Cravosity

Sometimes, I can't put my finger on what kind of food I want, or if I want food at all. I usually do want food, especially when I don't know what to do with myself, I just eat. I eat when I'm bored, as well as when I'm depressed, or really happy. Eating entertains me, makes me happy, and maintains my happiness. Right now, I thought about it, and I decided I'm craving a small sandwich, something that you could get at McDonalds, but I'm going to go over to the conveniently-close-to-my-apartment convenience store Lawson and buy probably a cheeseburger.

Sometimes I crave onigiri - rice triangles or hexagons filled with something like okaka (fish flakes), umeboshi (pickled plum), salmon, tuna and mayonnaise, etc., and wrapped in seaweed - something I never craved before having access to an abundance of them in Japan. Sometimes I crave ramen, however, I'm very picky about my ramen: it must have garlic in it, and it must not be the curly noodles because those remind me of United States 10 cents ramen which I can't stand. Today I went to the Yokohama ramen amusement park and got to enjoy komurasaki ramen which has grilled garlic chips all over it. Similarly, I also get regular cravings for sashimi, sushi, plain white rice, and oysters.

Doughnut cravings have been a staple of my existence, and in Japan they are easier to satisfy. I don't have to go to the grocery store and wait in line to check out to buy a doughnut and then find somewhere else to eat it; I can go into Mr. Donut and have one or two doughnuts on the go. I also crave what is called shu-cream, which are really thoroughly stuffed delicious cream puffs that I don't remember eating in the United States except for one time when I was into baking as a young girl and found a cream puff recipe in The Joy of Cooking.

Is there any rhyme or reason to these cravings? Do they correlate with our moods, or our internal balance? If bodies could automatically satisfy their nutritional needs properly by having appropriate food cravings, hmm, life might be a lot easier. Unfortunately it seems we must put in a bit more effort than that. So far I'm throwing in the towel with the effort. I'm going to eat what the food craving section of my brain tells me to eat.

But then, as we've seen before with my recent Japan-specific cravings, a food has to be introduced into your body before it will produce craving signals for it.

I've used the word crave entirely too much. Crave. That makes me think about that restaurant in Atlanta called Crave, or pregnant women, or tangerines, or a big spider amusement park ride. I'd like to see a bunch of tangerines ride the spider. They'd jump out of their peels, they'd be so scared. And then I could catch them and eat them.

Reminiscences

I often find myself in the past, thinking of good times. I delight in reliving moments that suddenly or randomly come to mind, such as the time I held hands with my first college crush all through a movie I can't remember; or the time my high school friend and I, during a depressing summer at home with our parents, went on a ride and got out of the car in some of the heaviest rain I've experienced, and frolicked gleefully and noisily like young girls; or the time my friend and I sat in the corner during softball study hall while the rest of the softball team had a backstabbing gossipfest about coaches and absent teammates, eavesdropped and self-righteously condemned them all to hell.

Just today, my boyfriend of three years (on the 20th), who stays in Atlanta while I live here in Japan, sent an email to me saying he was thinking about the time we went to the beach and drank rum out of paper bag bottles on the sand inbetween boogie boarding sessions. I hadn't thought about that recently, and I was quite happy to be reminded of it.

I often wonder if this living in the past fetish of mine is causing me to miss moments in the present. Perhaps, but the present becomes the past so quickly that I think it's difficult for the brain to keep up. I'm all for living in the moment, but when I think too hard about living in the moment, I find myself thinking about how I will think of this moment in the future when I look back on it. And there I am thinking about living in the past in the future. Maybe part of living in the moment, then, must also be living in the moment that is naturally occurring in your brain.

This Zefrank episode talks about the possibility (postulated by some psychologist) that happiness is more or less inevitable no matter what our brain might think at one time - looking back on past events will always more than likely be with fondness; one example he gives being criminals saying that going to jail was the best thing that ever happened to them. I sometimes realize that my memories of times gone by see me having definitely a lot more fun than I'm having in the present; which means I probably wasn't having as much fun during the memory as I remember having.

Surely this may not be true for everyone, but another example: George Robert Twelves Hewes, one of the only common-ish people who lived during the Revolution whose life was of interest to writers of history, had a goodness-magnifying glass of a memory so much so that he even remembered some things that did not actually happen (The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred P. Young).

The past, once past, is naught but the memories of we and they who experience it, and then however it is presented by whatever historian, journalist, biographer, anthropologist, blogger, or other such writer. It is non-existent unless and until someone thinks about it. So stir that settled cup of memories and spread it around. Let the past exist once again, temporarily as ever, and maybe it will just make someone's day.


(puke... Chicken Soup for the Pleaagh)?