I was born nearly two months too early — this is relevant to being awkward, I promise — and due to that I have some strange symptoms that plague me to this day.
The most vehemently obvious of these is I am gluten intolerant.
Worry not dear readers; this isn’t going to be a long woeful diatribe about how awful it is not to be able to eat cookies and bread and croissants and brownies and pies and crackers and cake, OH MY BUDDHA ... CAKE.
Wait, what was I saying?
Anyhoo, as you can guess, my most unfortunate ailment makes for eating out or with anyone who is not aware of my condition a bit, shall we say, difficult.
I can always count on getting one of a few responses:
“Oh my god I’m so sorry!”
Why the concern, people? It’s not as if I have some sort of terminal illness.
Or, “HAH! Dude, your life sucks.”
To which I reply, “Uhh yeah..sure…kinda…I suppose.”
Finally, my personal favorite, “OK … so you pretty much can’t eat anything.”
And in truth, I really can't eat all that much.
When I said I’ve got some “strange symptoms” from not being cooked long enough in my mother’s baby basket, I forgot to mention that they are all related to my stomach.
Thus I give you, “Ana’s Fantastic and Wonderific List of Foods That Make Her Stomach Hate Her.”
Imagine me inhaling deeply right here and saying the next sentence all in one breath:
Foods high in sugars, salts, nitrates, preservatives, acids and fats, red meat, wheat, most uncooked vegetables, dairy products, peanuts and, last but not least, walnuts.
As you have most likely deduced, MY LIFE IS TOTALLY AWESOME.
The most awkward part about all these food aversions is that I’m not allergic to them — i.e. I can eat them without needing immediate EpiPen action, but if I do eat them, the consequences are…we’ll just say “unpleasant.”
So my response to the final inquiry listed above is usually something along the lines of, “Uh, I just ingested this huge gust of wind ... I'm stuffed.”
I mean, how am I supposed to explain all of this to every person that I am possibly going to have a chance of communing with? Maybe I should start carrying business cards with “The List” on them to hand out. Yeah, that would definitely balance out my strange quotient nicely.
Due to the fact that I have lived with these intolerances my whole life, I don’t find it all that difficult to acquire foods that I can actually eat. They just happen to be foods that most people don’t really, well, enjoy all that much compared to other foods.
For starters, I don’t think I have gone a day in the past seven years without consuming an apple. Apples are my staple food. If I could live off of just apples I would. If apples were a drug I’d be an addict. They’re the jam to my toast, the Sonny to my Cher, the zen to my garden, the apple of my eye … too much?
But, you get the point.
As for the whole “wheat dilemma,” most people have this stigmatized view of how gluten-free baked goods taste, and it’s not positive.
Gluten-free baked goods don’t taste like poo, people! Well, not the good quality ones at least.
OK, sometimes they do taste a bit…funky.
I’m really not helping my case.
But don't feel sorry for me. I'll carry on like a wayward son. I can just photosynthesize...yeah.
Have a fun filled dead week eve, my lovely readers. Eat ALL the yum-yums for me.
And of course, tallyho!
