In Which I Try A Diet

This is dessert now.

What a world.

I woke up this morning with a Google Offer in my email box, which is sort of a non-shitty version of what Groupon, ScoutMob and all of those other companies have quickly become.

What it offered me (and what I took) was a chance to spend 10 bucks for 20 bucks worth of brownies at Fat Witch Bakery.

Now, I was still excited for this, but as I hobbled over to redeem my coupon with crutch-bowler Matt Chao, who’s house-sitting my parents’ apartment, it occurred to me, I didn’t even know when I’d ever be able to eat a brownie again.

Maybe I should back up. This is all so much for me. So many changes.

Even as I write this right now, my hypoglycemia is flaring up causing me to feel dizzy and strange, like some sort of sense of primal danger, no doubt caused by the carb-reduction of the diet I’m on, meaning I haven’t had a wheat, rice or corn product in over 24-hours, nothing with sugar added either.

My body must think something strange is going on as I attempt to trick it into digesting all the crap in front of my ribs and stomach. This was not the plan it thinks.

I think that too.

***

I used to tell people that I have a semi-hedonistic philosophy of eating and life, pretty much, too.

Do things that make you feel good, it goes, trying to adjust that directive for things that will eventually make you feel bad.

For instance, it might feel good to eat all of my delicious Alfanoose Chicken Shawarma platter at once, stuffing gob after gob of Chicken, cracked wheat, hummus, hot sauce and pita into my face and belly, but near immediately after, I feel stuffed and awful.

As simple of a realization as this is, it’s one I definitely didn’t realize until at least 18-19.

So, I had been growing in this pattern reaching ever so tentatively toward the future in my “what would make you feel worse” adjustments.

I realized my own latent lactose-intolerance and cut down on my dairy intake. I started eating smaller meals in shifts or phases in stead of eating one dinner, splitting up into multiples.

Always, I’d err on the side of that semi-hedonism if it teetered. Better to try the dessert or someone else’s food, or the new cart or shop on the block you were exploring, better to gain that knowledge and have the potential for discovery or transcendent experience.

Obviously, this is also a lot more difficult when applied to life and relationships and all the rest. The future of a job choice or classes or move is much less fixed than knowing how you’re going to feel when you eat something.

But the philosophy is the same: go with your instincts, do what seems fun, but also consider what might not be over time, as a ratio.

(I’m fond of ratios.)

So what could change this philosophy? What could cause me to seek some change, or a diet? As many have noted who know me well, a diet seems particularly ill fitting for someone who is frequently labelled a “foodie”.

The prompt was as epic as the world, a universal theme shared around countries and nations, repeated clandestinely from caves to huts to tall buildings, over the long arc of human history. Among all things that divide us, what drove me was something elemental, striking and true:

I had a bad date.

***

Actually, the dates themselves were pretty good.

We talked for a few hours. We made plans after the first date. We both were excited. We laughed at some funny shows. We even did some kissy stuff (that last part makes me feel pretty cool).

But at this Live WTF with Marc Maron taping, that I attended four beers deep after running through Alphabet City and Park Slope, out of breath, annoyed at the subway and somewhere in the back of my mind wondering if my ex was going to be there, I got a text message saying that “we should just be friends”.

I had many feelings about this text message. On one level, I was relieved and thankful. I wrote a gooddam article about this stuff, clarity and all that. This was an ending, I didn’t have to worry about what she felt about me, what I felt about her. I didn’t have to decode our last date, looking for clues. It was clear and it was over. And if she’s not attracted to me, it’s much better that I know than her trying to awkwardly work it out herself the next time we meet.

On another level, fuck her.

We met on an online dating site, she’s saying to me that’s she’s not into me, but she wants me to be her “friend”? How shitty and emasculating is that? No one being honest with themselves joins an online dating service to make friends, they join it to find someone, to get fucked, or to send naked pictures of themselves to strangers and everything in between.

The thought that you’re asking me to be your “friend” reveals an amazing assumption that I frequently see when talking to women, namely, that the same person who finds that yin/yang of mind/body in you appealing enough to make an asshole out of themselves pursuing, would just be cool helping you move things or taking care of your cat.

It’s an assumption of astonishing vanity to assume that someone who seeks you out on a dating website is also in the market not to be dating you.

It was in this state, receiving my first “let’s just be friends” since the age of 17, at a show run by Marc Maron, a man who open antagonizes happiness and constantly brings up his weight, that I decided, much like I did when I started dressing better and taking care of myself 4 years ago (after much-worse lady issues), to turn to the funny friend beside me who’d invited me to the show, show him the text message and ask him for more advice on how he lost 120 pounds.

I just needed to lose 20. Just to know that I could look better and possibly have enough dates to not care about this sort of shit.

Also, for anyone at that taping or who hears it later, Seth Meyers was pretty boring.

My opinion.

***

So that’s how I ended up on a carb-restrictive diet, eating “No Sugar Added” Fudgsicles.

I can’t remember the last time I’d had one. It tasted pretty good, though as my “sweet treat” for Phase 1, I am allowed one of them per night.

Huzzah.

When I went in to get my brownies from Fat Witch, including a special PB+J “Google for You-gle” Brownie that came with my coupon, I ended up balancing them to get a bunch of the “baby” brownies thinking that whenever I did get in that next stage of the diet, maybe they’d let me eat the small brownie, since I didn’t know if I’d have the self-control not to eat the big one.

My therapist is of the opinion that I’m not fixated on my ex, which I worry about sometimes, but rather that I’m fixated on the idea of having love in my life.

“Before you had a relationship,” She told me. “You had a hole in your life, but you didn’t know what a relationship could be, so it wasn’t so big. The one you had was loving and full and unexpected. So, it’s only natural that when it leaves, it leaves you with a bigger hole than before, now that you’ve experienced what you can have.”

The whole thing sounds like it could be about butt-sex, but it’s true.

In doing this diet, which on the second (first official) day I have not yet broken, my friend told me to keep my reason in mind for doing it. That that would help me from breaking.

“To feel good.” I told him. “To feel better.”

In the only two days since I’ve started and since I’ve told people about the diet, I have people telling me on all sides it’s not enough, talking to me about lifting weights or bicycling or rock climbing or just cardio. My book recommends 20 minutes walking a day, which I already get, but everyone else tells me more.

When I confronted my friend Bobby about why he offers this advice now he said:

“Well, before your philosophy was not giving a fuck. And I guess there’s some respect for it. But now that you do, well, you should do it right.”

Such arguments seem well-founded but have yet to have had an effect on me. I’m not a superman like my friend Frank, who wears an armlet that tells him that his metabolism has so increased that he burns 4000 calories a day just walking around.  I’m not skinny or immune to food, like some of my friends. I’m not even that down or unhappy about who I was before.

I guess, in a way, that dumb fucking text message at the Marc Maron show brought me back to the biggest fear of my life: the regression into “Loser Nick”, the Nick from high school and middle school, the Nick who hated and protected, who stood no chance of finding love or happiness outside of an occasional weekend in Park Slope, an occasional trip to China Town or, later, a night holed up in Sam Carey’s apartment drinking crappy Rolling Rock and not knowing what to say.

I don’t want to be that person.

I want to know that I can love and be loved in return.

I want to feel good about myself, or feel better.

I felt like something should change.

So I grabbed some Fudgsicles from Gristede’s on my way home from a show.

I packed them into my mostly broken mini-freezer one-by-one.

I took one and had it, last night.

And it was good.

And it was.

***

If you wondering what my last meal for a while as a carb-eating free-man looked like, it looked like this.

It’s from the “Village Pourhouse” truck, which sounded pretty ludicrous to me as a truck did not sell beer should not call itself a “pourhouse”.

But what can I say: I wasn’t full after the Bistro Truck’s free but calorie-light turkey burger giveaway and this was 5 dollars.

What it is, is what you see, a small-ish Buffalo Chicken Slider and what appears to be some beer-battered french-fries, large wedges with a crunchy-ish crust.

For a pretty ridiculously premised food truck, the food was pretty good and befitting the last dance of a pre-diet fix.

My sense is that they should charge 7 dollars for 2 buffalo chicken sliders and fries and then they’d be in business.

Right now, as they themselves admit, they were just taking out the truck to see if it worked.

But for just food that’s bad for ya, but doesn’t taste bad.

Well, you want that sometimes too.

Even if I can’t eat it.

***

FAT WITCH BAKERY

$10-for-$20 Google Offer, including a “PBJ-for-You-gle” Witch- Here’s the link

In Chelsea Market (9th Ave bet 16th and 17th Sts)

ACE to 14th St-8th Ave

***

VILLAGE POURHOUSE TRUCK

Buffalo Chicken Slider w/Beer-Battered Fries- $5

Really no idea for location. I hope I see them again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Big DSing

For all of my moaning and complaining about the tumult and inadequacies of my continuing (perhaps even inaccurately named now) post-collegiate existence, my weeks and days can really be divided up into two categories:

When I have a video game I’m playing and when I don’t.

Those weeks I don’t are sometimes more intellectually productive or cathartic. When there’s no video game in my pocket, there’s no doubt that the week’s New Yorker will be consumed like a freshly toasted hoagie; quickly and with sadness that it’s gone. Perhaps I’ll find a book and latch on to it, or even read a play, which tend to be shorter and easier to get through, with their sparse barbed dialogue, without sacrificing the intellectual imprimatur of the Young Man Reader.

But the weeks I am playing video games, I have something else that is tangible: peace of mind. I know I’ll never go without stimulation, without distraction, forced to feel the world and feelings I’d rather not experience (my ex, my sister, my lack of any real job or sense of what might be my career, etc…). In the improv class I took last weekend with guru Dave Razowsky, he spouted at us Buddhism-isms, applicable to improv, one of which was that “lack of acceptance is the root of all suffering.” If such is true, so be it. But video games make for pretty good Tylenol for such suffering then, floating you by even if you know the crash might come.

There also the sense of the lack of “kick” the world has, that threat of impending “being” one faces with its disappointments. In improv classes (among a LONG list of others), I often turn to my phone, not because there is any sort of interesting thing to experience, but usually because to be present is to face your own discomfort in being you, to accept your writing for its flaws, your acting or comedy for its misses. Instead of being present where you are vulnerable, you’re back in that screen, your mind in another world.

Much has been said, I feel, about the part of our brains we’d lost upon the advent of the first Blackberry: the organizational part, remembering dates and calendars, sacrificed upon the altar of more reliable electronic notifications, a buzz in your pocket, instead that feeling of unease or remembrance in our heads. Now appointments are like childhood memories, faded into the background, unsure, as we turn to our phones or cloud-electronic calendars for confirmation of what our own memory cannot tell us.

Is there something to be said then about our emotions, our beings, the rest of ourselves being there? When I go elsewhere to protect myself, into my phone, where does the rest of me go? Does it atrophy, like those memories?

I’m not sure, I can say, nor do I think such thinking might change my behavior, just as the recognition of it hasn’t seemed to throughout the years. Even if we know our memories of dates and times will fade, the phone storing them is more convenient, more reliable, more of an extension of the self. I don’t intend to give such things up and when I hear people forgetting their phone, I feel in shock, as if someone just said “I forgot my arm.”

I don’t know how much of me I’ve lost or am losing or where I go or what I’ll become, which was my state of life without thinking of electronica.

I do know though, that now that I have a Nintendo 3DS, I carry a little virtual being, a “Mii” around in my pocket, named Nicky, a facsimile of me. As I pass people on the street, my Mii is beamed to whoever else has a 3DS as there’s is beamed to mine and when I next open my machine, I see their small facsimiles, their electronic selves meeting me on a virtual grassy plaza somewhere.

We shake hands. We interact. We share twitter-sized greetings. And then they stand in my plaza, for as long as I’d like, to play games with, to interact. They reappear in other games, like confabulated dreams.

Who is that other self, that Nicky?

And what does he have of me?

***

Keith Haskel drew this picture of me on a table in Williamsburg with crayons provided for children.

Well, children or the overgrown children that make up the hipsters of the area.

As we sat down for a brunch I owed him as part of a remunerative effort for missing out on his birthday party, a young woman stopped me, recognized me and invited me to join her at her table.

“Thanks,” I told her. “I’m flattered. But I’m here with a friend.”

Keith made arms up as if I should “take her”, but I smiled and she walked off.

The event was unexpected, but somewhat frequent even as my expiration date passed as part of the airing of my reality show appearance. It is perhaps testament to Ms. Frankel and her popularity that I am still stopped on the street as an implied member of her totemic circle.

“Duder, you just gotta play it up for all it’s worth.” Keith said doodling. “Use it. Use it for something.”

“What?” I replied incredulously. “Improv shows? I think even people who like me on TV don’t want to come see me do 1900s-era Austrian-play-inspired improv on the second floor of a methadone clinic.”

“Sorry,” Keith replied. “Didn’t hear that. Was too busy drawing this picture of you surrounded by a floating FEITCLUB hashtag.”

Seeing Keith doodling reminded me that while I had no idea what to do with this suddenly still-lingering pseudo-fame, that I still expected to drop at any moment, Keith Haskel was the sort of man who could have spun Bravo-fan Twitter followers into gold.

Keith had the sort of drive and energy I always admired out of film school, working on the funniest shows with up-and-comers like Human Giant and Delocated, taking time off school when necessary and getting hired repeatedly by Viacom and Adult Swim for both his funnies and his professionalism.

What’s more, doing these full-time stay till-9pm gigs, he managed to put out a sketch or viral video every month or two to his awesome website, as well as somehow becoming friends with street artists, leading to his footage being used in Exit Through The Gift Shop.

When I encountered him doodling, he was taking a hiatus just to write, not in the sort of way that people do it, depressed, miserable and mostly unemployable, in a post-collegiate haze, but as some sort of Writing-cation, to see what he could make or learn in the time before “The Man” came knocking back on his door.

As it did, Keith got promoted and rehired to a TV gig that doodling day and when we ate our food, he just kept throwing ideas out for sketches, for editing things he’d made before, for whatever could be of his in this real world.

As we got a little buzzed and went to see Rob-Beardo Malone’s screening of Puppy Whistle, it felt nice to unwind with someone who contained so much energy.

“Duder, you just got to not worry, every once in a while. Just keep doing what you’re doing and mostly ladies and some men will keep stopping you in the street for pictures. Life is great!” Keith exclaimed.

And wandering around the blocks with him to the Anthology, waiting for a Malone-filled movie it kind of was.

Until I saw my ex on screen, in the film we’d starred in together, Rob’s film.

But moments like that, they exist, but they don’t erase everything else.

Even if you think so, at the time.

***

In my recent adventures in food-blogging (“For what? For who?”), I have found somewhat irk-some-ly, that my stomach space is no longer entirely my own.

While this might seem like a slight or trivial thing to you, or even a luxury, in my own massive indecisive adventurousness of lunch-hunting (often the high point of the day), you might understand such a let down.

While I don’t have any excuses or any explanations (those are owned by others), I can tell you that I sneak a meal when I can.

And one of those meals snuck was, luckily enough, from the Bistro Truck.

The Bistro Truck was a place I had been jones-ing to go since I saw them inexplicably parked outside McNally Jackson as some sort of culinary accompaniment to a New Yorker festival book-signing.

That day I was just on break from work, I ordered a special, it was too expensive (but good), but STILL– I felt that I had not experienced the true essence of the truck.

Imagine my surprise then, without seeking it out, in-between writing-motivated meals, I found the truck in its (I later learned) constant location, off Union Square, serving up its tasties.

Despite minimal room, I couldn’t resist the 6-buck Dijon Chicken, cooked in the nominal mustard and craime fraiche, served over cous-cous or rice (“COUSCOUS ARE YOU CRAZY” I told the amused truck-man.) with a nice spring-greens salad on the side.

This was no Chicken and Rice Halal-Food dinner.

Instead what I found were the nuanced French-Moroccan flavors of the truck, with subtle spices standing in for obnoxious hot sauce, mayonaise/yogurt nowhere to be found, and delicate cous-cous absorbing every bit of the jus the Chicken came in and stirring in well, for bit-coated goodness. That the salad had a well-thought-out vinaigrette was not lost on me, either.

When I was done with it, I found myself, over-full and over-content, resting in my back-meshed chair and submitting to yet another Netlflixed X-Files episode.

The pounds would be worried about later.

I’d put them on my virtual Mii.

***

BISTRO TRUCK

Dijon Chicken w/Couscous and Side Salad- $6

5th Avenue bet. 16th and 17th Sts. (Mon-Sat 11:30-6:30 only)

NQR456L to 14th St Union Sq. 1 to 18th St.