Lately I’ve been eating very little. I suppose it’s got something to do with having no money. As my firend Mandy, the dietician says, “That’s one way to eat less.” But for some reason, I’ve been able to make do with less food. And eating less makes it easier to eat less, if that makes any sense. Sometime around Christmas I sliced carbs out of my diet altogether, just to see what all that fuss was all about. I lost weight, so I guess there’s a correlation there. But in the months since, and with an erratic financial status that sometimes makes it more practical to just get a taco at The Cactus taqueria on Vine, I’ve not been so good about keeping carbs at bay. It doesn’t matter. I’m not interested in getting all keto-happy with the funky breath and all the other benefits. I just wanted to cut them out where I didn’t need them.
But the way things have been going lately, there’s simply no room for anything resembling a menu plan. In fact, here’s what my refrigerator has looked like this week:
Pretty paltry. It looks like I should be starving, but of course, I’m not. I manage to get food from various quarters. I’ve got a little vat of meal replacement formula (cookies & cream flavor) that Boss gave me so I knew what product I was designing a webpage for. I wake up in the morning, mix a couple scoops o’ that stuff in with some protein powder and that last me until about one, at which point I make another one. Then hunger for real food settles in and I’ll fix a simple salad out of half of one of those prepack lettuce things (the Santa Barbara blend, which someone somewhere decided was butter lettuce and raddichio.)
The real problem comes later at Rocket. Blood sugar levels drop. I get ravenous. The only thing within arm’s reach are S’mores candy bars, Rice Krispy treats and jawbreakers. That’s fine for the short term. But once the rocketing blood sugar levels peter out, the crash leaves me a trembling dizzy-headed mess. When I get home I immediately scramble two eggs. I can afford eggs. In fact, I don’t know how Trader Joe’s keeps their egg prices so low; they sell them for about $1.69 when everyone else can’t seem to drop them below three bucks. Does Trader Joe’s have a chicken coop in back of the store? How does that work?
In times of plenty, I have chicken and vegetables. Sometimes I make a sizzling fajita feast with delicious onions, peppers and chicken strips, seasoned with pepper flakes and hot sauce so fiery that it stretches the meal out for about an hour and through three or four glasses of water. No tortillas. Sometimes I make a delicious oriental stir fry, which is exactly the same as the fajitas, only with soy sauce instead of molten lava hot sauce. No rice. But that’s only in times of plenty, which come around once every few months, and then only for about ten minutes.
It’s all kinda pathetic, and if I weren’t doing good work at the keyboard I would be worried. But it’s all part of being in the Hollywood game. I make my choices based on that. I certainly don’t have to toil away at the jobs I do, or focus on the craft to the near-exclusion of almost all else, but I do. The hope is that it’s not in vain.
And to prove to myself that I still do have something of a social calendar, Sara and I are going to do some exploring tomorrow. First up is a swing through Los Feliz. I want to show her the evidence I found the other day of the ongoing invasion:
…and then we’ll see if we can locate the one that’s supposed to be in Griffith Park. Then we’re off to LACMA to check out the Diane Arbus exhibit. We’ve been trying to make it for a month and a half now. It wraps up at the end of this month, so it’s gotta happen soon.
I’ll post some pics of that if I can.