Still feeling un-wordy. Many things on my mind lately – the hours and hours I spend in bed (14 hours between Friday and Saturday, 12.5 hours between Saturday and Sunday); the guy who got evicted from his apartment upstairs yet now lives with the nice lady next door, who sits outside all the time and drinks and smokes and tries to say ‘hi’ to everyone who walks by in a really creepy manner; how little I actually use my computers to do something creative; how freakin’ cold it is; how hard it is to run in the cold and how that’s affected my weekly miles; my super-cool new running shoes; what to do with my tax refund – and by ‘what to do’ I mean the best way to keep me from spending it all on strippers and pizza; how much teevee I’ve been watching since I got a DVR…
..oh, my, that sounds like depression, doesn’t it? Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. I just feel unsocial and un-wordy. My brain is filled (metaphorically speaking) with images and feelings, a stew of mostly-negative but some positive emotions, and the effort of converting those into words, and the words into movements of my fingers on a keyboard, just seems beyond me lately.
Maybe this is normal for February. I’ll keep running when I can, and just keep plugging away at work, and spending time with my friends when I can, and it will sort itself out.
And maybe it’s high fructose corn syrup.
Have you heard of this? It’s chemically- and enzymatically-enhanced corn juice. Some say it’s bad for us in ways we’re only beginning to comprehend. It’s cheaper to make, in the US, because of all the corn subsidies from the Feds, and it has a longer shelf-life than cane sugar, so I know this: that shit’s in everything.
I did some grocery shopping this morning, and one of the items I wanted to stock up on was more jam for my breakfast toast. I normally buy the generic label raspberry, but I’ve had that for a while, so instead went looking at labels. And I had HFCS on my mind.
Hmmm… the jam I normally buy has HFCS listed as the second ingredient. Why would they add a sweetener to fruit? Seemed odd. Same story with the blackberry and strawberry jams. I realized that there’s a difference between “jam”, “jelly”, “preserves” and “topping”. At least, they’re all labeled differently, even though I couldn’t see a difference. They pretty much all had fruit, water, HFCS, and preservatives.
You’d think that, say, Smucker’s “Simply Fruit” preserves would be, oh, I don’t know, simply fruit? Maybe a little water? You’d be wrong, my label-reading friend. In fact, Smucker’s “Simply Fruit” preserves include fruit, water, preservatives, and both HFCS and corn syrup. Why would it need both?
I moved to the ones labeled “organic”. Instead of HFCS, they listed “cane sugar” (probably good) or “organic sugar”. What the hell is “organic sugar”? Since I didn’t have an internet connection there in the aisle, I couldn’t look it up. I still haven’t, mostly ’cause at that point I punted and didn’t buy any preserves.
Meh. That’s how I’m feeling these days; every time I start to take an action, it gets complicated, and I end up not taking any action at all.