The Null Set of Dinner

I don't like pea protein in my smoothies. Mike doesn't like rice protein. Nick doesn't eat anything healthy at all.

The other morning, I heard Mike in the kitchen making his lunch and his smoothie. Nick was still in bed. He's seventeen. He stays up late. He eats junk in the night and leaves piles of garbage and dirty dishes on the end table so when I came out of my bedroom and headed toward the kitchen, I could see exactly what he'd eaten. That morning, there was no evidence of the romaine I'd prepared and put next to Caesar dressing and croutons in the fridge. There was no evidence he ate the ready-to-eat snap peas or the carrots from the fridge either or especially the daikon radish I sliced and placed in a prominent spot after offering him a taste.

I shuffled into the kitchen and hugged Mike good morning. Then, I pulled out the ingredients for my smoothie. I was almost out of rice protein.

"Hey, when you get done with the pea protein you're eating, will you try the pea protein Nutribiotic sent me?" I asked Mike.

Nutribiotic had responded to a complaint I had about an altered taste in their rice protein by sending me three huge bottles of improved rice protein along with a container of pea protein to try. It was the most personal and generous response to a complaint I had ever gotten. But I'd eaten all the rice protein they'd sent and only had the pea protein left. I didn't want to try the pea protein. I liked my rice protein.

See, I put hemp milk, a little bit of half and half, cocoa, stevia, rice protein, and ice cubes into my Nutribullet cup and I've got a milk shake for breakfast that tastes like a chocolate malt. Every single morning, I drink a chocolate malt. I remembered standing in the Dairy Queen line on a hot Saturday afternoon with my family and scouring the menu. Even after considering all the possibilities, I would order a chocolate malt. I liked my chocolate malt. Who would have thought I'd get away with having one for breakfast every day when I became an adult? My attention came back to Mike when I realized he'd answered me.

"What?" I said. He thinks I'm hard of hearing. I'm not, not so much. I just have ADD, I think, or brain damage. I stare into space sometimes when people talk to me.

"I like the stuff I've got," Mike repeated.

"You might like this stuff too."

"But you don't like it."

"I haven't tried it, but I like my rice protein."

"So, why should I try it?"

"Because we have a whole jug of it and I don't want to throw it away."

Mike didn't say anything. Stalemate.

As we've gotten older, we've all diverged in terms of food. I mean it-we have diverged in almost all areas of food.

I should explain that some of this is because of our food allergies and intolerances. Yes, we have more than one.

Nick has a life-threatening tree nut allergy for which he carries a set of EpiPens everywhere with him. I eat almonds or cashews almost every day, but I have to do it so carefully that he never comes in contact with them, with even the dust from them. He won't even unload them from the groceries when I shop. I get that. I do.

Mike has IBS that is totally managed by eliminating fibrous vegetables like onions, greens, broccoli, asparagus, radishes, peppers, and celery. Have you ever tried to cook without onions? He can eat onion powder, but onion flakes give him problems. You know, problems, digestive problems. I eat some combination of onions, greens, broccoli, radishes, and celery every single day. Peppers give me gas though, so I don't eat peppers.

Nick has a fructose intolerance, so he can't eat too much of anything that is related to that, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, natural fructose in fruits, honey, or even stevia. It gives him a stomach ache. The doctor says it causes no damage, but it hurts. You'd think that would slow him down, but it doesn't. He eats junk right up to his limit and sometimes beyond. We've told him that if he eats too much sugar and his stomach hurts, he still has to go to school. He's had some pretty miserable days at school. Did you know that there is high fructose corn syrup in bread and in roast beef from the deli? That shit is in so much stuff in the grocery store. It's ridiculous.

I have developed an allergy to shrimp. That sucks, doesn't it? I love shrimp. I love sushi. So now, I have to brink Nick and his EpiPen every time I go eat sushi in case I get some shrimp and my reaction gets worse than the last time I goofed up, ate shrimp, and my eyes and lips swelled up.

And I have to eat a low-carb diet like a diabetic because I'm prediabetic and my doctor and I agree that I should handle it with diet instead of drugs. I can't eat sugar, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, or honey. And yes, for all those cheerful people who like to make suggestions, agave has just as many carbs in it as sugar and honey, so that's out too. On top of that, I can't eat much rice, potatoes, pasta, cereal, oats, bread, or beans. It sucks. I miss hanging onto a sandwich. I miss carbo-loading. I miss spaghetti, ham and beans, oatmeal. I fucking miss eating a bowl of Miniwheats.

On top of that, I've become lactose intolerant. This is totally fucked because before when I didn't feel I got enough to eat, I'd go to the fridge and eat a hunk of cheese. Man, I used to have seven or eight different kinds of cheeses in the cheese drawer at any given time. It was glorious when we went to France. I didn't mind not eating the pastries because I ate French cheese.

Now I can't eat any dairy but lactose-free milk and a touch of cheese if I remember to take a pill with it. Do you know how many restaurants throw cheese on everything? Try ordering a salad without cheese.

You know that math in fifth grade-sets? They give you a logic question about who read how many books and you're supposed to figure out the answer by putting the people and the numbers in overlapping circles. Do you remember that shit?

Well, if you put all the foods my family can eat into circles and overlap them accordingly, then Mike, Nick, and I only have meat, green beans, carrots, zucchini, yellow squash, and cauliflower in common in our diets. We can all eat apples, but I don't usually eat a whole one. We can all eat fruit, but I have to watch those carbs rise so I never get to eat very much. You'd think that would make me thin, but just look at me.

We eat meat together. Every single member of our family can eat meat and eggs. No, wait. Mike had a heart attack, a mild one. Yes, he's okay. Thank you for asking. But he can't eat real eggs or any transfats. Imagine that, no butter. He eliminated cheese for a while, but eventually, he missed it too much and he eats it now anyway.

So, imagine cooking a meal for my family. Just try to make something we can all eat. I'll tell you what it is:

steak or roasted chicken or pork

roasted cauliflower and zucchini

steamed green beans and carrots

That's it. That's your meal. If you eat that even once a week, you get to a point that you hate it. Mike is not thrilled by it. Nick hates it. I hate it. I fucking hate it.

So the rest of the 313 days a year, I get the joy of making all this shit I can't eat so my family has a decent dinner. I eat greens while they have roasted potatoes, chicken Alfredo, beef stroganoff, pizza, calzones, orange chicken, chili, pulled pork sandwiches with barbecue sauce, gyros, spaghetti and meatballs, enchiladas, lasagna, skewered chicken in peanut sauce, hamburgers, oatmeal with raisins, rice pudding, apple pie, pumpkin pie, lemon meringue pie, and fucking chocolate chip cookies made with the traditional tollhouse recipe.

You're hungry now, aren't you? I'll cook it. I will. But can't you just shoot me before dinner? Or maybe not because I get to have a chocolate malt for breakfast.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Danger of Half an Ice Cube

This morning, I got my smoothie mug out of the dishwasher and it wasn't clean. Crap. This new dishwasher sucks. Just because I put a big flat muffin carrier bottom in the top rack, none of the water got where it needed to go.

Then, I realized that the little dishwasher tablet was still in it's tiny drawer and I hadn't even started the thing last night. Great. Operator error. My dishwasher is fine but my brain is broken. Just what I needed since I have an interview this afternoon. Five hours of sleep and I'm fine. No really, I'm fine.

I had to set the dishwasher on delay so I didn't use up all the hot water before the guys got into the shower. That would be so sweet, wouldn't it?

'Honey, the fucking dishes are clean, but you get to have a cold shower on a Friday morning,'

I imagined the look on Mike's face if I told him that.

I had to start and cancel the cycle three times before I figured it out. I couldn't press the start button twice like I do to make sure the elevator comes because it canceled the delay and started the wash cycle immediately. Three times. Now, it's counting down. Yes, I'm sure. I got up to check.

I got the spare smoothie mug out of the cabinet, but I hate that mug. All but one of the little tabs have broken off so it's an operation to get my Nutribullet to spin with it. Cashew milk, a splash of half and half, cocoa, stevia, rice protein, and ice. Yummy, right? You betcha. I have a chocolate milkshake for breakfast every single damned morning. Don't tell anyone. Plus, it's only ten grams of carbohydrates. We love our Nutribullet.

But I'm moving slowly this morning. Did you know that I can hold six ice cubes for my smoothie in each hand? I have big hands. I don't know why I have to brag. I only need ten but today, I dropped an ice cube on the floor. I do that when I'm tired. It broke in half and I could only find part of it. I know I need more sleep when I plan to leave half an ice cube to melt under the stove figuring that it's just water and it'll dry up on its own.

Not lazy, just tired. It's-Friday-and-I-haven't-done-any-good-work-all-week kind of tired. Netflix-binge-watching kind of tired. You know what I mean. I know you've gotten up off the couch after a marathon of Mad Men with that special feeling. Your eyes burn. Your butt is so damned sore from all the work of sitting on the couch that you wonder why butts don't get callouses. Your mind is so settled into the cigarettes and misogyny of the show that you have a bad taste in your mouth. Or maybe you forgot to brush your teeth that morning. You can't remember. It's a special kind of exhaustion. Get used to it. With robots taking over our jobs within the next century, we'll all be hot-wired to Netflix or whatever embedded-brain technology that takes over when Netflix becomes obsolete.

I know. I've lived through eight-track tapes and five channels on a black and white TV. I've seen VHS, cassette tapes, DVDs, CDs, and audiobooks become obsolete. But will people be able to walk around, work, and shop for groceries while they watch all these shows that screen straight into our brains from the chips we allow to be embedded under our skin? No. Couches will endure. Couch will never go out of style. Did you just picture the little pods on Matrix? Cozy, right? We're voluntarily moving toward that scenario. Very low carbon footprint. Good for the environment. We could take up so little space in the world that we could use our internal energy to power the storage unit we house ourselves in.

Then, I realized I was staring into space as I stood in my kitchen. Did I look like Robert DeNiro in Awakenings? Blitz meowed at me and I woke up. He does that. He nags me in my own kitchen.

'Play with me.'

He brought his green paracord into the kitchen where I'm sure to step on the hard little burned knot at one end. It's like having Legos on the floor again. He sat on his string and meowed at me while I tried to think of what I needed to do next to finish my smoothie. I ignored him for the moment.

Screw driver.

I needed the screw driver.

See, the Nutribullet is great, really spins those ice cubes, except for the half lying under my stove, and there are no little annoying nuggets left over when I drink it. But Mike and I are both a little, shall we say, conservative with our money.

Cheap? No we're not cheap. We just don't run out and buy a new Nutribullet whenever a tab breaks on the best mug for our old one.

Okay, we do. We bought the next version of Nutribullet in case that last tab breaks off and we can't even start the thing with a screwdriver at five in the morning on a Friday. But we're not using that yet. We still have one tab left on one mug and all of the tabs on another.

 So, I screwed in the part with the blades, seated the whole thing upside-down in the base, plugged it in, then used a screwdriver to push down the plastic switch where the little tab at the edge of the mug would have gone if it existed. That little tab will probably end up in the belly of a dolphin in the ocean. This operation required dexterity. If someone in the house was asleep, I had to pick up the whole shebang and cradle it in my arms to keep it from rattling through the wooden bones of the walls and waking people up. Resonance. It works like the sounding board of a piano. That blender was so much louder when it sat on the counter. But when I cradled the thing in one arm and tried to hold the screwdriver in that little slot where the plastic switch expected the mug-tab, it was a test of dexterity.

At that point that I hoped I hadn't overfilled the thing because something in the design loosens the grip the blade-part had on the mug when I overfilled the mug. Then, smoothie goop could fly all over me, the inside of the Nutribullet base, and splash on the counter and anything on it. When I cradled the base in one arm, used the screwdriver to spin the thing, and this overflow thing happened, I got smoothing goop all over my pajamas. It sucked.

Today, somehow, I managed without getting smoothie goop all over my pajamas.

But Blitz wasn't done. He never realized how fucking underfoot he was in the kitchen. I stepped back and turned to rinse the blade-part so it would be clean when Mike made his smoothie. I felt my foot coming down on a paw or a tail, something soft. I twisted that tender spot in my right knee trying to step somewhere else while Blitz banged off my ankle in exactly the wrong direction trying to get out from underfoot, literally.

That cat has no survival instincts. The only thing he has to worry about regarding survival in our house is how to keep from getting stepped on. He doesn't get it. He's afraid of the UPS truck driving half-way up the driveway, but he's immune to lessons in protecting his tail from the crush.

He ignored my little ACL-tearing dance and stayed focused on a spot under the stove. Not a mouse in my kitchen. Please. God. No.

Do you think that God gets annoyed at these kinds of prayers? You know, the stupid ones that fall out of our minds when we're being honest about what we want? Do you think there's a special kind of hell in my future for all of my misdeeds? Yesterday, I forgot a good friend's birthday in all my morose binge-watching busyness. If God is really an angry God, my penance for it could be to eternally have to clean against the potential for hanta virus whenever a mouse got into the house and found my Cheerios. Yes, in my special hell, there is a lot of cleaning required and dirt and disease is everywhere anyway.

Hmmm.

What was the cat looking at, pawing at, under the stove?

I leaned down. My knee cringed.

It was white, not grey with big ears and sad eyes.

Blitz found my half-ice cube under the stove. I picked it up, but then put it back down on the floor for a minute. He tapped it with one paw, then shook his foot. He put his nose to it then backed away. I kicked it and it slid a couple feet. He chased it, paused, and tapped it with one paw again.

He shook his paw and looked at me.

'Is this dangerous?'

I stood there supplying no answer. Meanie. He touched it one more time. Then, I thought he might lick it. He didn't. It was too scary to lick it. Might kill him. He looked at me again. Why wasn't I answering him? He stretched his neck out to sniff it and backed up.

'This has got to be a trick.'

It was like the first time my cat Angel walked in grass when she was a kitten. She shook her feet with every step. Eventually, she fell over in that pathetic way a cat has of giving up. When it didn't kill her, she lolled about in the grass stretching her forelegs up over her head.

Blitz never rolled in the ice cube. Finally, he backed away and my fun was over. That shit was dangerous. Ice cubes. Awful. He looked back at it before he left the kitchen.

Maybe I wasn't so tired after all.

Thank you for listening, jb