Ode to a Pop Tart (and good food in general) … Part 1

Before I get to the pop tart, allow me to briefly recap how I came to the whole natural food thing, now called the slow food movement, decades before it became popular and not in any hippy/trend setting way. I came to it in the most normal and boring way possible, I was a girl trying to lose weight.

I had discovered in college that most of the forbidden foods of childhood (Cap’n Crunch, for one, or Frosted Flakes), were in fact quite disgusting. But still there were many packaged/processed sweets that I was addicted to still. Kellog’s pop tarts (cherry flavored, with frosting), ‘Nilla wafers, Oreos, Chips Ahoy, and Twizzlers as just a few examples. Perish the thought these days, but then, perfectly normal and acceptable.

I was a bartender in the early nineties with a bad junk food habit. I would eat Sprees and Skittles by the handful as a way to get through the shift. Accompanied by my daily ephedrine habit* (necessary to get through three jobs and keep my partying creds alive), I didn’t really gain much weight. But when I decided to drop the ephedrine**, I decided I had to kick the junk food. I explored two options:

1. Keep the sweet tooth, but go along with the current Snackwells craze. If you don’t remember Snackwells, they were these extremely low calorie snacks that tasted just about the same as regular packaged cookies and crackers.
2. Allow myself my sweet tooth, but go very high-end on quality and long on labor to get it. For example, if I wanted chocolate, I had to make myself a chocolate cake from scratch--no mixes--to satisfy it.

The Snackwell route was definitely the easiest and cheapest way to go. But fortunately for me right about that time I read an article investigating this new craze and how it actually caused people to gain weight, not lose it or even maintain. The theory (now nearly proven I believe) was that despite Snackwell’s low calorie count, it encouraged ingestion of more volume of food. Now the body apparently gets used to a certain volume before it ever gets around to dealing with the calorie count. So what happened was that when you got used to eating 10 Snackwell cookies or crackers to satisfy a craving, your body got used to 10 cookies or crackers period, regardless of the calorie count. So if you didn’t have Snackwell’s handy, you’d eat 10 cookies or crackers, no matter what the calorie count was because that’s what your brain/body had gotten used to. This made a lot of sense to me, even though it was only a hypothesis at the time I read the article. So the Snackwell route was out as a means to reduce junk food calories. Fact was, I had no resistance to my cravings and would have given into them whether the low calorie option was available or not.

The second option appealed to me in that I had a desire to improve my culinary capabilities. And I stuck to it. Because I still got to eat sweets and I got to enjoy them more. I became a better baker, ate sweets less frequently, and enjoyed them more than I ever had since my mother stopped baking from scratch. Then I stumbled across an unexpected side effect when, after a year or so of doing this, I indulged an old craving—Oreos.

They … tasted … like … CRAP! I used to love these things! What happened? Oreos split apart, the white stuff licked off first, the cookie dipped in milk or crumbled over ice cream. This used to be a wondrous thing! Now, all I could taste was the salt. All the salt used to help preserve these pre-packaged processed pieces of crap.

This was 1994 by the way. Long before Whole Foods starting taking your Whole Paycheck. Long before the urban revolt against hormones, antibiotics, and cannibalistic cows and chickens. Long before I even knew why the Oreos (and subsequently the ‘Nilla wafers, the Chips Ahoy, the Skittles, and the Kellog pop-tarts) tasted bad to me. This was before Bill Maher and his tirade against high fructose corn syrup. I had stumbled upon the great truth of food. Processed bad, natural good.

To be continued …

*In case you don’t know what ephedrine is, it’s a bronchial dilator that effectively acts as legal speed and an appetite suppressant. Due to the aforementioned three jobs and a prioritization of the beer budget over decent food expenditures, I needed the appetite and sleep suppressant to get through. I never indulged to the extent that caused all the hoopla later with idiot kids ingesting 10-20 at a time for the rush.

**The decision to drop ephedrine had little to do with its known health detriments and more with the fact that on ephedrine you talk incessantly drove even me nuts with myself. My apologies to all I annoyed before coming to that realization myself.

Do it all? Good god! I can't believe I ever thought I could.

So as mentioned in an earlier post, I quit my job of 11 years and am taking a 6 month sabbatical from working. I don’t want to trash my previous company, it was very very good to me in many ways and there are many reasons I could have stayed and continued to do well. I was just tired, exhausted really, and unable to concentrate on any of the fun stuff in life.

And in the three weeks that I’ve been off so far, I already am amazed at how much stuff there is to get done and how the hours fly by. How in the hell did I do it all? I mean just think about all the stuff a person is supposed to get accomplished to have a “full” life. Even forgetting the stupid magazine-type articles that state impossible criteria for having a fulfilled life, the basics (disclaimer: this is my list of the basics that are necessary for a fulfilled life) are overwhelming:
• Be in a relationship and actually have fun in it
• Have some hobby that is mentally stimulating (reading/writing count)
• Have some hobby/program that provides physical exercise
• Have a relatively neat/clean house and yard
• Be conscious of the food you purchase and consume and what it does to the environment as well as your body
• Be politically aware enough to make intelligent choices in both your purchase choices and your votes
• Be culturally aware enough to have entertaining and intelligent conversations with a wide-variety of people.
• Be handy enough to take care of basic household tasks
• Have well-cared for and happy cats
• Keep abreast of existing and upcoming technologies to take advantage of them
• Simply relax and get enough sleep and mental downtime

That’s pretty basic stuff, right? But it’s an exhausting list to accomplish when you’re working 10-11 hour days, being constantly conscious of what’s going on at work, and always think about the next step. And what about personal projects? Where does that fit in? Anything from simply cleaning out a basement to learning a new and challenging skill. Where does that fit in? It can be done, I am determined, but not without stopping now and again and ensuring you are covering the non-work stuff. But I definitely am getting to know why most powerful people have either a stay at home spouse, or the equivalent hired assistant. When I go back to the workforce, given my tendency to bury myself in my work, the fiancé and I are going to look into hiring an assistant!

That’s what the six months off is about. Figuring out what I like to do, what I want to do, both work and non-work, and what’s worth spending time on.

Starting week three of my “sabbatical.” I left my job of 11 years on June, 13, 2008. I’ll go into details of why later. In the process of deciding whether to leave it, or the company, I realized I’ve worked, really worked, since 1992 without any kind of a break.

Now, I had jobs prior to 1992. But they were just jobs. They weren’t jobs I really worked at. My first job at 12 for the Secretary of the Volusia County Medical Society (favour of a family friend); first waitressing job at 16 at Friendly Restaurant for the sole purpose of earning enough to replace the AC in my aging 1976 Buick Regal (I lived in Ormond Beach, Florida; AC is critical!); a job at a bookstore in college. But it wasn’t until I got my first adult restaurant job that I started what I call working which entails planning, advancing, being goal-driven, etc.

1. March, 1992: Hostess at Crackers restaurant in Church St. Station, Orlando, Florida. Realized quickly I wasn’t going to make any money until I started waiting tables.

2. Late spring/early summer, 1992: started waiting tables in Crackers. Realized just as quickly I wasn’t going to make any money until I started bartending.

3. Same time period, 1992: Church Street’s bartending school.
Now, before you scoff that this isn’t in any way challenging or has nothing to do with career goals and work ethics, you must understand something about Church Street. They were quite chauvinistic. Female bartenders were rare, and the waitresses wore the skimpiest outfits you can imagine and worked 4-6 hour shifts in high heels. One cocktail waitress outfit was fishnets, briefs, and coattails. So getting behind a decent bar in the complex was tough enough for a female, you had to be first in class. Also note I was in my Senior year of college trying to finish by the end of the year. I was determined to be perfect. And I was.

4. 1992 - 1994: Bartending at Church St. Station, sometimes at two or more clubs, plus throw in the odd waitressing shifts. Graduated college at the end of 1992. Proceeded to make up for all the partying I didn’t do in college.

5. 1994 – 1995: More bartending, this time at Church St and Sloppy Joes. Throw in an arrest for serving a minor (at Sloppy’s; bogus!), being fired, winning unemployment insurance arbitration, trial, acquittal, and finding a new job.

6. 1995 – 1996: Back at Church Street and throwing in Kelly Temps to find that “real” job as we used to call it (a real job was anything that wasn’t part of the bar/restaurant world). Then a Career Marketing Specialist (blech; resume writing for a firm designed to rip people off).
7. 1996 – 1997: Moved to Seattle and tripped into Microsoft on a permatemp contract. For Trip Planner.

8. 1997 – 1999: Permatemp to full time Microsoft via Trip Planner to Expedia.
1999 – 2008: FTE Microsoft/Expedia to Expedia. Much more on my Expedia progression later.

9. 2008 - … : Sabbatical. Much more on this to come.

There will at some point be some post about what this blog is supposed to represent. But I haven't finished that yet. So I'm just going to start and do the intro later.