Hunger knows no friend but its feeder.

Breakfast on the train: two pieces of toast with peanut butter and banana. I also had another bottle of Hannaford Kiwi Strawberry Sparkling Water. A bite of blueberry muffin left over from the Sunday evening's dinner at Cracker Barrel, and one stale leftover pancake.

A lukewarm Snapple, light green flavor.

I felt nauseated before my optometrist appointment, so I stopped a Starbucks at Copley Place to pick up a sandwich (tarragon chicken salad) and an Izze (clementine).

Lunch was a windfall sourced by J.: a cup of diet Coke, a slice of cheese pizza from Bertucci's, and a room-temperature dipped in salad dressing.

Dinner was leftovers from the office fridge: two chicken wings from the Chinese-American menu; a cup and a half of pork fried rice; a few spoonfuls of vegetable jambalaya; the rind of that slice of blueberry pie from the day before. Not a terrific lot of food, but with all that rice it felt like a big meal. All with a bottle of water, and another of diet Mtn Dew., And a honeybun from the Campus Convenience store across the street, since I was feeling low and wanted a pick-me-up.

But the story doesn't stop there! At nine I went to the House of Blues to see my friend play with East Coast Soul. I thought it was acceptable to have a snack, so I ordered a pan of their rosemary cornbread. It was great when warm -- fragrant and light. We put some Cholula chipotle hot sauce on it.I also ordered a diet cola.

When J. arrived, she hadn't eaten, so I ordered her some items from the cheap game day menu: a cheese panini with fries, a half-dozen oysters for the table, and at her request, an order of buffalo wings. I ended up eating three-quarters of the sandwich muself, and a third of the fries, and half the buffalo wings, and three of the oysters. Three refills of cola.

I am discouraged by the impulsiveness I showed today.

A day

Breakfast was waiting on the friendly counter when I managed to rouse myself downstairs. I ate on the drive to Boston: two pieces of toast with peanut butter and banana. A bite of fresh strawberry (no me gusto las fresas). A bottle of a unique and pleasant beverage, Hannaford Kiwi Strawberry Sparkling Water.

At eleven, a coffee break with scientist-friend Martha: a bottle of Ethos water at Starbucks, and a slide of pumpkin bread.

Lunch was leftover Chinese-American food with J. at the office conference room table:  a nibbled chicken wing, some spoonfuls of cold pork fried rice, a good cup of vegetables (me gusto el bróculi). A few bites of a rather confused slice of blueberry pie.

A cup of water at work. A bottle of Coke Zero on the way to my medical appointment at Tufts (me requieren orinar).

Dinner was eaten on the car: a foot-long wheat sandwich from Subway, with buffalo chicken and some gunk on it I couldn't identify. Also a chocolate chip cookie shared with J., and a bag of Sun Chips. Diet cola in a waxed cup. At the Green Day concert, I had a Magner's cider in the parking lot, whose cap I had to wrench off with a key. Brute strength solves many, though not all, problems. Inside the Comcast Center, I bought and ate half of a bag of $5 Cracker Jack.

In retrospect, an underhydrated day. Also a green day. A Cracker Jack day.

A meal of unexcusability

The morning started off optimistically: without any urge to binge. Good.

I split J.'s portion of iced coffee. We thought we were going to brunch at the Asgard in Central Square with  our friendly neighborhood atheists, but the Red Line suffered great delays (over an hour with no train, and no announcements!) so we missed out. We disembarked, after finally catching a ride, at Downtown Crossing, and decided to seek out a meal in that area.

We ran into my old friend Emily Small from Isle au Haut; small world. She was munching a panini from UFood Grill; being highly suggestible, J. and I elected to follow her lead. Subsequently I enjoyed my Southwest Turkey sandwich: turkey, sliced; turkey, baconed; tomato; some kind of sauce; flat hot crispy chewy bread. And an order of baked sweet potato fries, a diet cola (two cupfuls), and my half of a chocolate-peanut butter smoothie. Health food! But probably too much of it.

At North Station, wanting not to be left on the train to Lunenburg without sustenance, we got a small vanilla Coolatta and a chocolate chip chunk cookie. We split the drink evenly, but the cookie was mostly my responsibility.

A can of Coke Zero in the car on the way to dinner.

Dinner at Cracker Barrel in Sturbridge was not a proud moment. In retrospect, I believe I wanted to avoid seeming finicky in front of my two old high school friends Kim and Jeff. So I went whole hog (cf.: "pigbelly") and ordered Grandpa's Country Fried Breakfast, consisting of two eggs cooked to order (over easy, mine), with grits (I mix in an egg with broken yolk, and salt and pepper), buttermilk biscuits, a spadeful of "hashbrown casserole," and a portion of friend fried chicken with more gravy. J. gave me her bacon, probably just to marvel at my ever-moving maw. I drank diet cola, since irony is a good condiment.

The spirit is willing; but the stomach is weak.

A bowl of Fruity Pebbles and Frosted Toasters, mixed in roughly equal portions, with 2% milk. Incongruously, I also ate two leftover pork ribs before leaving the house. I suppose I didn't want to seem like a pigbelly at the picnic later that afternoon. Or, on some thrifty impulse, I wanted to eat them before they went bad. Bizarre.

Camilo drove over to pick us up, so J. and he and I stopped at Dunkin Donuts for coffee. I had half of a vanilla kreme [sic] doughnut, and a sip of her iced latte.

At the picnic, I kicked things off with a plate of pasta salad, turkey kielbasa, our potato salad, and a cracker with goat cheese. A bit later, I snatched up a chicken patty from the grill, and made a sandwich of it on a generic white bun with a smear of boursin cheese spread. After the desserts were brought out, I had two chocolate chip cookies and a half-cup of rainbow sherbet. I drank three cans of Fresca during the afternoon. Let's not forget the half of a black-and-white cookie which J. bequeathed me in a show of appreciably unconventional baked good largesse. Also a plastic cup's worth of white wine mixed with apple cider.

Unexpectedly, we felt peckish before meeting Julie at the movies that night. I ate perhaps three generic wheat Ritz-type crackers on the way to the train. And before we stepped into the cinema, the three of us stopped at McDonald's. I had a Southern-style chicken sandwich and a small diet cola. This sandwich is as close to pure candy as I can think of in non-confectionary form. To be more accurate, I really had five-eights of the sandwich; the girls each had a bite or two. And murmurs of gladness were heard.

During the movie, I finished not more than half of a large bag of popcorn, and a bucket of Coke Zero. It could have been a gallon. Certainly it felt that way. "Eat, Pray, Love, Pee."

It doesn't stop there. In high spirits we stumbled over to Peach Tree on Tyler Street in Chinatown. From all we ordered, I ate perhaps half again as much as I should, maybe more -- chicken and corn soup; a really fine sweet-and-sour chicken; shrimp with cashew nut; pork fried rice (I had none of this); and scallion pancake. This, with hot tea and diet cola.

I want to bed contrite, overfed, and a bit despairing. It is normal to eat more than one's appetite demands at social occasions, sure; but I really have to learn to push back against this tendency, when I have a day like today stacked with such events.

My reheated life

Two slices of wheat bread, toasted, with oleo and grape jelly. Can you believe it? I can't hardly.

An entire half-serving of coffee with Splenda and fat-free half-and-half. Usually I just get the leftovers.

For lunch, a tureenful (volume impossible to estimate) of leftover "drunken lobster" noodle dish, from J.'s lunch the day before at Tavern on the Water: artichokes, tomato concasse, Parmesan, lobster meat, and cavatappi. A bottle of diet Mtn Dew. A few bite of J.'s leftover vegetable jambalaya from the previous evening's dinner. A third of a bag, and not more, truly, of Cape Cod Five Cheese potato chips. These were oversalty and underdelicious.

A bottle of water during the afternoon.

Dinner at Panera: low-calorie chicken noodle soup, a hunk of baguette, half of their Sierra Turkey sandwich. Tabasco in the soup, and lemon in the diet cola. I admit that the clerk convinced me to take her up on their $0.99 deal for a bakery item. I am helpless before the chocolatine. I refilled the soda cup twice. Why did I need so much? Because I felt a strange compulsion, and obeyed it, to share a slice of coffee cake and a blondie with J. I had half of each. We are complicit in the crime.

Seafood enchiladas, NSFW brownie implications, guilt

Another day, another crumpet; this one like yesterday's was covered in an amber-colored stickum which I have been told comes from the bellies of garden-bees. Most sticky, most disturbing. To wash this down, I shared a cup of the usual Keurig brew. I have been informed that the half-and-half is fat-free.

Lunch was a six-inch buffalo chicken flatbread sandwich at Subway, with black olives, lettuce, and tomato. The fun stuff? Provolone cheese and a swath of light mayonnaise. Diet cola.

Dinner at Border Café in Harvard Square. An order of Cajun-spiced fried shrimplets, with some kind of honey-mustardish sauce. Nearly a quart of orange soda from the fountain. A few sips from a margarita so over-salted that when she first took a sip, J. asked, to bring me into the experience, if I had ever swallowed seawater: "Like that," she grimaced. My margarita was melon-flavored, blended, made "New Orleans-style" with a splash of Cointreau. Sure it is. We mixed some of the orange soda into the saline cocktail, and it was much improved. Well, more palatable, if not improved.

Half a basket of fresh fried corn tortilla chips and salsa. I chose for the main course a plate of Gulf Coast seafood enchiladas, kind of a smothered/drunken dish, consisting of shrimps and crawfish and unidentified sea-bits stuffed along with green bell pepper and maybe it was onion inside flour tortillas, then buried in a few ladlefuls of creamy sauce. With jambalaya on the side, and sour cream and guacamole atop it all. And rice. So much rice. And a bite of J.'s cornbread.

Afterward, at Tory Row, with Erin and Ethan before his show with East Coast Soul over at Tommy Doyle's on Winthrop in the old House of Blues, a bottle of Harpoon hard cider, a diet cola, and a shared portion of brownie à la mode brownie with, according to the prevailing fashion, a large scoop of vanilla ice creamI probably ate a little more than she did. Definitely did. How often this record turns confessional.

Either/(h)or(chata)

Breakfast was a honey-daubed crumpet, toasted in a mucky toaster which lives in our walk-through pantry. And a to-go cup of iced coffee, which as usual was adulterated after leaving its Keurig cup with Splenda and half-and-half. I believe we keep half-and-half in these days, rather than milk, because milk gets purloined by non-coffee-drinking residents of our apartment, and would leave someone else's cereal milky but our coffee black.

On arriving at work, I bought and drank a diet Mtn Dew.

Lunch was taken at Uno's, and was a real belly-churner. We opted for the all-you-can-eat soup buffet, which bubbles lusciously beneath an insouciant sign saying "Soup's On." Ignoring this sensible advice, I ate considerably more than a soupçon despite J.'s best efforts to discourage my consumption. I took a total of two and two-thirds bowls of New England clam chowder and broccoli and cheddar soup, mixed in various proportions. Liberal use salt and pepper and of chowder crackers was reported. At least two refills on my diet cola. I also shared an order of avocado-filled egg rolls with a cashew dipping sauce. By share, I mean I ate half of the order, and then ate the evacuated wonton skins that were all that remained after my lunch companion gobbled the insides up for herself.

After work, while walking about doing errands, I ate half a sprinkled donut from Dunkin Donuts on Beacon Street, and an "oven-toasted" sandwich on wheat English muffin, filled with a mysteriously spongy disc of egg white and turkey sausage. A bottle of Coke Zero from the 7-11 in South Campus.

Later, buckling in the face of temptation, I bought a Mexican plate meal from Ana's Taqueria at the MIT student center, where I was meeting four fellows to discuss the Harvard Book Store Philosophy Café: al pastor, with pinto beans, a little schmear of sour cream, salsa fresca, steamed tortillas, and rice. And, wanting to accessorize appropriately, a large order of their horchata.

Before bed, a few generic, wheat, Ritz-style crackers. And half a glass of orange juice.

Many cookies at the end of the day

A peanut butter and banana sandwich on the way to work, on wheat bread. A few sips of water and of iced coffee (with Splenda and a splash of half-and-half). Lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a Red Delicious apple, and a bottle of diet Mountain Dew. For dinner, I visited Qdoba in Kenmore Square and bought myself a grilled chicken burrito with a sauce known deliciously as "3-Cheese Queso." This with diet cola with lime, and a large chocolate chip cookie. At the seminar with MGH, I had perhaps five home-baked chocolate chip cookies. I don't regret it.

Sandwiches, pizza, cola

A crumpet with oleo on the walk to the train. To clear my addled head, on the off chance that some blood sugar imbalance was to blame, a chicken salad sandwich (cranberry, not buffalo) from CampCo, and a diet Mountain Dew. At lunch, a foot-long buffalo chicken sandwich on flatbread from Subway, with tomato, lettuce, black olives, and a smear of light mayo. Split between us, a bag of original flavor SunChips, and a bag of baked Lays potato chips. Diet cola.

Not knowing if we were going to dinner, we stopped at BerryLine, where I had one spoonful of original flavor, active-culture frozen yogurt with sliced banana and too many rainbow sprinkles. Dinner was at Cambridge One; a half dozen crisp breadstick straws, too much spiced with red pepper flakes. Three of us shared two half-portions of two different charcoal-grilled pizza, one with tomato, fontina, romano, garlic, and basil, and the other, less pleasing, with artichoke hearts and feta and spinach and god knows what else. Diet cola with this, as well.

Nothing before bed.

The brownies topped it off

Brunch with Louisa at The Blue Room, consisting of two and a half plates of food, with a sample of most of the desserts on offer. At least a bite of each of the following: pork ribs; Grecian green bean salad; scrambled eggs with tomato & feta cheese; beef brisket; bacon; fries; pork sausage; Moroccan spiced chicken; mesclun greens with corn vinaigrette; sweet plantains; salted watermelon; buttered cranberry-nut bread; hot salted shrimp; grilled salmon with chunky fennel vinaigrette; avocado quesadillas; lemon buttermilk pudding; Persian rice pudding; pineapple upside-down cake; lime tequila  cheesecake; mango muffins; chocolate nut brownies; coconut macaroons. It really wasn't as much food as this list would have it seem. Also several glasses of water, and a glass of grapefruit juice.

Back at home, dinner was Chinese-style dumplings. We minced chicken breast, with shredded carrot and cabbage, egg, green onion, and ginger, and wrapped them in ready-to-wrap dumpling wrappers. We fried these in vegetable oil, and served them with a broth made from vegetable stock, orange juice, light soy sauce, green onions, Napa cabbage, and spices. I had six dumplings all told, I believe, and probably two cups of broth. Also many cans of diet cola throughout the evening, and one Corona. The evening was topped off with two brownies, made especially for the occasion by Jenna. Also two generic Ritz-style wheat crackers, sometime during the night during a bout of hankering sleeplessness.

A day at home

Two pieces of wheat toast with oleo. A shared three-egg scramble, with Parmesan, diced tomatoes and a rosemary-besprinkled chicken breast. Two wedges of Laughing Cow product, spread on Wheat Thins, some of which were fused in monstrous parodies of the usual baked cracker form. Water with this.

A can of diet cola on the train after grocery shopping; a shared bag of Hot 'n' Spicy [sic] Chex Mix, on sale for ninety-nine cents. Then at home, a brace of defrosted beef ribs; a chop salad with iceberg lettuce, green bell pepper, shredded cheddar cheese, sunflower seeds, and light honey-mustard dressing. And a crab cake, perhaps the tastiest crab cake I have ever had, consisting of store-brand Ritz-type wheat crackers, mayonnaise, green bell pepper and fresh sweet corn, picked white crab meat, an egg, chopped green onion, and spices including tumeric, dry mustard, chili powder, and black pepper. All this was rolled in bread crumbs and fried quickly, and I have to say perfectly, in vegetable oil. I processed the remaining sweet corn and bell pepper with a little horseradish mustard and mayo and a splash of Tabasco, for an excellent remoulade. I often express my enthusiasm for cooking, but rarely brag about something I've made. These crab cakes, I have to say, where to-notch.

The girls had a zinfandel mixed with pear nectar, but I drank several cans of diet cola. I also had one-third of a pint of Ben & Jerry's Phish Food frozen yogurt. Really shameless of me.

Resuming the record

After a long hiatus, I resume blogging my meals. That is, my blogging was suspended, not my consumption. That continued all the while without abatement. Getting back to business, today's intake:

Two pieces of wheat toast that, working together, had managed to trap a peanut butter bug between them. The bug had been reduced to a smear. At work, a sandwich of mesquite-smoked turkey (not really), mozzarella, tomato (roma, even!), FRESH basil and a sweet red pepper mayonnaise on rosemary focaccia, from the inimitable Charles River Bread Company. A glass of water with this.

Halfway through my afternoon, a bottle of diet Mountain Dew (or Mtn Dew now, is it?), and a Reese's Crispy Crunch bar. Dinner with Louisa at Panera, of chicken noodle soup with a dash of Tabasco, a hunk of baguette with 10 grams of oleo, and a two servings of diet Pepsi. Half a blondie bar. A medium cup of ice cream from Coldstone, with Louisa's infernal participation, and in celebration of her looking departure to Italy. (In the flavor of Oreo Cookie Filling, with the addition of graham cracker crust and three Oreos, and hot fudge sauce. The staff sang when I gave them a dollar tip.)

Another cup of diet Pepsi at poetry workshop. Water at home before bed, and approximately half a cup of cooked taco meat (just on the verge of spoiling, blech), folded into a cup of Kraft dinner. With Frank's Red Hot sauce.