Blog of Magic Cheese

Right now I seem to be running 2/5 that an aggressively smelly man will board the bus and stand right next to me. The Yves Rocher gardenia solid perfume that I picked up in Paris has been my savior. The French certainly came up with a nice way to combat odor. I spend some of my trips home looking very devout, with my head lowered and my nose resting on my clasped hands. Catholic Europe would be proud.

I am still completely in favor of mass transit. I approve of it completely. It'd just be nice if the masses washed more often. And didn't pee in the mass transit. Or at least chose one area to pee in and stuck to it. I mean, I can't avoid recessed doorways and buses.

Overheard on the bus to work this morning from kids trying to get other people on the road to smile and wave back.

"We have three down, and the entire nation to go."

Wave on, 5th graders. (=

Also, no smelly man on the bus this morning. i r teh win!

I really wish that people would stop telling me that my years of school will be the best years of my life and that I should appreciate them while I'm still here.

I feel a lot of anger when I am told that, because my years of college have been marked by a lot of frustration, rage, violent depression, failure, and occasional malnutrition.

Furthermore, I have a full time job now in addition to going to school, and in the past I've run out of money plenty of times and lived on rice for weeks and watched my muscles get cannibalized by my body while I lose strength and energy, and when I'm told that I'll appreciate my school years when I get out into the "real world" and have to work for a living, the fact that that admonishment makes no sense makes me even angrier.

I'm not angry at the people that tell me this. I know that it comes from intelligent people that really enjoyed their school years. I think that it comes from a love of learning, and that these folks miss the freedom to expand their minds and learn freely without so many of the daily troubles and responsibilities that they have now.

I just really wish they'd accept that this may not apply to people that do not fit in college.

Imagine, if you will, that college is a bag that comes with a lovely meal for some people, and a pile of poo for others.

    "Oh! You have the paper bag! You had better appreciate that, because it'll be the best meal of your life."
    "... my bag is full of crap."
    "Oh, you say that now, but believe me, as the years pass you will realize that the food in there is the best food that one can possibly ever get."
    "No, really, my bag is full of feces. Look."
    "I remember my chicken parmagiana in my paper bag... it was so succulent, and tender. The tomatoes were hot and flavored with just the right herbs... savour every bite of that paper bag meal, young lady, because you'll miss it when it's gone."
    "My bag is full of poo. Please do not tell me to eat poo."
    "It's not poo, it's the best meal of your life. Believe me, once you're done and you're older and wiser, you'll realize that."
    "I can smell the poo. Believe me, I'm the one holding the bag. It's full of poo. Smelly, inedible poo that will make me sick if I eat it. Stop telling me to eat it, because if you don't want me to get sick, that doesn't make sense."
    "Best meal of your life. You'll understand when you get older."

I understand and admire people with lovely meals in their paper bags. Their lovely meals do not make it impossible for my bag to be full of shit.

I have always believed that life gets better as one ages, because one becomes wiser and changes. I had a lovely time in high school, learning and being surrounded by great people and friends, but when the time came for it to end and move on, I was ready for it. And as unhappy as I have been sometimes since then, I have never wanted to go back, because that would mean reversing the learning and the changes that I have picked up since then.

Now that getting enough food and shelter to survive is no longer so much of a challenge, we get to choose to live and what to live for. If my life is all downhill from here, I would choose not to continue living. I realize that this is a very arrogant thing to say and that I'm still very young and not at all wise, but it is honestly my belief at this point in my life. I do not want to go backwards. Sometimes the only thing that kept me motivated in the last few years was the belief that I, and by extension my life, would get better. Please stop telling me that my belief is silly and that I'll learn when I get older, people that loved university.

This is the first week of my life that I have wished I were not as I am. I am very tired.

The second Whole Foods market in San Francisco that I kept driving way out of my way to instead of going to the one 4 blocks from work because they sold my favorite beverage, Reed's apple cider ginger brew, is no longer carrying Reed's apple cider ginger brew. Sad! )=

The bus stopped a half block earlier and dropped me off in a slightly different spot yesterday where I discovered a pastrami shack that sold pastries the size of my face. Happy! (=

I took a picture of the face pastry to share with you all. :D

I went back with Michelle and Lauren a few days later to try the pastrami but they didn't have any face pastries. They had a similar pastry, but it was the size of a regular pastry. It was as if my face pastry had a smaller, more normal little brother.

Bem unwittingly showed me that there is a Panda Express near work so that I can feed my secret orange crack achicken my secret orange chick acrackshen secret chicken orange crack js;daofgiahwr;giuahwrluhwr myself.

He was trying to take me to Rubio's on the lure of their fish tacos, but their egregious oversalting of their blackened mahi mahi drove me away and back into the MSG-free fuzzy arms of my sweet, faithful panda.

Joy to go indeed, panda menu.

When one's been born in this country, raised in this country, speaks the language, wears the clothes, and is fairly at home with the customs, one tends to forget that Office Food was chosen by and geared toward folks of a more European Ancestry and that it can OH GOD KILL YOU.

My ethnicity seems to be manifesting itself in a violent way as far as food tolerance is concerned. I thought that dairy could be a sometimes food. I was so wrong. This is sad, because last night at the pool table warming party, I had a delightful slice of pizza, then some spicy calamari and a lovely slice of cheesecake. This wasn't even crap dairy. This was Whole Foods vanilla bean cheesecake with fresh fruit, this was dairy that was from grass-fed cows and probably not even filled with cow mucus and pus and stuffed with hormones. Washing it down with sake probably didn't help, but I refuse to blame the sake.

What the hell happened? I used to have a truly American stomach of steel that could take any horrible unnatural things I threw down my gullet. Remember those mirror-image fake fats that they used to make "fat free" chips that gave everybody anal leakage so they pulled them off the market? I loved those! I could eat a large bag in a sitting and it never gave me so much as a fart.

This attack is all the more traumatizing because it comes from things that are so familiar. People eat pizza all the time! I always hear about cheesecake. It's like walking into your bedroom and being attacked by a your everyday pillow suddenly gone rabid. How the hell are you supposed to see that coming?

No matter.

I will spare you the details, save that going to bed with a combination of overwhelming nausea, sharp hunger because one no longer has one's dinner and a headache because one no longer has one's last dose of medicine is no fun at all. All I want to eat for the forseeable future is rice, vegetables, and fish. It even makes my stomach feel a little less lurchy to say it as a mantra. Rice, vegetables, fish. Rice, vegetables, fish. Rice, vegetables, fish.

Sushi never feels so good as the day after you've been poisoned by dairy.

It came out at work last week that a co-worker feels that the descendants of the Vikings have generally let themselves go from the days they were carving people into blood eagles and dedicating sacrifices to Odin to now, where they produce minimalist furniture and lingonberry preserves.