Diane Mierzwik

October 11, 2009

This morning I made a list of food items to purchase at the grocery store, you know that piece of paper you leave in your car with your canvas bags but you are too lazy to walk back out to your car to retrieve – okay, I’m too lazy to retrieve.  Still, each week, I make a list and hope that by the act of writing down these items, even if I don’t have the list I will remember what I need (Chinese proverb – if I think about it, I forget it; if I hear it, I ignore it; if I write it down, I might remember it – I paraphrased a bit).

So after throwing away the science experiments in mold, I spied my virgin six pack of jello, as they have yet to be removed from their cardboard packaging though they are about four weeks old. Are they old maids by this time, I wonder.

I also wonder how I talked myself into purchasing jello. It’s not like I’m usually a sucker for slippery things. I don’t own a snake as a pet though the salesman at PetCo spent twenty minutes trying to convince me that given my lifestyle, a snake is a good pet.

What lifestyle is that, you ask. The middle-aged-too-busy-to-take-care-of-myself-let-alone-someone-or-something-else lifestyle. He kept telling me all I had to do was feed the snake a mouse once a month.

Which bring us back to that jello in my fridge. I was a sucker for that durned advertising – “Only 10 Calories” and the sense of relative ease a package of jello would bring to my life. I created this scene in my head how when I got home from work, I would be hungry and eating 10 calories of jello would do the trick. Because I barely have time to take care of myself, jello would make a great snack and I would be skinny eating it.

Which brings us back to that snake. Another selling point was how many calories I would burn handling the snake.

“When your body is on high alert, you burn more calories,” PetCo saleman responded when I mused that perhaps a dog would better suit me, since I could take it for walks and burn calories at the same time.

Which brings us back to my lifestyle … I left off part of it. Here it is again – the middle-aged-too-busy-to-take-care-of-myself-let-alone-someone-or-something-else-so-I’m-pudgy lifestyle. I thought, hey if I get a dog, I might force myself to take care of it, and also take care of myself while I was at it.

Which bring us back to that jello. Did you know that in that 10 calories is fruit? Okay, fruit juice. Okay, fruit coloring. That has to be good for me – right?

Still the jello sits in my fridge. When I get home from work and search through my kitchen for a snack, I mostly just wish I had stopped at the vending machines at work before leaving and drink a glass of water. Even water is better than jello to me.

Despite the “Only 10 Calories” I can’t bring myself to eat something that slips and slides in my mouth, that I can’t bite into and – if I’m not careful – will slip from my spoon onto who knows what. Too stressful for not enough reward.

Though I wonder, do snakes eat jello? I know dogs will. They’ll eat anything. They’ll love anything, even a middle-aged-too-busy-to-take-care-of-myself-let-alone-someone-or-something-else-so-I’m-pudgy woman.

So I added chocolate pudding to my grocery list. It has only 60 calories. I might actually eat it, enjoy it and my pudginess.