There’s nothing quite like pizza for breakfast. Straight out of the box in the fridge and into my mouth. And don’t tell me it’s not the right way to eat a pizza.
But… I’m a hypocrite. Although I can’t stand having someone tell me what is the right or wrong way to enjoy my food, I often tell my best friend, John, just that. I mean seriously, just because it’s not the right way for me (or most of the other people on the planet) to eat peanut butter… on a sandwich with a slice of processed cheese… should I be telling him it’s not right?
Damnit, yes! It’s wrong, plain and simple. It’s like putting ketchup in your chicken noodle soup, or eating baked beans smothered with maple syrup. (I’ll get some flack from the Quebecois on that one, particularly this time of year.)
We all have our oddities when it comes to food. What are yours?
Yesterday I had to take my son, Alex, to the doctor to get a note for school. It wasn’t for a high-risk field trip; it wasn’t because of some strange sort of disease the school needed to be assured he was free from – nothing like that.
I needed a note to say that he was allowed to eat. The first conversation on the phone with the doctor’s secretary went something like this:
Me: Hi. I need an appointment to get a doctor’s note.
Secretary: Okay, what is it for?
Me: Well, you see, the nurse at his school won’t let him eat until he has an all-clear from the doctor.
Secretary: Soooo, when was the last time he went to school?
Me: Today.
Secretary: How long has it been since the school didn’t allow him to eat.
Me: It’s been about a week.
Secretary: ….
Me: So can I get an appointment soon? Or…
Secretary: I don’t understand.
Me: Neither do I.
All of this, of course, came about because he aspirated (inhaled and had lodged in his right lung) a piece of food on Christmas Eve. For the most part he is tube fed, but the school wants to make sure it’s safe for him to eat before they’ll let him do so.
So today I went to the doctor. That conversation went as follows:
Doctor: Sooo… what do you want me to write?
Me: Just say he can eat. OH, and drink. I don’t want to have to bother you again in case they decide that’s against the rules as well.
Doctor: And he’s been fine when he eats at home, right?
Me: As fine as he’s ever been.
Doctor: Oookay.
(She starts typing.)
Me: I guess this isn’t something you write a note for every day, eh?
Doctor: Err, no.
Today, Alex went to school with the note in his backpack. After not being allowed to eat with the other kids for a week, he’s a happy camper.
1. It’s never too late to join in, since the “Jot it” part of JusJoJan means that anything you jot down, anywhere (it doesn’t have to be a post) counts as a “Jot.” If it makes it to WordPress that day, great! If it waits a week to get from the sticky note to your screen, no problem!
2. If you write a JusJoJan post on your blog, you can ping it back to the above link to make sure everyone participating knows where to find it.
3. Write anything!
4. Have fun!
I’ve been seriously thinking about how much my own tastes influence my fiction. The other day, my characters were in a restaurant and I purposely made them order something I, personally, wouldn’t eat.
It occurred to me that maybe I’m thinking about this too much – micromanaging my story. But the fact is, they’ve gotta eat. And I find it boring and not really credible that they’d like ALL the same things I do. If for no other reason than every character in every story I ever write always eats the same group of foods, I feel like I have to change it up once in a while.
Is this something you’ve put any thought to? If you’re a vegetarian, do you ever have your characters eating a nice juicy steak?
How else do your characters not reflect your tastes? (Human characters, that is.)
I’m in a unique, somewhat unenviable position of having a child who enjoys trick-or-treating but doesn’t eat – all of his meals are administered through a tube. So while he’s at school, I must either hide the candy or eat it.
Though I do my best to resist temptation while indulging in my second love (after my kids) of writing, as they say, resistance is futile. After all, what better way to pass the time whilst NaNoing than eat sweets?
Thank goodness for running around the mall doing Christmas shopping in December, eh?
I was sitting in a Tim Horton’s enjoying a sandwich and a coffee the first time it happened. My then seven year old son sat across the table from me, smiling and flirting with the ladies as per usual. One of his new admirers (he has many) asked him from an adjacent table if he wanted one of her crackers. She must have felt sorry for him – there I was eating and he had nothing, not a drink nor food. Since he’s Deaf, I answered for him.
“He doesn’t eat,” I said with a smile.
It was all I could do not to laugh at her incredulous glare. I’m sure she wanted to ask me if I was nuts. She went back to her soup and completely ignored him for the rest of the time we were there, despite the fact that he was smiling and waving at her, trying to get her attention back.
My son Alex, up to that point had never eaten or drank a thing in his life. You see the tube in his nose in the picture?
He now has one implanted permanently in his belly. Why didn’t I just give the woman in the Tim Hortons that little bit of information? Let me tell you a story.
When he was about six months old I took him for a couple of hours out of the hospital that he called home for the first eight months of his life. I decided to take him to the mall since I wouldn’t have made it home and back before he had to feed again. I couldn’t leave the hospital, however, without equipment. Attached to his tiny body was a heart monitor. I went into the lady’s washroom to change him and a woman came up behind me to see him. She saw the monitor and asked what it was. When I told her I was graced with an expression of absolute terror and, no word of a lie, she ran from the washroom. THAT is precisely why I don’t tell people about his feeding tube.
Fast forward to when he was eight. I took him, my boyfriend at the time and a friend out of town in the car. I was driving and the friend, who knew sign language was sitting in the back seat with Alex. They were chatting and also sharing an orange – that is to say she was eating the orange and he was sucking on the rinds. For some reason he found them more appealing. (No, I’m not apologizing for that. HA!)
Anyway, we decided to stop at a KFC on the highway. As usual, we all got our food except for Alex. Two things you need to know at this point: Alex loves to suck on chicken bones, just so he can pretend he’s actually eating something and he is a clean freak, which means he HAS to be the one to throw everything in the garbage. So there the three of us sat, happily watching Alex flirt with a restaurant absolutely packed with people, suck on bare chicken bones and clean up after us. It was the general consensus that we should have brought the orange peels in for our little slave, for good measure.
The moral of this story is, if you see a kid in a restaurant not eating but seemingly having a good time, it’s probably best not to try to interfere.
In an email to my mate earlier today I wrote the following:
So I’m procrastinating right now. I should be delivering papers but instead I’m reading. What, you ask? Blogs. Anything that’s short enough that I don’t feel as though I’m actually getting into something. Because that would be serious procrastinating rather than the ‘I can stop doing this at any given moment because it’s short’ procrastinating. Hey, that sounds like a blog entry, doesn’t it? I may just copy and paste later.
And now that I have another million and one other things to do, what am I doing instead? You get the idea.
While I was walking around the block delivering my papers (yes, I did finally do them) I thought more about blogging and the effect it has had on me since I started a little over a month ago. It’s addictive! It keeps me up at night and better yet, gives me something to think about when I’m delivering papers! Hey, it’s sapping my energy! And for energy, I need… food! But do I? Not as much as you might think. I’m just a teensy bit overweight.
So then why is blogging better than food? (I had to get around to it sooner or later.) Before I discovered this wonderful way to avoid the things I should be doing, I would graze. Procrastination meant weight gain.
Therefore I triumph in the logical conclusion that blogging is indeed better than food.
At the very least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
lindaghill.com 