I love sugar.
And I TOTALLY mean in the 'I love it so much I want to marry it' kind of way. I want to go to sleep beside sugar, I want to wake up next to sugar, I want to have sugar peck my cheek when I leave for the day and give me a hug and a soda bottle full of itself when I get home from work. I want to dive into sugar like Scrooge McDuck dives into his money bin. I want to become my own country so I can issue 'sugar certificates' like when US currency was backed by gold certificates. I want to grow sugar cane and sugar beets in my back yard so I can have something to gnaw on when I cut the grass.
I think you get the idea.
But sugar doesn't love me. Rather, high-fructose corn syrup doesn't love me. If it's something you need to cut with a scissors in chemistry lab* then it's not really something you need to be putting in your body. Nothing good will ever come of high fructose corn syrup because nothing good has so far. It's alarmingly common to see a line of kids who all look like Augustus Gloop, adults are dropping from diabetes, and there's corn syrup in everything that isn't pulled straight out of the ground and put on your plate. Seriously.
And aspartame isn't any better.
Those who've known me for longer than... say... three months know I'm constantly falling off the sugar/soda wagon. Give it up, go right back, give it up, go right back. I have a friend who's been 'quitting' smoking for twelve years and I give him crap about it all the time, but I'm no better. I'm like a heroin addict but without all the neato and unhygienic hardware. We do both have spoons, I suppose.
So I need to commit, I need to find some reason to give it up for good. The only way food producers are going to stop feeding us poison is if we stop buying poison. And I can't wait for others to take the first step for me.
Here goes nothing...
* that's how they do it in college, ooze out a length of high fructose corn syrup and cut a nubbin free
Showing posts with label dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dead. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Tales From My Past - The Iranian Kid
When I was in eighth grade a new kid showed up. Being in a military town we got new kids all the time, but this one was different. He was thick and dark and was already working on a pretty decent mustache, and he looked at us with wide, suspicious eyes, like he was waiting for the worst but hoping for the best. He liked to play basketball - 'hoop' as he called it - even though he was a worse player than I was, which was saying something. He looked vaguely Mexican, at least in coloration, but his features were wrong for it. When we asked him, he said he was Persian.
He was from Iran. It was August 1979.
His name was Sayeed, and he understood math better than the math teacher. He spoke English with barely an accent, which was way more Farsi than I knew, and he wrote Arabic as kind of a parlor trick, because it went backwards on the page. He didn't care for football and its pads and solid hits, but he really wanted to try out for the basketball team, and maybe baseball if he learned how to play. He slowly stopped being the new kid and stopped being the zoo exhibit because of his foreign-ness and started just being one of us.
Fast forward to November. Revolution in Iran. Students storm the US Embassy and take over fifty people hostage. It's the only thing on the news, video of young men who look remarkably like Sayeed chanting 'death to America.'
In an instant Sayeed went from just another kid to representative for his entire country and spokesperson for the revolution. He endured abuse like I could never imagine, but he also enjoyed more sympathy and defense than thought twelve-year-olds capable of. I could imagine him bracing for a day at school, for the names, for the demands for an explanation, for the humiliating yet necessary teacher interventions, for the agonizing yet well-meant friendly gestures. No matter how bad I had it, I knew I didn't have it anything like Sayeed did.
He finished out the school year and then his family moved back to Iran. I remember talking to him about it, and he was politicized to an extent that was foreign to me. He loved his country, and he and his family wanted to help make it better. So they went. That would have been May 1980.
The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980.
I remember watching TV and seeing bodies, men killed in some nameless part of the desert between the two countries. They looked like Sayeed. Just as young, with the beginnings of proud Persian mustaches that were never going to get bushy. The news said both sides, Iran and Iraq, conscripted boys as young as twelve. If you were big enough to hold a rifle, you got one.
And it hit me. The kid who just wanted to 'shoot hoop,' and who could out-Algebra the Algebra teacher, might be dead. He was my age, fourteen, and he could be a corpse at that very moment. Or he could be sitting behind a stack of sand bags waiting for the enemy to come over the wall. And here I was worried about having the proper brand of shoes and whether I should buy a mum for one of the girls I liked. We were the same, he and I, and yet his path took him into a true life-or-death situation, while mine let me worry about zits and trying to get to first base.
That was the first time I realized that life isn't fair. The truth hit me in the gut when I saw the lifeless eyes of boys my age, killed in some conflict they certainly didn't understand. The injustice of it made me cry, and the shame I felt made me turn off the TV.
I don't know what happened to Sayeed. I hope he's alive and well and teaching his kids how to shoot hoop. But he was exactly the wrong age, and in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time for his survival to be anything but a lingering question.
Ma salama, Sayeed.
He was from Iran. It was August 1979.
His name was Sayeed, and he understood math better than the math teacher. He spoke English with barely an accent, which was way more Farsi than I knew, and he wrote Arabic as kind of a parlor trick, because it went backwards on the page. He didn't care for football and its pads and solid hits, but he really wanted to try out for the basketball team, and maybe baseball if he learned how to play. He slowly stopped being the new kid and stopped being the zoo exhibit because of his foreign-ness and started just being one of us.
Fast forward to November. Revolution in Iran. Students storm the US Embassy and take over fifty people hostage. It's the only thing on the news, video of young men who look remarkably like Sayeed chanting 'death to America.'
In an instant Sayeed went from just another kid to representative for his entire country and spokesperson for the revolution. He endured abuse like I could never imagine, but he also enjoyed more sympathy and defense than thought twelve-year-olds capable of. I could imagine him bracing for a day at school, for the names, for the demands for an explanation, for the humiliating yet necessary teacher interventions, for the agonizing yet well-meant friendly gestures. No matter how bad I had it, I knew I didn't have it anything like Sayeed did.
He finished out the school year and then his family moved back to Iran. I remember talking to him about it, and he was politicized to an extent that was foreign to me. He loved his country, and he and his family wanted to help make it better. So they went. That would have been May 1980.
The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980.
I remember watching TV and seeing bodies, men killed in some nameless part of the desert between the two countries. They looked like Sayeed. Just as young, with the beginnings of proud Persian mustaches that were never going to get bushy. The news said both sides, Iran and Iraq, conscripted boys as young as twelve. If you were big enough to hold a rifle, you got one.
And it hit me. The kid who just wanted to 'shoot hoop,' and who could out-Algebra the Algebra teacher, might be dead. He was my age, fourteen, and he could be a corpse at that very moment. Or he could be sitting behind a stack of sand bags waiting for the enemy to come over the wall. And here I was worried about having the proper brand of shoes and whether I should buy a mum for one of the girls I liked. We were the same, he and I, and yet his path took him into a true life-or-death situation, while mine let me worry about zits and trying to get to first base.
That was the first time I realized that life isn't fair. The truth hit me in the gut when I saw the lifeless eyes of boys my age, killed in some conflict they certainly didn't understand. The injustice of it made me cry, and the shame I felt made me turn off the TV.
I don't know what happened to Sayeed. I hope he's alive and well and teaching his kids how to shoot hoop. But he was exactly the wrong age, and in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time for his survival to be anything but a lingering question.
Ma salama, Sayeed.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Tragically Dead Fat Comedians
You know what we haven't seen lately? A tragically dead fat comedian. For a while there they were dropping like flies, and now... nothing. Maybe it's because there are fewer comedians? Maybe it's because younger people listened to Jared from Subway and dropped 100 pounds? All I know is that lately I haven't heard of someone living fast, dying young, and leaving a king-sized corpse. And if this kind of talk makes you feel uncomfortable, just remember, they would have wanted it this way.
Roll Call
Fatty Arbuckle. The name says it all, and he endured a sensational scandal and career-ending trial. The tragedy is that his career was back on the upswing when he had a heart attack and died.
John Belushi. Ah, Bluto Blutarski, we hardly knew ye. John died at the age of 33 in the Chateau Marmont, after a night of drug indulgence. While he died much too young, I think he was spared the kind of embarrassment of a career most of the Saturday Night Live original cast has since endured.
John Candy. Died of a heart attack at age 38. The heart attack came on after a solid month's eating binge while on a movie location shoot. He was also Canadian, and you know how they are.
Sam Kinison. Also died at age 38, though - incredibly - not as a result of drugs, alcohol, or any other personal demons. If you wrote a fictionalized account of Sam's life no one would believe it. He was a child preacher for his daddy's Pentecostal church. He lost his faith, abandoned the church, and became one of the smuttiest comedians since Redd Foxx. There was nothing beneath Mr. Kennison, no chemical too vile to try, no vice too perveted to do. Then he began to turn his life around, and some idiot crashes into him on the highway and kills him. Talk about tragedy, Mr. Kennison's story has it all.
Chris Farley. Dead at age 33, like John Belushi. He died the best death in recent memory, though: after a solid week of round-the-clock booze and whores, he died of a heart attack while trying to take his heart medicine.
Roll Call
Fatty Arbuckle. The name says it all, and he endured a sensational scandal and career-ending trial. The tragedy is that his career was back on the upswing when he had a heart attack and died.
John Belushi. Ah, Bluto Blutarski, we hardly knew ye. John died at the age of 33 in the Chateau Marmont, after a night of drug indulgence. While he died much too young, I think he was spared the kind of embarrassment of a career most of the Saturday Night Live original cast has since endured.
John Candy. Died of a heart attack at age 38. The heart attack came on after a solid month's eating binge while on a movie location shoot. He was also Canadian, and you know how they are.
Sam Kinison. Also died at age 38, though - incredibly - not as a result of drugs, alcohol, or any other personal demons. If you wrote a fictionalized account of Sam's life no one would believe it. He was a child preacher for his daddy's Pentecostal church. He lost his faith, abandoned the church, and became one of the smuttiest comedians since Redd Foxx. There was nothing beneath Mr. Kennison, no chemical too vile to try, no vice too perveted to do. Then he began to turn his life around, and some idiot crashes into him on the highway and kills him. Talk about tragedy, Mr. Kennison's story has it all.
Chris Farley. Dead at age 33, like John Belushi. He died the best death in recent memory, though: after a solid week of round-the-clock booze and whores, he died of a heart attack while trying to take his heart medicine.
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