First Milestone MET! Story: Poorly timed Snack

Hey there. It's been a little bit too long since an update, my apologies. I meant to be a little bit more consistent. Anyways, I don't have an official number in yet, but I have enough people who have told me that they'll be donating to be able to confidently say that I have raised around a thousand dollars.
Awesome, right?
I'll update with the official number as soon as I can.
While I'm a little bit stingy and would usually wait until I get the numbers in, I'm thinking that you guys have been great enough to help me out, so I'll cut you a break. :)
Remember that even if you aren't physically donating, getting the word out there and praying are a pretty big help as well. Thanks for that.
(Not that I would mind the physical donations.)
Read the story, and if it makes you laugh, why not consider donating to help the cause?
This is one of my typical short stories: a quick first person narrative of food out to get me. (Hey, it's fun to write them. And true. Mostly.)
So without further ado.

Poorly Timed Snack.

It was delicious.

I forget what exactly it was, but it was delicious. Some kind of cornbread/cake thingy. It was really good, trust me.

So naturally I took some with me when I had to walk my sister to a neighbor's house. I grabbed a handful, since it was rather crumbly, tossed on a coat, and walked up the street, coolly ignoring the drivers who probably were not glancing out their windows and judging me for eating a sit down food standing up. (I still imagined that they were looking out of their windows and judging me, which is why I coolly ignored them.)

No seriously, eating any kind of comfort food while doing anything other than sitting on your rear and saying "Thankee kindly" is murdering the quintessential meaning of the food. Sausage gravy sheds tears just by being brought into New York city.

It was really crumbly. I think I got half on my face, half in my mouth, and half on my coat.
(The half on my coat was the same half as the one in my mouth.)
Also I got half on my sister. I'm not sure which half that was.
We eventually reached the neighbors house. It wasn't actually that far away, but I kept getting distracted. I have a tendency to get lost whenever I make a left turn, or a right turn, or go straight, or stand still.
More on that some other time.
We rang the doorbell like gentlefolk. We used the door knocker like civilized human beings We barbarically knocked on the door with cornbread smeared hands, and it was promptly answered by Mr. Neighbor. Sister disappeared inside to chill with friends(I hear that small children have now evolved past "playdate.") and left me to deal with Mr. Neighbor, who was very friendly, like a normal civilized human being.

I am usually also very friendly.
Well not very friendly. I am usually a tolerable human being, we'll put it that way. But I had a large amount of food on my face, and was therefore socially hampered.
I also have this bad habit people nowadays euphemistically call "being busy all the time."
That basically means that to the rest of the neighborhood, I'm Boo Radley even if my siblings have their noses in everybody's back yard. (Which they sometimes do.) Most of my ventures either involve me staying inside the house for long periods of time, or being away for long periods of time, so when I come out everybody thinks that a new kid moved in.
Then they remember that the denizens have an older brother and try to ask me the usual questions.
"Who How are you?"
"What Grade are you in?"
"Where are you going to college next year?"
These are totally legitimate questions probably, and I wouldn't be averse to answering them usually.

But today, as I have mentioned, I had cornbread on my face, and a stuffed stomach that told me to go lie down and take a nap.
So while the friendly neighbor asked about life, I furiously attempted to clear food from my face without making it look like I was playing peek-a-boo. This involved surreptitious nodding in such a way that would hopefully dislodge crumbs from the edge of my nose, and slightly larger smiles than I usually give for the same reason.

It kind of worked, I mean he didn't give me any funny looks, or any funny looks that I noticed, but I was a little bit busy to notice funny looks in the first place, seeing as I was attempting to save my dignity and reputation. (Not that I really have much of either. I swapped them out for an extra finger once. I don't know what I did with that finger.)

I think I managed to somehow answer the questions and not look like a total idiot. I may have though. They don't teach you in school how to deal with that kind of situation. I bet if somebody wrote a book on what to do when you've gotten to a fancy dinner and realize you have spinach in your teeth and can't go somewhere to remove it, that guy would make a whole lot of money. Make it a little bit more universally applicable and he'd conquer the world.
Not that people would follow the advice, they'd just read the book and share it with their friends and realize that they'd just eaten horseradish and their friends were now looking at them like hypocrites. Oh well.

*    *    *

Awesome? Talk to me about it. And get ready for the next milestone story, something a little bit different:

The Banana Crime Lords.

Vegetarians, I don't hate you.

For some reason half of the stories I write here turn into making jokes at the expense of the poor people who actually try to eat healthily. It's a complete accident, I promise.

It's not like I get up in the morning with a food hangover from the fried chicken sandwiches the day before and say: "Today, I'm going to make myself feel better by picking on people who make better choices than me."
Or if I do, it's the subconscious.

It gets to be troubling, because it isn't just stories, but also how I react to situations. I have in the past made fun of nice people who eat raw broccoli because it is healthy and probably damaged their reputations. There is unfortunately not much of a control unit between Mr. Brain and Mr. Boca.
(Boca means mouth in Spanish. I have a bad habit of populating my sentences with spanish frases, pero no puedes anything about it.)
Or Spanglish phrases at any rate. (Why does Spanglish sound like some disgusting pseudo-Italian dish?)

I've attempted to add some kind of dam in the thought-to-word flow, but my capitalistic brain decided to charge tolls.
Oh well. At least I have EZ-Pass.

That's a stupid analogy because they don't charge tolls on dams.
But don't give them any ideas.

It's especially a problem since I've frequented mostly homeschooler circles over the course of my young life, and (homeschooler fun fact for those of you who don't know much about us) about every third homeschooler you meet has some kind of weird hippie-food thing.
I just did it again. We'll rephrase that. Some kind of responsible I-will-take-care-of-my-body-thing. So they get natural peanut butter and don't eat dairy and all that stuff. Coolio. When people talk about how in depth their health regimes are, I just kind of stare and say stuff like:
"Well... I brush my teeth regularly..."
"I make sure to read the sides of the cereal boxes so I know what I'm eating..."
and the best:
"Yea, I exercised once. It was nice." (Awkward silence after this one.)

I think it's ironic, because culturally speaking, the stereotype is that girls and women are the ones who care about their health, and guys are just like,
"BACON!"

And it's unfortunately too true, but for some reason we of the male race seem to think that lifting weights for five minutes burns off all of the garbage we just imbibed for the previous six hours.
I assume it works kind of like burning random trash. The worst stuff just stays there amidst the ashes of everything else.
If that's true, my body is made up by about seventy percent of metaphorical melted plastic and clocks.

What, you don't set your clocks on fire?
You should.

Sometimes I legitimately try to follow the example of healthy people.

Sam reads a blog on burpees.
"I can do that." Sam thinks.
Sam does three burpees, cries, brain goes into a fuzz and he wakes up six hours later eating icecream out of a mixing bowl.

I do have an on-off relationship with exercise, but she hasn't been returning my calls.

Death of the flies

Don't get me wrong, I don't go around murdering bunnies and stealing cats to drown them.
But I do have this personal thing with flies. Maybe they just buzz in my ears way too much, or it could be that the flies in NJ are actually mutants that phase through solid walls and get into my house even when we've locked the doors, windows, and dryer vents, as well as putting duct tape over anything that looks remotely like a crack, even when it's in an inner wall.
Well, masking tape is more truthful, since it doesn't leave that crappy residue, but I'm sure that you get the idea.

So of course, they're out to get me too. Which is why I found myself, on a hot day, struggling to open one of those granola bars submerged in chocolate, only to see a large fly, sitting contentedly two feet in front of me, with two flyswatters behind me, sitting on their shelf, just waiting to spill the blood of small pests.

I couldn't wait. But, I also did not want to put down my delicious granola bar, since it would glue itself to the counter with chocolate and probably contract all manner of salmonella and viruses. (I don't trust our counters, even on the rare occasions that they actually look clean. Usually that just means that they've grown a layer of shiny oils. What from, I don't know or care to know either. )

So I compromised of course. With one hand on my mighty fly gutter, and the other hand on my slowly melting chocolate bar, I attempted to simultaneously chew and kill the fly.

Let me get the record straight- I can walk, talk, and chew gum. I can listen to music, write this blog post, and listen to my family scheming to sell old school books on ebay.

But for some reason, the mundane task of digestion coupled with the art of war was beyond my completely non-existent motor skills. For this reason, I found that though I got several smacks on him, he still fluttered weakly around, and my hand was soon submerged in chocolate. (My other hand.)

I eventually wrestled him to the ground, where he lay, still alive, and apparently in agonizing pain. This pulled at my heart strings, since even though I have nothing against a clean swipe, the fly who attempts to struggle along, despite missing several legs and an eye, is certainly a distressing sight.

Normally I would grab a tissue, wrap him up, and toss him into the garbage can, all of which would take no more hands then I had open at the moment, but for some reason, I attempted to scoop him up on the end of my flyswatter, in a valiant attempt to save the trees. (Because using one less Kleenax= saving a whole dang oak forest.)

Each time, he painfully spasmed, even as he fell from the swatter, back to the ground, buzzing in extreme pain.

I was starting to think I should just go get the tissue, when I finally got him to stay, and unceremoniously dumped him into the garbage can. I then realized that since I had neglected to fully finish him off, I would in all likelihood be sealing his fate as one of several more hours of extreme pain, surrounded by cast off banana peels and rotten garlic we had accidentally obtained from Lord-knows-where.

But the act was done, and I was, to an extent, victorious.


And my granola bar had deteriorated to a state of extreme in-edibility. You can decide for yourself whether or not I ate the rest.