well enough to warrant the name choice and claimed that there was probably some amusing, anecdotal reason for the name.
So I looked it up.
Turns out that Swedish Fish are so named because they are made by a Swedish company named Malaco and exported to the United States.
Swedish Fish are actually Swedish. Not only that, but they are first generation Swedish, each one coming right off the boat.
Literally.
Swedish Fish therefore appears to be an apropos name, but still, it seems a little odd. Right?
Imagine if your Toyota Corolla was named Japanese car.
Or your bottle of Guinness was called Irish Beer.
Of if Coco-Cola was called Empty American Calories.
Did the marketers at Malaco really believe that it was the Swedish aspect of their candied fish that they should promote the most?
It’s hard to imagine a group of marketing executives making this decision, but apparently it happened.
Best of all, in Sweden, Swedish Fish is marketed under the name pastellfiskar, which translates to pastel colored fishes.
At least the company is consistent in its odd naming of products.
I recently learned that my wife purchased Chef BoBo’s Good Food Cookbook: Smart Recipes for Happy Healthy Children.
She did not purchase it for Clara.
She bought it for me.
Not nice.
Elysha and I ate at a restaurant in Massachusetts today that had a fourteen page menu.
To assist us with the dissection and dissemination of this tome, the menu began with a table of contents, entitled the Menu Navigator.
It would appear that someone was taking themselves rather seriously when designing this menu.
Slate’s Chris Wilson reports on a 2009 study by the Department of Agriculture found that “2.3 million households do not have access to a car and live more than a mile from a supermarket. Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these ‘food deserts,’ where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away.”
An interactive map of these food deserts can be found here.
I’m stunned by these findings.
And I’m ready to help.
As I’ve written about before, the area of Connecticut in which I live in inundated with grocery stores, and while their presence alone does not adversely impact me, their sheer number seems to compel consumers to frequent as many of them as possible in a given week, thus clogging my highways and surface streets with people who somehow manage to find the time to shop for meat at one store, fruits and vegetables at another, bulk items at a third, prepared foods at a fourth, and so on and so on.
I wish I had that kind of extra time on my hands.
The lack of efficiency in this model offends me on a personal level.
The amount of fuel being used to shuttle oneself around to these stores is destructive to the environment.
The presence of these multiple-grocery-store-maniacs on the roads slows me down.
Seemingly gone are the days when a family was able to do its food shopping for the week on a single day.
In the land of fast-paced, on-the-move, not-enough-hours-in-the-day lifestyles, the majority of people who I know somehow manage to carve out enough time to shop for food three or four days a week.
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
Using Google Maps I was able to determine that within a single mile of my home are a total of eight full-sized grocery stories, including two Stop & Shops and two Asian grocers. Had I stretched the range out to two miles, I would have more than doubled this total.
So what if we ship half of the grocery stores in my area of Connecticut to a place more needy? Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas, and parts of Texas could all use one of the Stop & Shops within a mile of my home, or one of the two Asian markets or three Aldis or two Shaws within two miles of my home.
Lift these suckers up and send them someplace else. Reduce the congestion on my roads, replace the vast acreages of parking lots with trees and grass, decrease the amount of fossils fuels burned while driving to these stores, and perhaps encourage consumers to return to a time when families did the bulk of their shopping on a single day at a single store and transform the time spent turning our towns into giant farm stands into something more productive.
Food deserts?
I’m drowning in food over here.
I just watched a family of five purchase their entire dinner from a 7-11. Not an impoverished, bedraggled family either. A jovial, well-dressed bunch who proceeded to pile into an Audi after making their purchases.
Hot dogs, corn dogs, Twinkies, soda, slushies, and a food product that purported to be a burrito.
I’m both horrified and slightly impressed at the same time.
Regardless of my inability to give thanks for my greatest blessings, I have many other reasons to give thanks this year that I thought I should mention: 1. My daughter continues to be a blessing in our lives. She is perpetually happy, consistently well behaved, loves school and is learning in leaps and bounds. She can sing her ABCs and has memorized sizable chunks of several books.
With a year filled with thousands of little moments like these, how could anyone ever complain?
More reasons for thanks:
2. My wife has proven to be a remarkable mother with near-flawless instincts when it comes to parenting. She is tough, loving, unwavering and willing to do what is best for Clara in all things.
She’s a pretty great wife, too.
3. In these tough economic times, I am thankful to still find myself with the means of providing for my family.
I am doing some of the best teaching of my life this year and my job is secure. While I have an eye on teaching high school or college sometime in the not-so-distant future, I still adore my days in the classroom with my fifth graders and am blessed to be doing something that I love and a job that I have dreamed about doing since childhood.
In addition, I am working with some of the finest teachers who I have ever known, and together, I feel like we are making enormous differences in the lives of children.
My DJ company remains successful after fifteen years in business, and this year we streamlined our operations in such a way that I am doing considerably less work for more money.
My writing career continues to prosper. Though my latest book is not yet finished, my brilliant agent has already sold the foreign rights to the book in Spain, Italy, Brazil and the UK, with two other nations soon to follow. In addition, the script for the pilot episode of a television show based upon Something Missing has been written and will soon be pitched to studios. And the film options for Unexpectedly, Milo remain plentiful, with smart and determined people working hard to make the project happen.
I have much to be thankful for in terms of my professional life.
4. I am thankful for my friends, a collection of honest, direct, intelligent, successful people who miraculously accept me for who I am and stand by me in times of trouble.
5. I am thankful for the Patriots, a young team that is poised for a Super Bowl run. Regardless of their success this year, they are positioned to be an outstanding franchise for years to come.
6. I am thankful for canned, jellied cranberry sauce. We should eat much more of this throughout the year.
7. I am thankful for Bill Bryson, William Shakespeare, Stephen King, Nicholson Baker, JK Rowling, Jasper Fforde, Mark Twain, Billy Collins, David Sedaris and Kurt Vonnegut and a dozen others who I have shamefully forgotten to mention. These are writers who continue to entertain and inspire me every day.
8. I am thankful for Bluetooth headphones and the limitless supply of podcasts and music that pour forth from them on a daily basis.
9. I am thankful for puddles in the driveway, so that I can watch my daughter splash in them.
10. I am thankful for pickup basketball and the occasional collisions in flag football.
I’d be thankful for tackle football if I could find someone to play with me.
11. I am thankful for Sesame Street, a show that I watched as a child and one that I now watch with my child. Thirty years later, it has not disappointed.
12. I am thankful for Kaleigh, a dog who can admittedly annoy us to no end but is the only other living being willing to climb out of bed at 4:00 AM with me and head downstairs to work. Almost every sentence that I compose is written with Kaleigh underfoot.
13. And yes, I’m thankful for Owen, our twenty pound bulimic house cat who wakes us in the middle of the night and bites us from time to time but accepts all of Clara’s poking and prodding and full-body hugs with patience and love.
There’s more to be thankful for, of course, but Kaleigh needs to be walked, Owen needs to be fed, Clara needs a hug, and I need to finish a book.
I’m not going to work today (it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving), which means I have a lot of work to do.
I am off to the Patriots game today, an almost all-day affair in which we will spend the afternoon watching the first game on a television mounted in the back of my friend’s car followed by three hours screaming and cheering inside Gillette Stadium. Food, poker and the tossing of the pigskin will fill much of the afternoon as well.
My friend, Shep, can get quite emotional in the midst of a Patriots game, particularly if a referee, a pass interference call on either side of the ball or a gain of two yards on a running play is involved. While I tend to be more cerebral in my analysis of the game, Shep is pure emotion while watching a game, capable of firing off a string of curses that would embarrass Rex Ryan. When there are kids around, I sometimes need to remind him of his language.
But I think I’ve found a much better way to help Shep manage his emotions:
Meat.
Researchers at McGill University in Canada have found that merely looking at a photograph of cooked meat has a calming effect on men.
The results were published earlier this week.
Researchers explain that this effect probably has an evolutionary basis. While the acquisition of meat in our earlier hunter/gatherer days might have been a stressful endeavor, the moment of consumption likely had the opposite effect on men.
"It wouldn't be advantageous to be aggressive anymore, because you would've already used your aggression to acquire the meat, and furthermore, you'd be surrounded by people who share ... your DNA," lead researcher Frank Kachanoff told the Montreal Gazette. "One of the basic principles in evolution is to want to preserve not only your DNA but also that of your next of kin."
I could offer the same rationale to Shep, explaining that there is no advantage in being aggressive in regards to the referees or the play calling when when your seats are adjacent to the press box and 60,000 screaming fans are sitting between you and the field. But perhaps I’ll simply take a photograph of the sirloin that will be cooking prior to the game and flash the image to him from my iPhone from time to time.
Especially if there are little kids around.
Over the last week or so, I have been yearning for a McRib, which my local McDonald's is now offering for a limited time only. Frightening words for a McRib lover, and I love the McRib, regardless of what McRib-bashers may say.
Two days ago, in between parent-teacher conferences, I finally ate my first McRib in more than ten years.
It wasn’t as good as I remembered it to be.
IT WAS BETTER.
And since posting about my desire for a McRib and my attempts to convert my wife to the joys of this delicacy, I have convinced three other people to partake in its pleasure.
The verdict:
One person “Loved it!” and two said that is wasn’t bad.
Converts! Its always gratifying to know that my belief system has improved the lives of others.
A similar, less barbecue-enhanced situation occurred earlier this week.
Based upon my previous brushes with death, which include two instances in which my heart and respiration stopped and another time when an unloaded shotgun was placed by my head while the trigger was pulled, I conduct my life by adhering to the following philosophy:
Since you could die at any moment, do not complete any assigned task until the last minute. Avoid spending your last hour on this planet finishing some mundane and soul-crushing chore that will do you no good once you are in the ground.
For the most part, I strictly adhere to this philosophy, consistently procrastinating on tasks that lack any appeal to me.
I also work well under pressure, and perhaps better under pressure, so this admittedly makes my philosophy easier to apply.
Not everyone thinks this policy is sane. A least a couple of my friends are constantly questioning this belief, challenging my compliance, and a few are downright annoyed by it at times.
I don’t quite understand why. All I do is live life as if every day could be my last. It’s a nice platitude that is repeated quite often, and it seems to make sense unless you actually attempt to live by it. Then you realize that in order to do so, you must also live on the precipice of deadlines, the constant awareness of mounting responsibilities and time slipping away and the danger that important tasks may go unfinished.
But this is the way I choose to live, despite the outrage that some feel about it.
But not all.
Over the weekend, one of colleagues and good friends was supposed to complete an important assignment that could impact the future of her teaching career. As she walked into my classroom this morning, I asked how her weekend went.
“Fine,” she said.
I asked if she had spent most of the time working on her assignment, which is what I would have expected her to have done.
“Nope,” she said. “I started it at 8:00 last night and finished around midnight ”
“You saved it for the last minute?”
“Yup,” she answered, beaming with pride. “And it all thanks to you. I thought about how you don’t believe in doing things until the last minute in case you die. Since there was a chance that I might die this weekend, I decided to enjoy my two days off and waited until last night to get started. And you know what? It worked out just fine.”
Just think: My first disciple.
I wonder if all great religious figures started out this way.
With a handful of McRibs and one believer.
I find veganism fascinating, particularly when it is practiced for ethical reasons. The morality behind avoiding meat raises so many interesting questions. For example: Do ethical vegans force their pets into veganism as well?
Is a vegan’s dog not allowed to eat dog food containing rabbit, chicken or turkey?
Are the cats of vegans discouraged from hunting mice?
Is a boa constrictor owned by a vegan not fed rats?
Why might there be a distinction between the ethics of food when it comes to humans and pets? And is it ethical to alter an animal’s natural diet based upon your personal beliefs?
Also, is it ethical to impose your vegan beliefs on their children?
Should a person’s eating habits be defined by their parent’s sense of morality and their disregard for the presence of incisors in their child’s mouth?
I guess that if you believe that imposing religious beliefs on children is ethical, vegan beliefs could be viewed in a similar light. Yet there seems something less diabolical in a vegan stuffing green beans down their child’s throat than a parent stuffing the homophobic belief of a 2,000 year old desert-dwelling God into a child’s impressionable mind.
Elysha and I went to Mo’s Midtown this morning for breakfast. The food was good, and Elysha actually likes their pancakes a lot, but these are several subtle oddities about the restaurant that had us wondering if we would return any time soon.
Let’s start with the name of the place: Mo’s Midtown.
This restaurant isn’t even close to being midtown. In fact, it’s actually one street over from the border between Hartford and West Hartford. It couldn’t be farther than midtown.
So why this name?
Things like this really bother me.
The word restaurant was also misspelled on the menu. Instead, it reads restorant.
This bothers me as well.
And that’s a lot of issues centering just on the name of the place.
But there’s more.
Elysha and I went to breakfast without cash and were pleasantly surprised to discover that they accept debit cards “for our convenience.” While I think all restaurants (and restorants) should accept credit cards, it’s not uncommon for a small diner like Mo’s to deal only in cash.
However, after handing the waitress my bill ($15.24) and my debit card and entering my PIN number, she handed me back a receipt and $3.76 in change.
“Oh no,” I said. “This isn’t mine. I gave you a debit card.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I withdrew $20 from your account for the bill and here is the change.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“It’s like taking money out of an ATM machine. I withdrew $20 to pay your bill. I can only withdraw money in increments of $20.”
“So we’re essentially standing in a giant ATM machine?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, finding my sarcastic comment amusing.
“Is there a charge for using this giant ATM machine?” I asked.
“Yes. One dollar,” she said.
I eat out quite often, but I have never found myself paying in such a manner. And frankly, I thought it was a lousy way for the Mo’s to avoid credit and debit charges.
For my convenience? I don’t think so.
These issues alone would have been enough to keep me away.
But there’s more.
Add to the list the need to explain to the waitress of a diner known for its pancakes what silver dollar pancakes are and then still not getting them for our daughter when the food arrived. “Sorry,” the waitress explained. “He didn’t understand, so he just made one big pancake.”
And then there was the lack of fountain soda, serving Diet Pepsi in cans instead, as well as the waitress’s inconceivable decision to bring me and Elysha our breakfast a full five minutes before bringing my twenty-month old daughter hers.
Actually, this happens more often than you might imagine. Is it that hard to understand the mind of a toddler?
As a result of this odd series of eccentricities, we may never return to Mo’s Midtown, as much as I enjoyed the French toast and Elysha loved her pancakes.
Sometimes, if you can’t choose a geographically accurate name for your restaurant/ATM machine, that’s enough to keep me away.
Am I being picky?
Results published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology indicate that more than 30% of children with food allergies report being bullied or teased — often repeatedly — because of their eating restrictions. As the father of a peanut-allergic daughter, you might think this is cause for concern.
Think again.
Her last name is Dicks. Her peanut allergy is the last thing that kids will be teasing her about.
She should be happy that we named her Clara. I have two uncles named Harold who both go by the name Harry Dicks, and my father is Leslie Dicks and uses the name Les Dicks.
Clara Dicks is a cake walk by comparison.