#25 - kids these days.

the other night, i was on the phone with a good friend who lives on the other side of the country & we got to talking about how we always see kids these days round our respective cities guzzling red bulls & monster energy drinks & whatnot, leading us to believe that they either have no energy & need the drinks to function properly or that they are seriously amp'd all the time, which actually explains a lot of behavior i encounter on the subways. those kids are all full of sugar & guarana & roots & junk.

there's this triad of kids i've seen multiple times on the train. they have a boom box & they dance & clap & spin & flip the tiny one in the air & he kicks the ceiling when he hits the top of his arc, which usually brings at least one gasp & the attention of pretty much everyone in the car. those kids are probably sooooooooooo high on energy drinks & funding their habits by performing on the train. it explains a lot, actually.

when we were kids, we didn't have energy drinks & we were off doing sports & running around our suburban yards & going on scouting excursions just fine thank you. sure, now that i'm all grown up & perpetually tired from late nights & long days, i take in a lot of caffeine myself, occasionally in energy drink form, but i'm an adult, who can obviously handle my caffeine intake.

these are kids we're talking about though. where is the regulatory system/religious group who should obviously step in & speak out against such consumption? we're in an election season, people!

#25 - kids these days.
snack: smuckers uncrustables peanut butter & strawberry jam sandwich
drink: sparks

so it's saturday late afternoon/early evening & i'm feeling a bit run down from an early wakeup & the rare doing of things before noon & realizing i could go down one of two roads at this point. i could settle down for a couple hour nap & still have the evening ahead of me when i awake or i could guzzle the sparks that i bought on a whim the other night & ride the alcoholic energy drink snake. i chose the road paved with sparks, figuring that if i crash & burn once the caffeine & malt liquor has worked its way out of my system hours from now, so be it.

for me, sparks is a beverage that i often feel should not be. i liken the taste of a sparks to that of an orange willy wonka bottle cap, meaning that its flavor is fruity with a chalky, tooth-decay-enveloping aftertaste.

shortly after i moved to nyc, sparks was introduced to the city, specifically to hipsters & often in brooklyn. it was one of the first markets sparks was available in, i assume. i was going to a boatload of concerts at the time & quite often, there was free sparks available, to give hipsters a little shake to their step. now i think they just do coke instead.

anywho, if you drink more than one, you will probably get sick. one evening after work, i saw ted leo during cmj at the now defunct rothko. i didn't have time to grab dinner & was likely broke & so took advantage of the free sparks on hand. by the end of ted leo's set & my second sparks, i was 95% sure that some part of my stomach had eaten a less fortunate other part of my stomach. for a brief moment, i felt like i could identify with kurt cobain. luckily, tonight, i am older & wiser & only have one on hand.

along with the sparks, i'm snacking on a smuckers uncrustables peanut butter & strawberry jam sandwich. it tastes fine. it's basically what you'd get if yo moms made up a bunch of sandwiches one night all crispin glover style & then stored them in the freezer for you, rationing them out to you one at a time, asking you if you'd like a pb&j and when you say "yes," telling you to wait 30-60 minutes so she can thaw one out. maybe yo moms has a court order preventing her from using knives. if so, these smuckers joints are right up your alley.

#24 - beantown.

seriously, boston. sometimes i just don't give you the love you deserve, especially when it comes to your music scene. i was born in 74', which means that i was in high/school college when the notable boston/mass bands included the pixies, sebadoh, belly, morphine, the lemonheads, juliana hatfield, buffalo tom, the mighty mighty bosstones.

until much later, i didn't listen to any of them, save a buffalo tom song on the no alternative compilation. a recent girlfriend was shocked dumbfounded surprised that i had never listened to the pixies. luckily this was a few years prior to their reunion tour, so i was hip to that when it came round.

during my high school/college years, i was giving compton & seattle & york, pa a lot of my love, but my boston area bands were letters to cleo & dinosaur jr, a testament to my preference for pigtails & guitar soloing weirdos.

& then i moved to nyc (save five months in 06') and to me, the boston music scene became as familiar to me as the akron, oh music scene.

#24 - beantown.

snack: ghirardelli intense dark citrus sunset 60% cacao
drink: blueberry cobbler flavor new england coffee

seriously, that's how you spell that company's name? ghirardelli? c'mon? really? the letter combos make me afraid to even run that one through the spell check.

so tonight i was walking to pathmark to pick up a few things, including a snack for the evening and on my walk there, was listening to the new amanda palmer album (the videos are the best part!)...boston music...a boston artist who has been around since the beginning of the decade as half of the dresden dolls but who has flown under my radar until recently. it is officially my favorite album right now, with that okkervil river album coming in at second. alphabetically, it is the first album on my ipod, which means that if i just keep pressing the play button on my ipod all monkeylike, without really even paying attention, it goes to that album by default. the first note is loud & hurts my ears sometimes when i do that though. anyhow, maybe you should give it a quick listen or maybe you shouldn't.

...so i walked to the store listening to amanda palmer & anticipating a boston creme pie to snack on in celebration of boston. when i got to the store & went to the freezer section, i thought differently. boston creme pies are friggin' $8. f that. ain't nobody's birthday up in my apartment tonight.

so instead, i went the gourmet chocolate route with the ghirardelli (thank you cut & paste function) citrus sunset...cacao beans for beantown.

i needed to re-up on the coffee as well & to my delight, the bags of fresh ground new england coffee were on sale for as much as the run-of-the-mill pathmark brand, so i went for the blueberry cobbler flavor. new england represent. fruit represent.

the results...the chocolate is really good. it's dark chocolate with bits of orange and caramel crunch, all things i love. the coffee is also really good. so good that the two cups i've consumed should have me up into the morning with caffeinated bloodstreams. usually the caffeine doesn't have extreme effects, but right now, i'm amp'd, folks. oh, wait...

AMP'D.

...and a side beantown note...this is blog entry #24...the number worn by my favorite baseball player growing up & the owner of the one of the top moustaches in red sox history.

#23 - running on empty.

enough is enough. i will never again watch an episode of saturday night live. it is horribly acted, both by the guest hosts & the stable of actors. nobody cares enough, it seems. season premiere, folks. michael phelps, thanks for trying. couldn't we occupy this valuable time slot with something a bit less stale? lorne, are you steinbrenneresque in your vanity?

i'm sure michael showalter could come up with something. i hear judd apatow is hot.

#23 - running on empty.
snack: none
drink: water

if i was to eat anything right now, i would puke it up. that is how bad saturday night live is. it has killed my desire for snacking.

...i might as well have some water to calm my stomach. i don't feel that i can fully speak for chris farley, but i have to believe he is rolling over in his grave.

i rushed home from the bar for this. ick.

r.i.p.
s.n.l.

#22 - somebody's watching me/you.

over the first three months of eat! drink! snack!, i've kept an eye on the traffic to the blog, mainly to see if any strangers made their way to my blog & if possible, whether they stuck around or not. it also gives me a rough idea of who's reading out of the people i do know, which will come in really handy come xmas card time.

in monitoring the blog activity, i've come across one distinct fact...people really want to know about caliente corn nuts. over the past three months, i've had countless folks who have come to my blog because of a google search for the term. turns out my blog entry about them, corn nuts & the american dream, has made me the #2 entry on google for that search term. in my book, this makes me the official caliente corn nuts spokesgod. in numbers, 9 of the last 40 visits to the blog are from that alone. yesterday i had three separate caliente corn nut visitors, one who was from anchorage, ak & one who was from delaware & more specifically, a "STATE OF DELAWARE" ip address. i assume these are the two vice presidential candidates...and now i've likely made it worse by blogging about it a second time.

somebody from procter and gamble checked out an entry on their TOTALLY EXTREME product, screamin' pickle pringles.

i'm international. folks from israel, maldives, algeria, canada & new zealand have stumbled across the snack-related diatribes of a manboy in brooklyn.

crazy internet.

#22 - somebody's watching me/you.

snack: immaculate baking co. sweet georgia brownie triple chocolate chunk cookies
drink: cream-o-land dairy 1% milk

tonight's snack comes direct from hendersonville, nc's immaculate baking co. last night, on my way home from a focus group about public radio, i was at the local grocery store & must have felt "i've listened to way too much despairing public radio" bad about something...probably world peace or hunger or the "bridge to nowhere" lie and as a result, was no match for a box of cookies emblazoned with the words "cookies with a cause," "soul-cially responsible" and "chocolatey."

from what i can tell, these cookies' cause is creativity & more specifically the folk arts. as far as causes go, it's no rwanda, but can't everybody be paying attention to rwanda, which works out for folks (& their arts). the cookies themselves are organic, yummy & full of chips both white & black, an obvious nod to racial harmony.

milk. what more can i say about you? you do a body good. you can be found on the upper lips of celebrities. you might be really, really bad for me. you might not need to be pasteurized after all. you are only in my fridge because of coffee. you make these cookies better. you came from a third-generation company in new jersey. thanks for helping out with making other stuff better sometimes. 'preciate it.

#21 - x = _.

i listen to a lot of npr. you might call the amount of npr that i listen to in a given week "disgusting" or "irrational" or "humanly impossible," but i do it. it's just that, by nature, i'm curious about everything that's going on at all times everywhere. a typical week by my calculations:

all things considered (weekday) - 135 minutes x 5 days = 675 minutes
all things considered (weekend) - 50 minutes x 2 days = 100 minutes
all songs considered - 30 minutes x 1 day = 30 minutes
morning edition - 105 minutes x 5 days = 525 minutes
day to day - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
fresh air - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
news & notes - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
talk of the nation - 110 minutes x 5 days = 550 minutes
tell me more - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
weekend edition (saturday) - 105 minutes x 1 day = 105 minutes
weekend edition (sunday) - 105 minutes x 1 day = 105 minutes
car talk call of the week - 5 minutes x 1 day = 5 minutes
this american life - 60 minutes x 1 day = 60 minutes
studio 360 - 52 minutes x 1 day = 52 minutes

TOTAL - 3,217 minutes (53 hours) = 32% of my time

it's really not as hard as you might think to listen to this much npr. i have the ability to slap on a pair of headphones whilst at work, so i usually end up spending half my time there listening to npr. between walking, subway & whatnot, i usually get in another two hours of listening a day. then, the rest of my listening is done whilst at home, which comes out to...

3,217 minutes per week
work listening - 240 minutes x 5 days = 1,200 minutes
travel listening - 120 minutes x 7 days = 840 minutes
home listening - 1,177 minutes (19.6 hours per week/2.8 per day)

two facts you may have gathered about me:
1. i love math
2. i am slightly o.c.d.

#21 - x = _.
snack: e. frutti x-ray fish
drink: snapple goji punch

with my math, i've decided to break out the gummy x-ray fish that i got when i was up in boston weeks ago for the radiohead show. check out this (hastily photoshopped) bad boy:

obviously, everything gummy is good, so we don't even have to go there. the best part about gummy things is that they contain gelatin, which means that i'm getting my daily fill of connective tissue! yay! as you can tell, the skin comes off to reveal the best parts of the fish--the head, spine & tail. mmm. fish spine.

to wash this fishy down, i'm having a snapple goji punch. apparently a goji is basically a wolfberry & according to the back of the label, this fruit "just might be the world's most powerful food." why is it so powerful? according to the front of the label, the beverage offers immunity to the drinker. this excites me to no end. if i am ever attacked by infection, caught in a foreign land with contraband, or on a reality show, i am so going to drink another one of these. the bonus? it's tasty too.