Portion Control

For dinner last night my dad and I had some sweet and sour pork with rice. The pork was already made, so I cooked up 2 cups of rice for the two of us. Usually this is enough to feed the both of us with a little left over. Our rice cooker here in SA is really basic, the pot purports to be nonstick but that's a pretty big lie--the rice sticks to the cooking pot like nobody's business. My dad is trying to combat a way to get the rice to stick less (adding more water, adding less water, turning it off immediately after the cycle is complete, etc) but no luck. So, tonight he decides that we should just eat all the rice in one go!

I heat up his pork and serve him some rice and then go to heat up mine in the microwave. He goes back to the pot and serves himself some more rice and has really an obscene amount on his plate. When my pork is done heating, there's just enough rice in the pot to serve me about 1/2 a place of rice, just in the center. That is a perfect amount for me, so I don't have a problem with it. I sit down at the table and my dad says, "Oh, do you not have enough rice? I'm so sorry, I didn't realize you hadn't taken any yet. Here, have some of mine!" I explain that this is a perfect amount of rice and that I don't need any of his, but he does have an awful lot on there. He won't let up and keeps trying to give me rice. Now, my parents have been overfeeding me rice for a long time. They simply don't understand that I am no longer 15 years old and on a swim team wherein I exercise heavily for 2.5 hours every day. My metabolism has slowed some and I just don't eat a huge 10" dinner plate HEAPED full of food for dinner. I like to fill my plate more with veggies and meats with a SIDE of rice to get some carbs. And yet, every time I am home with my parents, they emphasize how I need to eat MORE. It's very frustrating. My dad then goes on to lecture me about how rice isn't fattening. Which, technically, is true, but we're not eating brown rice, which helps you burn fat, which I would totally devour in large portions additionally for the fiber benefit. I just don't want a giant amount of white rice for Christ's sake!

The next morning we are driving to work and my stomach feels crappy. It feels like a combination of hunger, cramps and just general upset-tummy feelings. I'm pretty quiet and my dad is concerned about me. Finally I admit that my stomach isn't feeling so good and I might be really hungry. Of course he has to shoot back with, "I told you you should have eaten more rice last night." This of course turns into me snapping back that the rice have nothing to do with my current condition and that he needs to leave it alone. How fricking ridiculous, I stuffed my face with sweet and sour pork AND two squares of chili chocolate for dessert PLUS a spoonful of honey as a post-dessert dessert around 10pm. Clearly not eating enough was not the problem last night!

I got to work and relieved the problem by visiting the bathroom -- sometimes you just have to go in the morning [sorry to describe bathroom activities but I just want to make it clear that this wasn't HUNGER, it was needing to go #2. If you're grossed out by that, you need to read the book Everybody Poops. It's true. Everybody poops. Even girls. The general unwillingness of women in this country to discuss their bowel movements might be worthy of its own fatwa, in fact.].

I'm so sick of my parents trying to behave like I'm still some teenager who doesn't know her own body. I've lived away from home since high school and I think I know how much to eat and what to eat a hell of a lot better than they do.

Ginger and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I am calling fatwa on all of yesterday—hear me, o readers, Monday, July 20, 2009 was a really crappy day. First of all, I had to re-do my class schedule about eight times. Information on what classes to take is (no surprise here!) difficult to find on the T-Bird Registrar’s website and is poorly organized to boot. I then discovered that I had the class codes wrong for two classes, which resulted in more organization. I thought that I had everything figured out neatly until Panos kindly wrote me to let me know that I still had the wrong class code for Ops Management, and that it was only offered in the 2nd module, which means that now I have 4 classes in the 1st module and SEVEN, yes, that’s right, SEVEN in the second. Basically if I want to take Business Presentation, I’ll have that many classes. This is unacceptable. Additionally, there are about 150 people who need to take Ops Management and there is only one section. How about that? Sometimes I really hate this school and want to make a big, fat pile of money and drop out. I emailed Kay Keck and Paula Friesen about this; fat chance they’ll do anything, as per usual.

I then went to the gym, where my trainer proceeded to tell me that I used to be fat (again) and that I had many parts of my body that were “flabby.” Fuck you, man, seriously. Telling people that they are fat is not motivating, it is insulting and in fact, puts you into a shame spiral of depression that makes you considerably less likely to want to do anything except curl up on the couch with a pie and eat the whole thing. I told him to his face that he should 1) shut the fuck up and stop calling people fat and 2) that he had body dysmorphic disorder that he projected onto others.

Then, a little bit later, he asked me, “what’s that thing on your nose?” You know what that thing is on my nose? It’s a giant fucking zit. Thank you, Lindwell, for pointing out the huge, enormous, erupting and red zit on my nose. This thing is epic. It’s the Mt. Everest of zits. It may be the unholy union of two zits, in fact, making up for the fact that I haven’t had one in almost a year. This thing is like the One Ring of zits—one zit to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. I look like fucking Rudolph the Red Nosed fat, flabby reindeer. This day just keeps getting better! I was so annoyed at him that I started responding very loudly. I think my monologue went something like this:

“Oh, what is that thing on my nose? The giant, angry looking, red bump? I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a zit! Thank you so much for pointing it out to me, up until this very moment, I had no idea an enormous pimple was erupting on my nose! Excuse me, everyone! [At this point I start practically yelling at everyone in the gym] Lindwell has a very important announcement for everyone, he would like to you all to know that I have a giant zit on my nose and that it’s obvious! Next time, I’ll make sure to circle it and put an arrow so you don’t miss it!”

Was I being a brat? Yes. Was I still bitter about being called fat/flabby? Yes. Serves him right.

Oh, and then later, I realized that I lost one of my Tokidoki earrings, which were one of my favorites... I lost the Sandy so now I just have a sad Bastardino earring that's lonely.