Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

food

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I’m typically a two meals a day kind of guy, at best. It’s really more like one meal and a package of pop tarts. I haven’t gone an entire week of eating what amounts to breakfast, lunch, and dinner since before the beginning of highschool. Even when i was in Boston where i was sure to eat breakfast and dinner (typically the hardest meals to get me to sit still for) i still managed to skip out on lunch each day. Sometimes i come upon unusual days of low energy and high appetite, but they are few and far between. Until last week.

Within the last week i have slowly but surely been sneaking ever-so-close to three meals a day; not the most solid three meals in the world, or the most healthy, but three distinct servings at three separate times of day. In theory i’m all for this; i have no problem spending money on food if i’m actually going to consume and enjoy it. However, there is one slight problem in this situation…

I’m pudgy. There, i said it. At first it seemed like a subtle kind of thing, and i thought that maybe that i’ve had a few beers in the past month, but all of a sudden i have this tummy and it sticks out past my waistline and magically i’m twice as hungry as i ever am. I get just as much exercise (more than last year) as usual, and it’s not as if i’m getting any taller, and my meals vary from cereal to chicken to giant salads (no pizza, no hoagies), so unless this is my body’s way of preparing for some freakin’ seasonal hibernation, i’m not a happy camper.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6764951/

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Last night’s start stop rain versus humidity gave way to gray an drizzle today, much to my delight. So much heat all week was just piling more wear and grief onto me and onto the city with every day, and today wiped everything back down to the simple scent of cement and a breeze. With the city so cool and forgiving Hillary entertained my ambitions to get out and wander. We were on second street looking for a restaurant to preface seeing Ghost World, and somehow we wound up in Pagoda.

Pagoda occupies a place in so many simultaneous sentences in my head that i can hardly discern what order i’m supposed to write them in, so please excuse the tangle.

Pagoda is nestled in a restaurant-and-Ritz-theatre district that is Old City, so there are a lot of cobbly streets and things with “independence” in their name. In front of it there is some kind of tiny square about Ben Franklin (though it is not the Ben Franklin House, which is nearby), and in it is a tiny metal model of a historic house on a tiny podium. I saw the house all of the time, because Pagoda has just recently become Pagoda… it’s claustrophic bamboo-strewn space has experienced several incarnations in my lifetime. The restaurant to occupy the building for the longest time was Waldo’s… the same upstairs balcony with a low-flying view out the two-story front face of the building but with a marbly bar extending the entire length of the restaurant from front to back with the swingy doors to the kitchen at the end and a pinball machine tucked into the back corner.

I would sit tiny in those high chairs at the bar with a can of pineapple juice over ice and a bowl of chunky round bar pretzels watching football, because i was nearly always there on a Sunday. The surroundings and everything have melted away now so much that i believe that i really didn’t know anything about the place other than the doors and the balcony and the chair and the top of the bar and the teevee. And my father behind the bar; but, he’s not something i know all that well.

Any story i could tell you about Waldo’s would just be an iteration of “and then the Eagles scored” or “and then we played pinball,” but looking back i think it was the only place i’ve ever been where i have been unequivocally happy; time has wiped away all of the pouty bored pieces of it so they are just smudged pictures around me at the bar trying to teach my dad how to play football on gameboy (“What do you mean there’s not penalties?”) or making my typical assertions (“If the Eagles lose the the Cowboys on my birthday i’m never watching a game here again, okay dad?”) or something. My last memory was from down at the end of the bar at one of those Superbowls that Denver lost, but by then we were me and my dad and his wife and i only remember it was strange being there at night on a Sunday because visitation always was over by 7pm on a Sunday so my life could get orderly again for school the next day.

Splitting time between parents was a funny thing, because weekends with my father never got very much accomplished except for stealing me away from what i was used to, and we never went anywhere because i always was back at home by sundown on a Sunday with a kiss goodbye from his rough stubble. But, i did it nonetheless, from when he lived in a tiny apartment with fish and one of the other bartenders to the wife’s adorable splitlevel house in Andora to their home in BlueBell that is anything but that to me. And, now i don’t even really call him for father’s day, because i don’t have a strong enough association with the world, but i think of him whenever i hear doo-wop on the radio because of his silly high voice that i cannot really match, or when i am distractedly ignoring the Eagles lose. Or when i see where Waldo’s used to be.

So, Hillary entertained my buried sense-associations and we ate at Pagoda and i choked back some tears. It was raining, anyhow.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5038252/

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I’m actually feeling somewhat violated by this whole McDonald’s debacle. Basically, their fries are vegetarian all over the world except in America, where they’ve been prepared with beef extract somewhere along the line. In India the cow is sacred, and so McDonalds respects that. In Britain vegetarians are a minority that actually holds some sway, and McDonald’s conceded. Yet, here in America where we’re just a bunch of ineffectual cow-munching idiots, McDonald’s has given no indication that they’ll change their preparation of fries. I was a vegetarian through all of the latter half of highschool and my first year at college, and i know for a fact that in that time i’ve had plenty of McDonald’s fries and i honestly feel like my decision to be a healthier person was violated by a multinational corporation with no respect for the people it serves. In light of this, maybe fast food restaurants need to indicate what’s really vegetarian on their menus, because sometimes vegetarians get hungry for some drive-thru too. As a result of all of this, i am hereby boycotting all McDonald’s products until the fries are vegetarian once again. This will be especially painful for me because i have a serious addiction to McDonald’s hashbrowns (which probably aren’t vegetarian either). Have a nice day. (stole from Re)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3816126/

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Obviously i’m too busy or too apathetic or something, cause life is starting to get a little dull on this end. Life gets dull when i have no anchor and i just drift from hour to hour without any sense of where i’ve been or where i’m going. As distracting as it might be, having a crush or a demo or tour tickets to chase after gives me a sense of purpose, of forward motion. And right now i’m just sitting here eating lots of chocolate with zero motivation at all; i don’t want to be here but i don’t want to go home and i don’t want to be playing guitar and i don’t really want to go to my voice lesson because eating several pounds of chocolate in a 24 hours span does not tend to aid one in producing beautiful noise. Listless is the word. So, yeah, i’m just taking it one minute at a time as i crash down out of my sugar rush, hoping the clock will learn to tick a little faster at some point today (other than while i’m asleep).

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/04/3364918/

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I’m eating turkey that reminds me of being a vegetarian.

Let me qualify that statement. Junior year of high school i was still on my normal poultry-heavy diet, and there were two events that led up to my turning into vegetarian. One was an awful encounter with an open-faced roast beef sandwich which i’d rather not revisit. The other was peppered turkey from the lunch meat department at Acme. Junior year I brought that turkey to school every day for lunch, with dijon mustard and some munster cheese. Every day. By May, my stomach was in full revolt against the spicy red edges of the turkey, and the mustard that kept it glued to my kaiser rolls. Every night i’d go to bed after having eaten other snacks and a normal dinner, and my stomach would still remind me of the turkey i’d consumed for lunch. I would lie awake at night because of it.

When i told my mother that i wouldn’t eat any more meat, at first she thought i was just being stubborn, and then she thought i only meant red meat. But, when she bought that next batch of turkey it sat in the refrigerator until it was spoilt. She was angry that i had wasted it, but she got the point.

Obviously she still buys the turkey from time to time, as it was in stock just now when i raided the fridge to make myself a sandwich. I didn’t really realize what it was when i took it out and pasted it down to my kaiser roll with dijon mustard, but one bite sent me back to sitting on the floor of the basement hallway at JR Masterman, opening up my bookbag and pulling out a turkey sandwich.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2571509/