What’s Happened To Our Brown Paper For anyone who knows me, they are highly aware of my almost OCD efforts to make sure that any type of food I put into my mouth is either a healthy sized portion or good for me (or both). I would consider myself a major food snob, but I direct the source of my food snobbery towards my equally food-snobbish parents, who cringe at the thought of restaurant bread that had been previously frozen, or god-forbid they are served a Starbucks coffee that isn’t freshly brewed (does that count as food?) In my struggle to maintain a balanced, healthy diet in a lunch cafeteria filled with soggy pasta and stale french fries, I generally try to give myself a time frame of between 10 and 30 minutes every night to figure out something to make myself for lunch the next day. However, as I ventured farther and farther into my junior year, I realized that the unavoidable laziness that comes with the third year of high school (among many other perils) had finally caught up to me, even after I had sworn it never would. I soon found myself dishing out more 5-dollar bills than I could count in order to pay for my weekly lunches consisting of fried chicken with giant pieces of fat on the end and bags of my ultimate snack food guilty pleasure, Chex Mix. No matter how many bottles of water I downed to try and counteract the fatty foods, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was doing something terribly, terribly wrong. I find myself asking what truly is the deciding factor between how we dictate the quality of our lives. For myself, quality food and putting good ingredients into my body is a huge factor in the overall quality of my life. As I sat staring down at the piece of chicken fat in my hand (I swear it was giving me the evil eye), I realized that it was not necessarily the type of food I was eating that was creating such a strange void in my heart, but that I suddenly missed the crinkling of my brown lunch bag as I proudly poured my carefully planned meal onto the blue speckled half-moon lunch table. I missed the taste of whatever healthy or “healthy” food I had generated for myself (notice the second healthy in quotations, as I will often try to convince myself of a food’s nutritional value). Moreover, I missed the idea that I had worked (semi) hard for something that meant a lot to me and that in the end, made me feel better than living off blue bags of Chex Mix with the weird tasting pretzels. Perhaps my life would be better if I could just squeeze a few more homemade turkey and brie sandwiches in, or something non-food related, like a few hours’ worth of thrift shopping, where I can feel good for being on my feet and even better for leaving with a cheap pair of Lucky Brands. Either way, my happiness seems to be centered, on, simply, happiness. We must remember to not stray too far from that, as I've found that most of our unhappiness comes from the forgotten notion that there are things in this world that legitimately make us happy. It seems that my brown paper bag is a little farther away then I was hoping, but not so far that I've completely given up. Hand me a chocolate bar, wait a couple weeks for the weather to warm up, and I'll definitely come around... Stay Classy Valley,
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |