lost carrot

I've been sick for the last week which, following the trip to The Cow, was one of those inevitabilities one spies heading down the road and tries to avoid anyway, like Mondays after long weekends. I'm always sick after The Cow. I can't recollect any specific examples of this besides this past week, since I seem to have difficulty remembering more than two weeks at a time, but it's obviously enough of a pattern that people at work have remarked on it.

"I keep telling you people, I'm allergic. You shouldn't send me there anymore. Really."

"We don't care that you get sick after the Cow. We were just noticing that it happens."

Feel the love.

At any rate, I lost two days of work, felt better, came in for three, infected everybody I touched as a zealous proxy for karmic retribution--I smite with the left hand of God, yea verily!--and then was flat on my back again for the entire weekend.

It was 3 AM Monday morning, restless in bed, that I realized I'd somehow managed to lose a bag of baby carrots.

I know, I know, segues. I have to work on my segues. But honestly, folks; these realizations come to me when they come to me, and if I hadn't gone to The Cow, I wouldn't have gotten sick, and if I hadn't gotten sick, I wouldn't have been awake at 3 AM, and if I hadn't been awake at 3 AM, I wouldn't have remembered the carrots. Which I'd lost. Somewhere.

I joined Weight Watchers about a month ago, one of the steps I've taken to prevent my heart from imploding. While I've only lost three pounds so far, this failure is due more to my general inability to remember I'm on Weight Watchers than any lack in the program itself. I tend to remember these sorts of things right after I've started eating the four pound roast beef sandwich, or right before I throw away the empty Carl's, Jr. wrapper.

I can just hear my cardiologist now. "Goldfish, Yuhri! Goldfish! Do you want to be a comma in the run-on sentence of life?"

Hence the carrots, a little sack of baby ones that I bought on a whim at the grocery. I've mentioned before that food-wise, I tend to operate on color rather than substance. Orange, a color I abhor in any other medium, has a way of pushing my epicurean buttons, who can say why. Thus the otherwise inexplicable passion for cheetohs which, if you really taste them, are rather like styrofoam packing beans coated with salt.

Speaking of which...

A couple of years ago after the Seattle earthquake, news and media were trumpeting the imminence of a massive quake that would annihilate most of the west coast. According to them, it was only a matter of time before we all slid into the ocean and the tuna-net ravaged dolphins got their payback playing bocce ball with our plump, dead buttocks.

None of this was news to my mother, who alternates "Be Happy!" campaigning with "The End is Coming!" predictions. In between teaching violin to her little three-year old students, gardening, visiting the poor and the sick and mentoring young teachers, she prepares quite contentedly for the forthcoming annihilation of all life on earth. God has a hard time keeping up with her expectations, seeing as how they require the job holder to be equal parts Disney production and homicidal psychopath.

She was delighted by the Seattle earthquake, in a shiny, smug sort of way. "I was ready," she told me with great satisfaction, and instantly contradicted herself with a triumphant, "Nobody was ready. It was big surprise to everybody, but I knew."

I visited her a few months later to help her empty out the garage, half of which is still packed to the roof with Dad's carpentry tools, machines, and lumber. On the so-called "clean" side of the garage, I discovered four refrigerator-sized boxes full of styrofoam beans.

She must have been collecting them for years.

"What is this?" I demanded, manhandling one towards the curb. Mom, who was busily gardening in the front yard, instantly straightened and started to chirp.

"No, no! No throwing this one out. I am keeping this ones."

I released the box with some relief. It thumped to the ground; a little cloud of styrofoam beans poofed out of the half-open lid, causing Mom some distress.

"You send that many packages?"

"Sometimes I sending, to Japan. But these are good for emergency."

Emergency . . . what? Emergency packages to Japan? I contemplated my little mother, who was busily weeding the driveway clean of little styrofoam beans for return to the big box. "What kind of emergency?"

"Earthquake," Mom announced, and tenderly replaced the beans in the box before folding it carefully shut. "If there is big emergency, I will using them to eat." She popped one in her mouth and munched, thoughtfully.

Eat. I eyed her. "Using them as chopsticks?" I suggested hopefully.

Mom swallowed. She was greatly amused. "No, no, eating them. They are making out of corn. They are biodegradable. If there is being big emergency and no food anywhere, I will eating them. They may saving my life!"

Mom knew the word biodegradable. I meditated on that while I took the box back to the garage.

So anyway, the carrots. The end of the story is that I crunched through a few--they taste nothing like cheetos--stored them in the fridge for a couple of days, then took them to work. I remember putting them in my bag. I vaguely recall eating one at work. And then, nothing. I can't find them anywhere. Not in my bag, not in my desk, not in the fridge, not in the work fridge.

Don't you love an anticlimax?