I haven't written about food in a while because quite honestly I haven't eaten anything that great in a while. My Lean Cuisines have not improved much with the addition of ketchup. My late-night snacks have been mediocre and far from inventive. Today I almost made great strides by whipping up a batch of my everything cookies, only to realize that I didn't have any eggs. I am a self-proclaimed foodie who doesn't even own eggs. My first-year self would cringe.
This revelation is not an easy one for me. I don't like to think that any parts of myself have regressed during the past year. Regressing this early in life - my quarter-century mark is coming six years too soon - would be a failure on my part.
So no eggs. What important things will drop off next? My love for all things four-legged, furry and 80 pounds? My ability to write a 13-page paper on a Southern author simply because I love that I could never be her? What kind of person will I become when I ignore my dogs and my books, and I sleep all day?
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but I do not think that it is an impossibility. I find myself sleeping more and more and reading because I have to and simply nodding at the pictures of my pets my mom texts me four times a day. Where did this growing indifference come from?
I blame it on food. No, not food itself, but my feelings toward it. I have let them change and in the process, I have numbed my taste buds. Last year I may not have had a kitchen and shelves full of food, but that didn't stop me from using taste bud discretion. If my dish at the dining hall was bland, I got a new one. If my one kind of cereal wasn't fulfilling my needs, I added two more. My days were long, and I was confused and homesick and all the other things 18-year-old college kids are. But I didn't ignore my desires - I acted on them.
Sitting at my dining table, I may eat macaroni or spaghetti or something else along the lines of yellow, and I'll eat until I'm full and then some because I'd rather do that than homework or walking down the steps to do my laundry or something else mundane. Then I'll jump up, turn on fratmusic.com and get ready for a party or a dance night or something else that only happens after dark.
I have turned to instant everything. Instant noodles. Instant fun. Instant gratification. If something takes time - like making an edible dish, then I'd rather just be sleeping.
Instant gratification will only get you so far. Although some areas of my pleasure-seeking have improved since the embarrassment of first year (see: late-night texts), I have grown even more dependent on instantaneous actions and reactions than ever before. I think it's because I'm scared. I'm afraid to take my time on something and then have it not work out. Or have it turn out poorly. My ramen might suck, but at least it only took a few minutes. Yeah, I am trying to work this food thing as a metaphor for the rest of my life.
I don't spend more than a night on my papers because when I get a B or lower, I'll have an excuse. I don't take too long getting ready in the morning because I can say I just rolled out of bed. I don't make cookies even when I have eggs because they might not taste like the ones I used to make, and then I would have wasted a lot of time.
Tonight I was hungry. I looked in my fridge and freezer, and I considered the deli meats and frozen spaghetti. Then I saw, for the first time in a while, ingredients. Pieces I could put together that would taste a hell of a lot better than a sandwich. So I made a quesadilla with two kinds of cheese and black beans and onions and peppers and a lot of butter. It wasn't a four-course meal, but it was a start. I was reclaiming the part of myself that tried and was okay with failing. Well, at least more okay than I am now.
I'll never stop napping, and I'll never swear off fratmusic, but I want to start reading what's on my shelves again instead of dancing around a basement all night. I also want to make a lot more quesadillas.
Connelly's column runs weekly Thursdays. She can be reached at c.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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