Food for Thought, Desire, and to Cure My Horrible Bad Moods.

Everyone likes food, that’s simple enough (with the exception of one of the regulars at work who actually dislikes eating, something I’ll go into later).  It tastes good, satisfies hunger, and one can usually get what they’re craving.  Going out to eat is enjoyable with friends and family, even dates.  For the most part, food is awesome and can cure bad moods and exhaustion.

I’m a little different.  Like seriously, really different.

According to the boyfriend, my happiness is dependent on food.  Not just physically dependent, but psychologically and emotionally as well.  He has not said it, but I think in the beginnings of our relationship, he probably thought something was significantly wrong with me.  I would spiral out of control and it would seem like no hope was left and with the smallest bite of anything…I would be fine.  At times, he says it seems as if I get high off of food.

Now, granted, people go through mood swings when they’re hungry, and I got lucky and both of my parents are horrible people to be around when they’re starving and ready to kill because their stomachs are empty.  So I guess with that, their mood swings with hunger didn’t cancel each other out.  Instead, I’m a raving monster when I need food, sugar, something to drink, and basically an all out meal.  What’s worse in this concept is that I usually don’t have anything in my pantry or fridge because even grocery shopping is kind of a foreign idea for me.  Don’t get me wrong I know how to grocery shop, but I just don’t like to.  It’s just like me being a fashion major and on the edge with shopping, except clothes shopping I can find enjoyable (but at times I get disgusted at what’s being sold lately).

I know I’m strange in that fact.  So with that, the boyfriend usually has to force me to go to the grocery store with him and usually, I’m stuck and my mind goes spiraling out of control again with the following going on in my head as I try to decide on buying a can of tuna or not:

• I don’t want to spend the money, but I don’t know if the cheaper stuff is just as good as the brand name stuff (curse the day I became interested in fashion because brand name stuff is always better than generic crap).

• I don’t know what I want to eat.  What if I buy something for the week and I end up not wanting it?  What if I don’t buy enough of it?  What if my roommates eat it without asking (actually, that just happened last night…my soup was missing and I found out via Facebook status of one of the roommates that they ate it)?  What if I end up just eating shift meals at work?  I like going out to eat, screw cooking.

• This is inconvenient and out of my way-my only mode of transportation is by bicycle, which I actually learned how to ride when I was 19 from my boyfriend (and that was an act to show that he was interested me, so go back to the first entry).  So what if it starts to rain?  What if I can’t carry all my food purchases?  But this might be mended once the boyfriend gets back into town because he finally has a car now!  Even with this switch in transport, it still won’t make me want to go the store.

• I’m just hungry and I don’t know what I want and I get anxious because the boyfriend has finished his grocery shopping.  So the first thing I see I want and what does it happen to be?  A bag of Fritos.

So I can decide on one measley bag of chips, and the boyfriend is done and sees that’s all I have in my basket and asks, “That’s it?” and from there I break down and he has to walk through the aisles with me going through every single thing there is on the shelves.

Now my boyfriend has been with me long enough to know the signs and symptoms of my hunger pains and he knows how to act:

Fig. 2- Lack of McDonald's and my friend will die.

1. If I pout, he should feed me.
2. If I get angry, he should feed me.
3. If I’m upset, he should feed me.
4.  If I’m sad, he should feed me.
5. If I’m tired, he should feed me.
6.  If I’m happy, that means I’ve been fed.

I don’t know how to really respond when he jokes about my food swings.  Typically I laugh, but when I am really upset and he tells me to just calm down and eat something, then I get offended and I want to snap back, “Well why don’t you calm down and eat something?!” because I am very clever and witty but when I am upset, it never shows it’s true self.

I don’t know how I came to be this way.  Maybe it was when I was a baby, my Grandpa was visiting and every single time I began to cry, he’d stuff the bottle in my mouth.  That’s probably where it all began and has nothing to do with my extreme iron deficiency and small, miniscule case of hypoglycemia.   It’s all an extreme chemical imbalance and instead of causing me to become depressed, I get crazy hungry.

All in all, at least I am not quite so dramatic as one good friend of mine who believes he’ll die if he does not eat or even over eats as he typically does (See Fig. 2).

What if I was a cat, only eating whenever my owner fed me?  Well switch that around, what we think are pets are actually owners since we feed them, clean their crap, and buy everything for them while they just sleep and eat and feel cuddly when the want to.

In any case, I’m hungry now.

Sexuality and Flirting for Dummies (mainly me).

Fig. 1- Let's get physical!

I don't know how to flirt.  I'm sure it's a pretty basic concept, but I'm the awkward type and usually do not know how to respond to the suggestion that the other person could be starting a flirtatious conversation with me.  I would attempt to go along, yet what happens if they really aren't flirting with me and I'm stuck in an awkward situation?

When in doubt, dance out.

Unfortunately, that's not something I can ever accomplish when I am at work and can't escape the customers at my table and my tip is weighing on their impression of me.  Though I hear many times, from friends and even my boyfriend, encouraging me to heighten my sexuality so I could make even more money than I normally do, but it's just not something I can grab ahold of.  If someone even makes a "kind-of" gesture, I give an awkward shifty-eye-glance and just continue with "Would you like fries as your side item?".

I get teased for the level of awkwardness I can bring to a situation, and I guess it's not something I can pride myself in.  But even through text conversations with friends, they get the idea of my cluelessness (see Fig. 1).

But on another side, how does one respond when a stranger walks up to you when you get off the Subway in New York City and say, "I want to suck yo' ass"?  I couldn't quite pretend that I was deaf, only because it was obvious with the expression on my face that I heard them, and from there I couldn't pretend that I didn't speak their language.  So I was stuck, as he walked a few steps with me and finally left.  When at work, I've gotten the question of "Does this restaurant have a hot waitress policy or something?".  Now that one, I'm sure I could have played along with somehow, yet they could have been checking out the other girls and not me, or he was just drunk from the one beer he had, or he was possibly kidding.

I replied with a simple and Courtney-esque "Uh, I don't know..." and the shifty-awkward-face was included.

A few times at work, I've had several male customers shake my hand and they tell me their names.  That was just strange.  But I don't have awesome flirting-sexual-slut-waitress-magic in my apron either because the pockets are filled with my order book, straws, pens and a change purse along with whatever cash I've received.  I have to admit, I have an obvious mental block and that is that I do not enjoy the attention of guys with the added fact that most of them (at least the ones around my age) are typically young, dumb, and full of come.

Basically, I guess what I am pointing out about myself that flirting is above my head.  And the boyfriend can account for that, so it's a miracle we're in a relationship now.