I dislike long introductions, so...
Onwards, to how I willingly became a passive-aggressive food-hoarding queen:
Me: 22, young, impressionable, trying to get rid of the last 20 pounds before ideal weight. Still have a knack for certain junk foods, especially if spicy. Also buy a lot of food I forget about until I get hit by a craving three months later (relevant).
Lilac: my portly apartment-mate, a wonderful girl, but fatlogic up to her teeth. Shamed by her family for being fat and so hides her disordered eating habit. Also in the tendency to steal food and (only partially) replace it at a later date.
On a fateful summer day I came back from work a desiccated husk of overheated, overworked and underpaid grad student. It's already 9 PM and I hadn't had anything to eat since noon, because work was hell, school was hell and I just wanted to curl up into a foetal ball and munch on my Goddamned pack of vinegar chips/crisps and boiled frankfurters.
I put myself on auto-pilot, start the water and trudge on the five steps to our pantry to find...the snack shelf empty. WTF? I know for a fact that two weeks ago I had bought six small packs of vinegar chips, two bags of hard candy and one pack of those small pretzelish things. I hadn't had any of these!
"Lilac, you awake?" I said and promptly the most enticing aroma of (you guessed it) lilac entered my nostrils as my roomie waltzed out of her den, all flowery in disposition.
"Yeah...oh, don't bother looking for chips and stuff, they expired so I threw them away. I told you to stop buying things and leaving them around forever." and I swear to you, she could have been painted on the Sistine chapel with that angel face on.
I feel the righteous fury of Adrestia, our patron goddess of retribution, but clamp my yap shut and proceed to the refrigerator. Wherein, my curvaceous beauties, I only find one last frankfurter buried between the manifold veggies I (still) owned. Disgruntled, but not yet tipped over the edge, I proceed to boil it and eat it grudgingly with sub-grade mustard, while Lilac and I chatted away about our day.
Surely, she probably threw the others away because, indeed, they were beginning to feel less-than-fresh. Right? Right?
This goes on for a couple of more weeks, while I start to get the stinkin' feeling that she's not quite as religious as I thought about keeping the pantry and fridge clean of food that's trying to evolve. My first clue were two suspicious candy wrappers in her room, then packs of crisps hidden away carefully in our trash. Then packs and packages of things reappearing when I'd given up on them (e.g. two Oreo sleeves suddenly becoming three again)
All of this while she earns more than me and is supposedly dieting alongside with me. Worst of all, I was just restricting calories, she was on this full-fledged Dukan diet that is very carb-restrictive.
So I come up with a plan, I think up a stink and I think it up quick. I love me some weird cuisine (as if frankfurters and chips didn't weird you out already) and have a love-hate relationship with wasabi coated peanuts. She did not know what those were. * cue evil laughter *
So I bought a little tin of those pain-inducing pleasures, took the top off and left them on the table with the plastic lid on, nestled in between the salt and pepper shakers. I do that quite a lot with regular peanuts and just forget about them for days, so this was standard behaviour for me. Then I popped into my room to devour books.
Not twenty minutes in, my darlings, I hear the most righteous banshee wail that ever graced my aural canal. It was as if thousands of buttholes screamed and then puckered up in expectation of wasabi-fueled hatred spewing out in 24 hours.
"Lilac, what's wrong? What happened?" I literally trip over myself to go to the kitchen and I see my roomie with her head either alternatively in the sink or chugging milk straight out of the carton, while there's a green mess on the table.
"I can't believe you tried to poison me! What the hell were those things?"
I calmly amble to the faucet, turn the tap off, look her in the eyes and smile:
"My food. Stop eating it."
It was glorious, it was beautiful and it was what the goddess of retribution demanded. I'd like to say that there was some huge, significant fallout but no, we're both adults and we sat down to discuss what had happened once our tempers cooled down. She finally opened up to me about her secret eating and apologised for stealing my food.
And so we progressed from mere people sharing an apartment to friends...
TL;DR: Moral of the story: don't steal food from starving grad students, but do be a good lad/lass and apologize when you've done it.
Submitted April 19, 2015 at 09:22PM by LaGordette http://ift.tt/1It1uHR fatpeoplestories
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