Warning: FOOD PHOBIA

AFRAID OF FOOD

I know, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me. As a healthy, active, yet curvaceous young woman of 28, I have never been known to miss a meal. But lately, I’ve been more and more bothered by a looming question: Will my food kill me?

In a bizarre habit I think I have in common only with my dog, I have a history of eating the same exact thing, in the same exact amount, every day:

I start with a ½ cup of Quaker oatmeal sprinkled with a tablespoon of brown sugar, which I heat up in a Tupperware in the microwave at work. I follow that with a light Yoplait flavored yogurt at 10:30 a.m. as a snack. Then for lunch, a can of tuna in water with Light Miracle Whip, French’s mustard and dill relish with six multi-grain Saltines. I complement this nastiness with a piece of seasonal fruit and wash it all down with some Crystal Light.

At around 3:30 p.m., I eat a 100-calorie bag of microwave popcorn, and hold on for dear life until dinner rolls around. And the whole day, I’m sipping from my battered Nalgene bottle, drinking about 60 ounces of water during the day.

Sounds pretty healthy, right? I thought so too, until all these bastards in the media had to tell me the facts about what I was eating.  

In the past two years, I have learned that nearly every single thing in that daily diet, if consumed enough, will kill me.

The first hubbub was about tuna. OK, aside from the fact that what comes out of those 50-cent cans looks and smells a lot like catfood, I always figured I hated it, so it has to be good for you. Plus, it’s a low-fat, cheap source of fantastic lean protein.

Then I learn that the water those fishies are swimming in is polluted, so they’ve been steadily accumulating mercury in their bodies, which they store and pass along to us. 

Before this, the only thing I knew about Mercury was that it is perhaps the most awesome substance on earth. I remember breaking a thermometer once in the sink and I pushed around the stuff for about a half hour. I was enthralled.

But, apparently, it’s particularly bad for women and kids, and your body stockpiles it instead of flushing it, which is bad.

Well, I thought, it gives me another excuse to add to my anti-baby rhetoric:

“Kids? Umm, no, sorry – I have about a half pound of mercury stored in my body from 10 years of eating canned tuna every day for lunch – not exactly a baby-friendly zone anymore.”

So I never liked tuna anyway. But yogurt to me, is the perfect food. A good balance of carbs, protein, calcium, with a dollop of fruit mixed in. Perfect. Until I got the news that the milk used to make my delicious Yoplait is full of hormones they pump the cows with to make them produce more milk. Then of course there’s the fact that “light” yogurts are sweetened with aspartame, which is about as good for you as arsenic.

So by not wanting to consume as much sugar as what’s in a half-can of regular soda, I get cancer instead. Nice. By the way, this one kills two birds with one stone, since the Crystal Light that I consume by the pitcher is also sweetened with that artificial shit. But it is yummy.

Moving on, with the worst blow to my day: Microwave popcorn has a cocktail of carcinogens in every delicious bag. Apparently the materials these dipshits put on the bags to prevent the cancer-causing artificial butter from soaking through the bag rubs off onto the popcorn and can also cause cancer.

So, as I’m reading this one, (because I didn’t believe the fat jerk at my office who snidely told me my favorite 100-calorie snack would kill me as he munched on his second helping of Doritos that day) I find out that they don’t know how much rubs off on the popcorn, but it probably take a lot to make you sick, so don’t worry about it. Little do they know I eat it every day, and when I’m done with the popcorn, I take my finger and rub off all that artificial butter crap so I can be as disgusting as possible while getting the full cancer-causing effects.

The least of my worries is probably the piece of fruit. Yes, I know that it’s bathed in pesticide perfection, waxed down so it doesn’t wither and then shipped sometimes half the world away to reach me, but if a damn piece of fruit is going to be the thing that does me in, so be it.

The last thing I learned led to my new belief that everything we classify as a modern convenience is the devil. Including the plastic containers in which we store our food and drink. When they get warm or old, they like to release harmful chemicals into the food and drink, just to teach us a lesson about innovation.

So all that water I’ve drank out of my decade-old bottle? Cancer. And it’s supposed to be particularly bad if you leave it in a hot car. Which was ALWAYS for the three-and-a-half years I lived in Florida. In fact, I would even drink the hot water that had been roasting in the bottle for hours in the car. Nothing like hot, leeched chemicals to quench your thirst in 98-degree heat.

Ever hear that ignorance is bliss? I couldn’t agree more when it comes to this subject. I mean really, how are you supposed to eat anything? Everything is processed or mass-produced in a way that is most likely unhealthy. I don’t exactly have a banana tree out back with chickens and turkeys wandering around, waiting to be slaughtered. So what are we to do?

This last weekend, the health-food-that’s-bad-for-you topic came up as I chatted with my aunt, my cousin and my 92-year-old grandmother (who believes farmers and food manufacturers would never do anything that might compromise your health), and I finally reached a conclusion.

My grandmother still runs her entire farm in Nebraska by herself at 92. She has lived a long, healthy, disease-free life eating the organic vegetables she grows in her garden, raising hormone-free, antibiotic-free beef and chicken, and working every day with her hands outside in fresh air on her farm.

I, on the other hand, sit on my butt at a desk all day with a sore back, staring at a screen that will no doubt damage my eyesight over time, breathing ventilated air like an animal in captivity.

I have tried the past few months to deviate from my normal menu, but it’s not easy. I admit: my semi-obsessive food routine brings me comfort during my day. It alleviates stress – it reduces any further decisions I have to make. And it just makes me feel better.

So I decided: If the 100-calorie bag of microwave popcorn that brings me 15 minutes of pure bliss every afternoon also brings me the risk of cancer somewhere down the line — I’ll take my chances. And I will not longer be afraid to enjoy every minute of it.

Keep the complaints coming

When I was the city reporter at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Mo., I used to feel my heart sag every time I came to my desk and found my message light blinking.

I should have been excited: The message might be from someone I had been trying to reach all day for an interview, and that blinking light might represent the key to finally wrapping up my story.

But instead, it usually triggered this reaction: “What now?”

I was conditioned by many experiences when that blinking light was a message from an upset reader, calling to complain because:

-       They didn’t like my story.

-       They felt I didn’t address something important.

-       They felt one side was underrepresented.

-       They were upset with something the city was doing in a story I wrote.

-       They felt something was inaccurate.

-       Or they just felt I should be spending my time doing something else.

 

My first reaction was always defensiveness. I would wonder why people would actually go to the lengths of calling me to leave nasty messages about these things: Didn’t they have better things to do?

Once I took a step back, I would further examine what they were saying: Did they have a point? Was I balanced? Did I leave out something important? Was something inaccurate? Should I go back to my college job of delivering pizzas?

After answering the latter question in the negative, I would work on a response. Sometimes they were confused and didn’t know what they were talking about. Sometimes they were right, and I had dropped the ball. And sometimes it was a matter of opinion.

It didn’t matter though, I never saw the true and wonderful value of complaints. I thought they were negative thoughts people should keep to themselves  — until now.

Our paper in Laramie, Wyo., is horrendous. Horrible. Like, a we-print-press-releases-verbatim type of horrible. A one-source-only type of rag. To put it mildly, I’m disgusted at what this paper calls journalism, and I’m ashamed that people here accept this paper’s low standards as OK.

If this were the paper of record in Columbia, that message light would always be blinking. People there simply would not stand for it.

Here, it ‘s representative of a larger attitude of the small town: It’s the way it’s always been. What are you going to do? Case closed.

To me, this kind of attitude inertia is what has kept Laramie without much progress other than at the university in the past decade.

And what I’ve noticed is you don’t hear complaints, like you would from people who have higher expectations. Instead, you get excuses of why things are the way they are and why they aren’t changing anytime soon.

One of my friends said it’s partially acceptance, and partially that he thinks people deep down like the fact that they’re different from other places – even if it’s not necessarily in a favorable way.

But for me, it’s hard coming from someplace where complaints are valued so much that the local paper has an answering machine for nothing but complaints, which it then prints in the paper as a column of comments. Frequent topics in this column include threads about dogs peeing on other people’s yards, bicyclists not obeying rules of the road and democrats spending too much money in Congress.

As much as I sometimes hated hearing them, it is the sort of discourse that lets people share their expectations. In my newfound appreciation for complaints, I think that’s really what a solid complaint is: a statement of disappointment about the way things are, and hopefully, an intent to change things by pointing it out.

I know there are some who, like the former me, believe that complaints are worthless whining that serve no purpose.

Of course excessive complaints can generate negativity and unhappiness — without a doubt. But the absence of complaints also represents acceptance and compliance.

Some things we must accept – especially those we cannot change. And all the complaining in the world won’t change that.

But the other kind – the kind that represents an idea of betterment, a possibility for improvement, are needed.

So keep the complaints coming.

And I’ve got one to start, or maybe it’s really more of a request: Can we please have a Target in Laramie? 

We blog because we can't not blog

Ever have that itch? Call it compulsion, obsession … whatever.

Whether it’s checking your e-mail every two seconds or making a habit out of rounding up the latest gossip on your favorite celeb, we all have something we feel we just simply must do.

I started thinking about the subject after I started blogging again and I read a good friend’s writings (in her blog) on the subject. With all the junk out there, it’s true – do we need more? Does anyone care what anyone else has to say when it comes to the minutia of our lives?

I think not.

And furthermore, I think – if we did care, would we even have the time to keep up?

Definitely not.

But here I am, with the itch that must be scratched. I must write. And I must share what I write, despite the fact that no one (not even my mother, Heidi) will read it. It is entirely possible this is my way of making up for not having newspaper deadlines anymore as a writer, with my feelings of loss coming out in gobs of far-too-wordy exposés on nothing. On topics possibly not even Seinfeld could make a show out of. And if that was the show about nothing, this is the blog about nothing.

I think, furthermore, that this is the common denominator of blogs. Although some (like this one), start off with a theme, a purpose, the actual driveling of entries are so purposeless that it’s impossible for them to truly be about something.

Blogs about sports end up feeding the monster (content-needy readers) with things like the Navy football team visiting the White House, just as does like, every year since it had a team.

Blogs about celebrities devolve into who likes what kind of frappacino, and what ridiculously expensive shoes she wears to get it at Starbucks.

Or blogs expounding people’s training habits for their sports end up turning into either mindless recording of their miles or anecdotes about their shoes, watches and heart rates with personal triumphs and epiphanies sprinkled throughout their massively long pages of daily entries. Their discipline, it seems, follows through not only in their commitment to jog daily, but to keep everyone informed about those jogs by their commitment to blog daily, as well.

So why do we do it? Because we have to. Just as the title of this no-follower, no-friends blog suggests, Because It’s There.

I realize that mine comes from a writing obsession, as my friend admitted in her blog as well. I think she’s like me in that I find pleasure in noticing the oddities of life, and they are best told in writing, not speaking.

And I don’t think it’s out of self-indulgent self-interest, because then we would care if people were hanging on our last word. I couldn’t care less.

And, as itches go, I made myself feel better earlier today by finding ones far worse to scratch.

For example, on the bathroom wall inside Ernest Hemingway’s house in Cuba, you’ll find his weight and blood pressure etched in pencil for every day he lived in the house. I’m not sure I have ever known what my blood pressure is, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what my weight is on a daily basis.

Two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling obsessively took large doses of vitamin C, which he was sure would ward off not only the common cold, but cancer as well. As far as I know, he didn’t die of either, though – so maybe he’s right.

And that brings me to the master of obsession, Mr. Howard Hughes, who spent his free time creating orders for his assistants to use no fewer than six tissues when touching a door knob to open a door, and no fewer than 12 when opening a cabinet. And that’s just the tip of the crazy iceberg.

So if we must write, and we must post these obsession-laden writings to blogs, then it simply must be done.

And does a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it make a sound? But I do know that a blog without a single reader still makes its impact: Because the satisfaction is in the writing.

 

Choose your obsessions

By Siddharth Anand

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions

Trojan horses

They bind you

Without you realizing

They hinder your natural design

And make you completely blind

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions;

They are the weeds,

You; yourself choose to grow.

Some seeds are rotten..

Still you keep them, them, you don’t throw.

 

And after the tsunami

You wonder why you were destroyed

By; your own army…

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions;

They determine; the extent of your regression…

Although we must All have some,

Eggs turn into chickens

Choose your obsessions

For they are impressions

Which can determine your future

& Tomorrow’s positions

The journey; and the final decision.

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions

What do you get the man who has everything?

Every year, exactly three times per year, I face the most dreaded of tasks: buying my father a gift. 

Whether it's for his birthday, which I complete forgot to even call last year (good daughter, huh?), Christmas, which at least brings with it some seasonal gift options, or the worst one, Father's Day, it's always something I begin as an epic adventure and end by realizing disappointment for myself and my poor father. 

I generally don't have any idea what to get a guy who is not a good consumer to begin with (my dad has been known to wear dress socks until so many toes are sticking out a bum wouldn't even wear them) and has enough money to get basically anything he wants. Or, at least he can buy anything that I could ge

t him, which isn't saying much.

The problem is, I've picked the low-hanging fruit. I've already given ties with cartoon characters on them, books, and the easy standby bailout gift: Anything with his favorite sports teams' logos on it, from embroidered checkbook covers to flasks with a set matching shot glasses (He doesn't even really drink, by the way). Alas, most of these items were either thankfully disposed of years ago or are collecting dusts as relics from a different age down in his home office, which has shelves upon shelves packed with sports memorabilia shit.

I've also done all the sentimental gifts, which are always good for getting better mileage with less cash. I've given framed photos of daddy and his little girl, picture collages, poems, and even spent a month carefully crafting a scrapbook for him chronicling me and my brother's lives in pictures from birth. It was the first and last I'll ever do. Spending hours hunched over a book covered in glue trying to get little handprints to stick to a page is not my idea of fun. A year ago for Christmas, it was the picture above in a frame. A picture he dislikes, by the way.

So this year, I planned a get-together with us kids, and we're taking him to a Rockies game. I thought I had it in the bag. I bought tickets for everyone, worked with my brother to arrange a post-game bbq at his house - I was on top of it. Until my brother asked, "So, any ideas on what to get dad?"

Uhhh ... "This is what I'm getting dad?"Apparently, I overestimated that my presence was present enough. 

So, I'm back to square one ... he's going to Paris, a beret as a joke? A book on French? (So many people have had so much success learning languages this way) A ... money belt? (I want to up the dork level a little for his vacation - why not just get a fanny pack?)

Another wine opener for his burgeoning wine-drinking hobby? (Because those are rare and hard to find) A gift certificate for a restaurant? (A nice, impersonal gift for the man who raised you and answered your crying phone calls twice a week during your freshman year in college).

Movies? A CD? (Actually, that was last year's present, as I recall. I thought he was getting more than just a CD by me introducing him to Jack Johnson. Your welcome, dad.)

OK, I'm stumped. So plan B is to go to the mall and see what I find that reeks of "dadness" and I determine he absolutely cannot live without.

Because football season is almost beginning — and who can't use another Broncos car flag with matching license plate frame?

Get out!

Get out! That's the point of this blog - that, and my hope to finally fulfill my New Year's resolution to write on a regimented and regular basis. As you can see, with this being Feb. 8, I haven't been real strict with myself this year. 

It's also my attempt to ensure I will get out of my house and explore the world around me no matter how cold it is, how unpleasant it might be or how lazy I feel and to share what I hope will be increasingly cool pictures. It's not a grandiose goal, and I'm sure it will go down as the least read blog on the Internet today. That's OK.

So we begin ... 

Misty May (my trusty golden retriever and sidekick) and I went out to explore our what's beyond the pink survey flags that mark the edge of our backyard a little more thoroughly on Superbowl Sunday. It was one of those thawing days where you'll still need a coat but, given enough sunshine, ice in some places is being coaxed into melting into the soil, creating a nice clay mud mix here in Mid-Missouri. 

Behind our house is a large slope that leads up to a road that's currently seeing some of its first development. But that steep slope is the reason my husband and I bought this house - the topography essentially limits it from having neighbors behind us other than the deer, fox, squirrels, raccoons and other wild things that live there now.

So, with a leash clipped to Misty for safety and to slow her down, we began our venture into the great wild (seeing as trespassing is more of an idea than an actual offense, in my mind). Our house was built in a valley of hills and is actually located in a modified floodplain of the Hinkson Creek. Go down the small slope of what is no doubt fill dirt toward the small intermittent creek that runs behind our property and you'll see instantly that this land is nature's way of dealing with excess water. 

Tough, spindly trees jut out of ground that, in places, can be muddy clay soil that can swallow your shoes whole to sandy spots that you simply sink into. I try to avoid both.

There is a great spot I'm fond of where water pools along limestone cliffs that form that slope I spoke of earlier. Misty, bounding on the sandy shore, was a bit perplexed to see the water covered with ice — this is a place she'd usually bound right into and take a swim. I was surprised myself to see something moving in the water: a small school of fish glinting as they swam along under the ice. This pool is no more than 3 feet deep (see pic above) and is secluded from any other streams or outlets for this water. If it dries up, they're done for. But on this sunny morning, each 2-inch fish is swimming along, trying to escape our presence.

I snapped a few pictures, trying to capture the fish (unsuccessfully) and the beautiful pattern a leaf frozen into the water made (mission accomplished). 

Not seeing Misty around me, I then turned around to find her staring and sniffing at something. Knowing my dog's propensity for rolling in dead things, I quickly scampered up the bank to find her staring at the carcass of a deer — a doe.

Eyeing it warily, it explained the smell I had noticed when we walked up to the pool. It was fairly decayed at that point, which means it must have been dead for awhile given the sub-zero temperatures we had had for weeks. I took a picture, not sure why, and moved on.

Misty and I worked our way up now, tracing the path the water took to end up in the pool. Following the limestone formations, we started climbing up a mini-ravine that we quickly found was filled with feet of fluffy dried leaves. Scampering up the hill, I heard the characteristic snapping of branches that comes with a herd of deer running away. I looked up in time to see a half dozen white tails flash as they moved over the ridge. Then my eyes traced the hill before me for a white tail of my own - luckily, Misty had not seen the deer. I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to stow the images of her chasing them onto the road where a car driving by would no doubt hit her. 

With that image subsiding, I nonetheless grabbed her leash, just to be sure. We started traversing the top of the hill when I saw something that made me stop in my tracks: a small village of what looked like makeshift bunkers for some no doubt homeless residents. 

It's not uncommon in our area to have homeless people turn from shelters to their own methods of subsistence and survival. There's a large camp of them on a hill by a very busy thoroughfare into town that my friends and I have affectionately dubbed "the tarp people" because of the white and blue tarps that mark the shelter they've made for themselves. At night, you can see their little lights coming from below those tarps. Often I have thoughts of admiration for the toughness it takes to survive in such an existence, although I realize that's probably a glorification of their lifestyle. 

Eyeing the one structure, which was quite well made with a stacking of sticks into a uniform triangle and the other, which was mostly reinforced with our city's extremely sturdy and durable blue bags it distributes for recycling, I edged away from them immediately, not wanting to disturb any possible tenants. I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture, but I didn't think it a wise move at that point, especially with my camera's obnoxiously loud shutter.

Instead, we worked our way part way down the hill, over an old barbed wire fence that had long rotted into a sagging pile of rusty wires. I found what looked like nature's version of a diamond necklace in the quartz deposits of a rock, and ahead was impressed with a limestone cliff covered in soft, green moss. 

Misty scampered down the hill, sliding down on leaves and then running full speed down the hill. I took things more slowly, actually thankful for the mud stuck to my shoes that gave me some grip on the piles of leaves moving under me. 

We got down to the valley floor, back into the marshy land that will be mushy and filled with water when spring comes. After stopping Misty from getting too personal with a dead turkey, we traveled to the edge of a small cliff overlooking the Hinkson Creek, which was a mere thread of what can be a raging river in high water. We hopped over downed logs that were covered in some sort of cool fungi growing out of them. On the edge of the creek, what we were standing on was a bank of earth that had been eroded away by the creek in high water, which means the 10 feet or so from us to the water is how much the creek rises when we get a lot of rainfall. The large peak flows are due to the storm runoff that comes from the massive amounts of pavement upstream, a problem that has caused the waterway to be added to the federal list of impaired waterways. It is nice to see the creek in its milder forms — it's a muddy, scary sight when it's at peak flow, but the kayakers love it.

With the sun becoming more obscured by clouds and the wind kicking up, the temperature began to convince me it was time to go inside and give Misty a bath.

On our way back, I was fiddling with my camera and Misty was zigzagging in and out of a dry creek bed when I saw what I thought was the largest squirrel ever. Taking a closer look at the large red tail that bobbed up and down as it ran away from me, I realized it was a red fox. Throwing on my large lens, I took off, running as fast as I could to keep up with the fox and maybe get to a point where I could steady myself enough to snap a few photos. All it took was the fox leaping over a few logs and I was outdone, clearly no match for a nimble creature of the woods. Looking around, I did find some other, more static things of beauty, however.
Cool green and red moss on a log, raccoon prints that I always think look eerily like children's hands and a feather of a wild turkey placed so nicely, you'd think it was posing. 

Alas, Misty and I's adventure was over, but the clay we dragged home with us on our feet is still lingering on our shoes and the patio.