Double Shot Kickoff Spectacular

I've been meaning to start this blog for a while now, but since I have an inordinate amount of time to do things on the interwebs, and because I feel that to wait a few days and not include these particular entries would be a disservice to my future loyal readers, today is the day.

This posting is a bit of a whodunnit. You see, I spent much of yesterday asleep, but not in the good, "Saturday afternoon, lying in the sun, dreaming I'm a cat" way. No, more in the "I have thrown up everything I've tried to eat all day and barely have the strength to close my eyes" kind of way. As we go through my list of things I ate, see if you can guess what actually caused my gastric distress.

Day 1
To start, for breakfast I toasted two Trader Joe's blueberry waffles, then "buttered" them fairly liberally with Country Crock churn style margarine while still hot, and then, once the butter had melted, I drizzled on some Log Cabin syrup, just so much that it would soak in with the butter and not drip (very much) when eaten as a sandwich, which is how I ate them with a succulently thick slice of Easter ham in the middle that I had just pan-fried without oil in my glorious 8" nonstick pan to which nothing really ever does stick except magnets.

As I was preparing all of this, I was practicing composing unwieldily run-on sentences in my head to narrate the actions of my life as well as eating the last of a big tub of Stonyfield Farms cream-on-top whole milk yogurt that I’d used a week and a half ago to make a vanilla-sage sauce to top a goat cheese spread. There was only about a third of the tub left and I was about to dive right in with a spoon, figuring whatever I didn't eat should probably get thrown away, when I thought "Why not just chug it straight from the container and not dirty the spoon?" I'm very green at heart.

So chug away I did, and two or three gulps down I noticed a fizzy tartness that wasn't there before, reminiscent of champagne. I decided it was probably best to throw the rest away, and by that time my sandwich was ready and I was out the door to work.

It was my first day at this assignment, and I was glad to have been placed right next to the microfridge full of water bottles. I had three throughout the day. I really should drink more water, but I'm going to start refilling the same bottle at the water fountain. I'm so green (imagine the national average shade of back yards in late October).

I wasn't feeling very hungry so I volunteered for the late lunch shift at 2PM. By about 12:30 I was starting to regret that decision, though, so that afternoon I ate two Sarris's chocolate eggs, half a cupcake my girlfriend got me from some specialty place in the lower west side, and a s'mores flavored granola bar.

My girlfriend had said that it was a cherry cupcake and that it had skittles on top of the icing. The skittles part was certainly true, though they'd started to melt into the icing and became more like skittles sauce than the hard-coated fruitrocks I used to pit against each other in shell-to-shell combat during lunch breaks of yore.
The cupcake had become quite messy from having bounced around by bag since about 9PM the night before, and I couldn't use my usual method of squeezing all the gooey stuff from inside the bag into my mouth like a tube of toothpaste because the cupcake wrapper prevented even squeezing and seemed determined to come out before any delicious cupcakeicingskittlessauceooze.

I ate about half of the cupcake by trying to peel the plastic bag open enough to not get icing on my rather large nose while still eating. Then I noticed it was not a cherry cupcake at all, but a funfetti cupcake. I was a little disturbed that my girlfriend would buy me a funfetti cupcake, although the skittles topping choice (yellow, orange and green, not red) did make a lot more sense. I decided to bring up the funfetti question with my sigoth later and set the cupcake aside until I could get a spoon from the cafeteria.

But at 2PM I received one of those special calls that sets some temping assignments above the rest, the announcement of free food. After the weekly faculty luncheon, the rest of the staff are invited up to eat what is left over. This is a better spread than it may seem, as they order from Whole Foods and always get way more than the professors can eat, obviously planning to feed the rest of the faculty as well.

I went up to the conference room on the 3rd floor and dug in to a roast beef sandwich on panini to which i added a roasted red pepper and some swiss cheese from the tappenade assortment. I also had some pita chips with the olive spread, humus and baba ganoush. The baba ganoush was not so good.

Then I ate a piece of fresh mozzarella because who can resist fresh mozzarella? (Not me.) I had a small, chocolate covered biscotti and then a strawberry for desert.

Then I went to the other end of the table and had some garlic sprouts, some cheese ravioli in olive oil with diced peppers and a waldorf salad-esque mixture of chicken, walnuts, red grapes, celery and red onions in this cream sauce. They appear to be in the yogurt camp and not the mayonnaise camp of waldorf dressiers. That waldorfy stuff was so good I had two rather large portions.

Then, because they were going to get thrown away anyhoo, I took a turkey and brie sandwich and a fresh mozzarella, basil and tomato sandwich for dinner later. I also threw a few cookies in my bag and took a glass of coke down to my desk to help me buzz through the rest of the afternoon. I ended up eating the mozwich during breaks at UCB's Harold Night and tossed the brieturkwich in the fridge when I got home.

End Day 1
WARNING: Day 2 has more description of food coming out than going in, so you may want to skip the next 5 paragraphs if you want to spare yourself the details.

That brings us to yesterday. I started off not feeling so hot, kind of hungover. When I sat down for my morning movements I broke out in a sweat which is my body's usual signal that I'm dumping poisons and I might want to consider a pre-emptive regurgitation. I managed to get through a shower and felt well enough to get dressed and head back to work though I wasn't hungry at all.

At work I thought I should maybe try to eat something, so I bought a banana and a croissant. Opening the bag for the croissant I was assaulted by the smell of it and couldn't bring myself to eat. Despite waves of nausea and pain and several trips to the bathroom for very small amounts of diarrhea, I managed to get through more work than they'd given me all day Tuesday. I tried to focus on work and let my GI problems work themselves south.

Things just weren't coming to pass, as it were, and by 10:30AM I was spurred to run to the bathroom again and induce myself to vomit in the thankfully empty public toilets across the hall from my office. Someone did come in towards the end, though, and my apprehensions about puking at work stifled the last throes before I could fully discharge all of the offensive contents of my innards.

For those of you keeping a score card, the culprit seemed to be the free food from the luncheon, as the most identifiable elements in the bowl seemed to be pieces of garlic sprout and red pepper.

I managed to shake it off, rinse my mouth, and a few breath mints later I was back to proofreading a paper on financial regulation agencies. I tried to settle my newly swept stomach with the banana and croissant. The croissant went down very well, but the banana didn't feel so good. Sadly, sometime around 1:30PM I had a repeat upheaval and decided that I should go home early if possible.

Thankfully my supervisor is a kind and benevolent man and he let me go without the slightest hint of disappointment. I spent most of the afternoon sleeping and wallowing in nausea so I didn't eat much of anything, though I did drink a little gatorade. Later that evening I managed to get down some more of the banana and some gatorade, but by 7:30PM, I'd thrown that up too.

If you are ever likely to throw up, I recommend banana and lemon-lime gatorade. Maybe because it was the third time I'd thrown up that day and I was running out of bile, or maybe it was because I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when I accidentally gagged myself and couldn't settle the rumblings, but I think that was the most pleasant tasting vomit I have ever discharged. There was none of the usual nasty after-vomit tooth-fuzz, which is funny because I usually get a similar kind of fuzz from bananas. You know what I mean?

Anyway, I did manage to eat about a tablespoon of the rice that my lovely girlfriend came and made for me before passing out when she left around 8PM.

OK, GROSS STUFF OVER

So up until the point where I passed out here, I was pretty sure that the waldorfy chicken salad had done me in, although the mozwich that had sat in my bag for at least 5 hours and who-knows-how-long before I lifted it from the faculty's refuse was a prime contender as it was the last thing I actually ate before symptoms set in. The sparkling yogurt didn't really come to mind until later, when I really started to catalogue what I'd eaten that day.

It turns out, though, that it was none of these, nor the ham that had been unrefrigerated on my return train ride across Pennsylvania or the funfetti or even the skittlessauce.

My mother called me to check in on me around 9PM. I'd earlier told her my symptoms because she is a nurse and so hopefully she can tell me when I'm about to die of meningitis so that I have enough time to write my tragic last-minute opus, if not seek out medical attention. She said that my father had the exact same symptoms and that it was likely a stomach virus that we had contracted over the weekend. This is strange since the last time I talked to my father was Sunday night before I went to bed, and the symptoms didn't start until Wednesday morning.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that even if you have contracted a stomach virus, you may not know about it for a few days, but eating sparkling yogurt or tepid waldorfy food items is probably not in your best interest anyway.

Come back tomorrow to find out what I ate today.