Posts Tagged ‘tv’

Pine Nuts — Bad Snack Choice 1-31-12

I used to love pine nuts.  I consider them a mystery food which made eating them something exotic.  Though I assume they’re a natural food, I really don’t know what they are or where they come from; the bottom of a pine cone?  I recently discovered a plastic sack of them in the pantry.  I tossed about 30 handfuls of them into my mouth over about five minutes as I watched a Lakers basketball game on TV.

The next morning, I awoke with a powerful metallic taste in my mouth.  Nothing I ate could get rid of it. Over the day, that metallic taste became the focus of my existence.  Everything I ate tasted horrible and the same. I was no longer experiencing the Epicurean adventure I expect every meal and snack to be.

A day later, with the metallic taste still in my mouth, my only thought was that something was terribly wrong with me.  I didn’t tell my wife, but she should have known something was up because I was more snappy with her than I had been in a long time.  In my mind, I ran over the list of imagined horrible things this could be, and quietly scared the crap out of myself.

Never the less, I didn’t want to spend the money on a doctor visit even though I was convinced that this was serious.  Finally, I confided to my wife my potentially urgent medical condition.

Knowing me as she has for the last 10 years, my wife didn’t offer any support for this new mystery ailment but she did give me the stink eye.  She has held my hand through other hypochondriac medical issues before.  She instructed me, in a tone only a wife can give, “type into Google metallic taste in my mouth.” and “food tastes horrible.”   Just thinking about the money I’d save by not going to the doctor lifted my spirits.

The answer was there alright.  Surprisingly, I’m not the only one who thought eating a bag of pine nuts was a good idea.  According to posts on the medical answer sites, eating that many pine nuts can ruin your taste buds for weeks.

I don’t know what relieved me more, finding out that there were scores of fellow idiots who eat as many pine nuts as me, or that nothing was wrong with me.  Either way, my outlook immediately improved, even though the metallic taste stayed on for another week.  Armed with the knowledge that I had blown out my own taste buds I ignored the awful taste in my mouth, turned on the TV to a Clippers basketball game, laid down on my couch and ate two tasteless king sized Milky Way Bars.

Food Hangover 8-2-11

Every night around midnight, I get a hankering to eat.  Not just a snack, a full meal.  It’s my right as an American to eat five full meals a day.  When my cravings come upon me, I am obedient and follow them to the refrigerator.  I open the door to survey the my food choices.  If there isn’t anything interesting in the refrigerator, I go to the pantry.  If there isn’t anything interesting in the pantry I go back to the refrigerator.   Eventually I find something, turn on the TV, and eat.

Knowing I have to get up at 5AM makes this late night eating feel so decadent and good.   I’m balancing between the old day and the new one and there is something liberating about quietly eating like a free man in the middle of the night.

This would all be well and good except for the food hang over I’ll get when I wake up in the morning.  I didn’t know why I felt so crappy in the morning, but I consulted other fat and sloppies and they informed me that this is called a food hangover.  I immediately grasped the concept.  I asked them if there was something I could do to still eat and avoid the food hangover.  None of them seemed to know, it wasn’t something they had ever thought about before.

Is this another passage into middle age?  Having to choose eating huge meals at midnight or getting up refreshed in the morning.  I used to be able to do both.

Male pattern baldness 5-12-11

One more irrefutable piece of evidence that I am growing older is my receding hairline.  When looking straight at a mirror, I can fool myself that I still have hair.  I still have good hair days but it seems that I have more and more bad hair days. I like to think I still have close to a full head of hair and it is only slightly receding, but it is getting harder to fool myself.

I always want to know the unvarnished truth about myself, but yet, I really don’t.  Well today, I got irrefutable proof of exactly where my hair line is.  I was at a house painting estimate and I saw the top of my head.  Lucky me.

I was at a mansion in Bel Air and I entered the master bathroom as part of the overall house estimate.  It had mirrors on the vaulted part of the ceiling and the flat part of his ceiling is also mirrored. This configuration of mirrors gave me an absolute perfect sighting of the top of my head from the looking down position.  Basically, I got to see the top of my head the way it really is.

It’s not bad enough that I actually see my male pattern baldness, my reality is even more depressing; the top of my head is balding unevenly.  Of all my fantasies that I’m not really balding so quickly, I never thought that I would be balding unevenly.  The right side is balding back further than my left side and the front is really thin too.  Geeze!  I’m not one of those guys who looks good partially bald.   How much longer it will be until I have to shave my head?    Another middle aged milestone I had hoped to avoid has irrefutably arrived.