Buckets of soda

I want to just get this out there, I know I eat too much fast food. I personally find fast food to be a misnomer, by the time you get in the car and drive to the restaurant and drive back, even if you get it to go and eat it on the way back you often spend more time driving than it would take you to make a sandwich, assuming you have all the ingredients you require at your disposal. With that thought in mind I'd like to propose we call fast food, convenient food, because that's really the case, it's considerably more convenient than it is fast. When I am choosing a fast food restaurant to get my lunch from I normally try to choose some of the better options, unless it's a day where I'm craving something.

One thing I've been trying to cut back on is my soda intake. I certainly don't want to eliminate soda from my diet, but I'd like to reduce my intake to at most 20 ounces per day. I've been getting really frustrated with a recent trend at fast food restaurants. The sodas are ginourmous! Today I ordered a small soda at El Pollo Loco and they gave me a 32 ounce soda. If that's not bad enough, yesterday at lunch I was told that the restaurant I was at didn't even have small cups anymore, so they instead gave me a 32 ounce cup. What the hell is going on? At almost everyone of the larger chains a medium soda is 32 ounces. What ever happened to a small being 12 or 16 ounce cup and a medium being 20 ounce cup? I started noticing a few years ago that cars were starting to be made with larger cup holders, and now most cars can easily accommodate a 44 ounce cup, and many can even accommodate a 64 ounce cup. What's next, a 128 ounce bucket? Are we going to be ordering soda by the keg? Why the hell is it so damned hard to get a small soda these days? Maybe I should just kick the habit after all.

Uncontrolled drinking = alien invasion?

Saturday night was a very fun night. It was the kind of night that when I look back on it I'd compare it to a very fine silk blouse, with a very pesky stain right in the middle of it. It's the kind of blouse that you love and would want to wear everyday, that is if it weren't for that pesky stain. The pesky stain on this evening is a woman who was so drunk that she was outright belligerent.

I made two mistakes that evening. The first mistake started on our way over to our friends house, and continued on our way to West Hollywood, and then ultimately continued at the restaurant and even the club where we ended up. That mistake was drinking. No, not alcohol, but water and Coke. I drink a lot of liquids through out the day, and even more so when I know I'll be consuming alcohol that evening. I'm particularly fond of a brand of bottled water called SmartWater, and I drank a 1 liter bottle on our way to the restaurant. At the restaurant I had two glasses of water and 2 cokes. Even when we got to the club I decided to take it easy on the first drink. I had the bartender put some raspberry vodka in some sprite and add a squeeze of lime. Mistake number one, I consumed a lot of liquid prior to dancing.

The second mistake was a small series of mistakes in dealing with my glasses. I can handle a couple hours without them, my eyes just get tired, so I shouldn't have worn them into the club. I then topped that off when I took them off while dancing. Dancing with my glasses on isn't normally a problem, but Kristen was just so darn cute, and I wanted to give her a kiss. I decided to take my glasses off, because when you're bouncing up and down like a kid in a bounce house and calling that dancing, moving in for a kiss with glasses on is a recipe for pain for the target of your kiss. I took my glasses off and hooked them on my dress, in the middle of the dress in the spot that often shows off a womans ample bosoms, or in my case, my less than ample bosoms. Kristen and I kissed, and it was life affirming the room span and the whole nine yards. Ok so it was just a kiss, but we were having fun, it didn't need to be one of those movie moments.

Everything caught up with me maybe twenty minutes or so later when I realized I had to pee. I excused myself and made my way to the restroom, which was packed. There were only two stalls and there were four women in front of me. The four women were clearly drunk. One of them was easily the loudest person I have encountered in a very long time. The two stalls opened up at almost exactly the same time. To my luck the four drunk women filed into a single stall. I entered the free stall, latched the door, hung my clutch up on the hook, checked my phone and my glasses were still in place and then finally, relief!

The four women were either olympic urination sprinters, or I'm crazy slow. They came out just after I did, four flushes to my one. I'm at one of the two sinks washing my hands when the extraordinarily loud lady hits me in the back really hard, causing me to lunge forward catching myself just before I hit the mirror with my head. Then she proceeded to push the bathroom attendant over, and fling her tray of towels, and all sorts of cleaning products all over the bathroom. This woman was beyond drunk, she was officially belligerent. She was yelling at me and the bathroom attendant for being in her her way. The lady was so loud that she didn't even hear the bathroom attendant call security in. I dried my hands and got out of there. As I was leaving, security came in an escorted her out of the club.

It wasn't until I got back out to the dance floor that I realized something had gone missing. Sure my back was a little sore from where I was hit, but something didn't feel right. I immediately grabbed my chest, only to feel that my glasses were no longer there. I ran back to the restroom, my partner Kristen following closely behind me. The stall I was in opened and I checked it, no glasses. I told the bathroom attendant what had happened and she helped us look. Nothing, my glasses were gone. I talked to security, they told me to call back the next day because they do a sweep of the club after hours looking for lost items. I was able to salvage the night at least. I didn't let the loss of my glasses ruin my night.

I called the club the next afternoon. By this time my eyes were hurting because I had gone the entire day without my glasses. I was so flustered recalling the events that I said it happened, yesterday April fourth. Ooops, I said April, not June! Argh! It's so frustrating because there were any number of decisions that I could have personally made that would have led to a different path than that night took. I could have left the glasses in the car. Sure the car could have gotten stolen and I still wouldn't have my glasses, but at least I wouldn't have lost them while they were in my posession. But I'm not going to focus on what I could have done differently, a person could go crazy thinking about that stuff. Instead I'll look at what led up to me getting knocked over in the first place, uncontrolled drinking.

I understand the allure of consuming alcohol. It make me feel really really good, and I know it does that a lot of people as well. I also know that I can feel it when I've had too much, that oh so pleasant feeling fades quickly. There's a difference between being drunk, and being shitfaced. The woman I encountered was two steps beyond shitfaced. What I'd really like to know is why the hell would someone want to keep drinking after they've hit the shitfaced mark? It really wouldn't surprise me if this woman got alcohol poisoning that night. And where the hell was security before she went to the bathroom. I know it's a loud club and everything, but if she was that bad in the bathroom, I can only imagine her up at the bar or on the dance floor. Where was security then? What the hell makes her think that just she was so fucking entitled to washing her hands first that she had to knock over two people just to get to an open sink. Some people just have absolutely no respect for anything, and that makes me really really sad. That lady is the kind of person who would run someone over with her car and then bitch about them leaving a dent. It makes me really sad to know there are a lot of people out there like this woman. Whats worse is that all they have to do is exercise a little self restraint. The world really would be a better place.

My true sentiments were echoed in the movie Men in Black. Agent Kay was talking to Edwards and he said "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." If aliens ever come to earth, we're getting invaded because as a whole, we do not represent intelligent life. It's all our fault too, because we put up with belligerent people in bathrooms who very likely cause us to lose our glasses.

The Smart Kitchen

I used to watch The Jetsons when I was a kid, by that time the cartoon was already around 20 years old, and next year it will celebrate it's 50th birthday. The Jetsons show cased some of the typical views of the future during the 60's. Cars that fly, robot maids, food that is prepared in seconds, and so on and so forth. I am afraid of heights, so the concept of a flying car kinda terrifies me. As far as robotic maids, we've already achieved the first stages ala the Roomba, an automatic vacuum.

What I really want to talk about is the futuristic kitchen concept, where food is prepared in seconds and the dinner table gobbles up the scraps. I'm not going to go off on the table that cleans itself up, sure it's a little scary, but it's also a little cool. It's the instant preparation of food that annoys me. It seems like we have been obsessed with the smart kitchen for decades. What set me off today was the news about the edible RFID tags. These things have been mentioned on countless tech podcasts and blogs. Renewed are the discussions of refridgerators that know when something is about to spoil, and androids and ovens that do all the prepwork on cooking for you, and even to the extreme the machine that reads your mind and materializes what you're thinking about as demonstrated in countless science fiction movies, tv shows, books, etc etc etc. All of these concepts drive me bonkers.

Put simply, I love to cook and I don't want to have to fight my oven for control. I don't care if the people who designed it think they can do a better job, I promise you, they can't. I'm not claiming to be some amazing chef or anything like that. Instead I rely on experiences, the experience of preparing, cooking, serving, and consuming. I'm sure a machine could learn that I like to put a little extra garlic and oregano in italian dishes, but it will never give me the pleasure of chopping an onion, or experimenting with my spaghetti sauce which is a modified version of my mothers recipe, which I'm sure she modified her mothers recipe. I seriously find a great deal of joy in the preparation and consumption of a meal. This is not because of some feminine duty or and horse pockey like that, I simply enjoy it, and I don't want technology messing with that experience very much.

Where I'd like to see the futuristic kitchen concepts go are towards energy efficiency. I'd love to see even higher efficiency refrigerators, and stoves that use less natural gas. Better yet, stoves using high efficiency convection surfaces. I'm not saying stop innovating on ways to make parts of the process more efficient, I happen to be a fan of electric blenders and mixers. I just don't want to the activity I love become utterly obsolete. And one other thing, I know for a fact that my partner does not particularly mind the source of her food, she's still going to enjoy it. But I know that she enjoys her food that much more when I'm the one who prepared it. On more than one occasion she has cooked using some of my recipes and not been happy with the result, but every time I cook for her, she gets a special little gleam in her eye. I'm not going to go all cheesy and say that's because I add a special ingredient called love, nope. The only thing that is different is that I deeply enjoy the process, and she recognises that. That is something that no machine will ever be able duplicate. I'd hate to admit it, but I think that really does mean that the secret ingredient is indeed love after all.