Have Your Cake, And Eat it Too

Not much to report on today.

Yesterday, I started picking nuts at 8am and could only continue until 11am. My hip joints felt like jelly. I was truly worried I was going to collapse. I had picked nuts for ten hours the day before and there was no way I was capable of picking for another full day.

I felt badly because the nuts that were falling out of the trees were large, beautiful
ones . . . the ones for which the broker pays you the big fractions of a centime. I decided that part of my problem might be my lack of nourishment. I had been getting by on small quantities of fried potatoes, lemon yogurt, a daily piece of chocolate, tea, walnuts, and Roquefort cheese. (Yes, this is the diet I eat to maintain this new, svelte body of mine.) So I took a shower, and headed off to town to find a restaurant at 1pm.

The place was full. The elusive Monsieur Fargal was seated at a neighboring table. I suppose he'll start showing up all over the place now that I finally tracked him down and have a rendez-vous scheduled with him. He greeted me and assured me he would be at my place the next week to check out the roof; and by the way, he’d like to introduce his eating companion, the man who gets rid of termites. Did I have any need for him? No, not yet; but I’ll take his card because by the time any of you roofing guys take care of my needs, I’m sure the termites will have settled into the rotting roof timbers. What a racket those two men had! Fargal takes a year to get your roof repaired; in the meantime the termites show up, Fargal suggests this man and gets his kick-back. I noticed that Fargal fought for the check and he won, paying for the meal.

Two fleshy American women sat at the table on the opposite side of my table from Fargal, regaling a diminutive French woman about the American presidential election and lamenting the high price of gasoline in France, while admitting that we Americans have been “spoiled” with low gasoline prices. (God I wish I could escape this election, and I wish I could escape Americans talking about the election!) I noticed that the two American women had the exact same distribution of fat on their bodies. I’m beginning to see that there is an “American Body” and it’s not Pamela Lee Anderson or Paris Hilton, it is more Bella Abzug or Janet Reno or Barbara Bush (just wanted to cover all my political bases). Americans look round. These two women, I’m sure they weren’t related, had the exact same double chins hanging from their faces, and the thought crossed my mind that we Americans are indeed spoiled and it’s not beneficial to us: we eat too much, drive too much, consume too much, we are just TOO MUCH.

To be fair though, Monsieur Fargal could stand to loose some weight; and he must be dieting, because he removed the whipped cream off of the top of his dessert and he heaped it on top of the whipped cream of the skinny Termite Man’s dessert.

If you read that New York Times article I linked to in my post “It’s Always the Mother’s Fault” you’ll remember that when the researchers conducted a word association test with American and French subjects regarding food, when they mentioned CREAM the Americans said something like “fattening” and the French said “whipped!”

You’ll be interested to know that the American women told the waitress they didn’t want any dessert. However, the tiny French woman ordered dessert and then shared it with the Americans.

You’ve got to love a country that wholeheartedly embraces all that’s meaningful in life without guilt. I read recently where the French average the most sexual encounters per year than any other nationality: 137. Let’s see, they eat bread and drink wine by the bucketfuls, have lots of sex, are skinnier and healthier. No wonder I love living here.

And, while the U.S. is spending tens of millions of dollars on abstinence programs in middle and high schools, the French are resigned to the natural fact that teenagers have sex lives. They arm their school infirmaries with the morning-after pill and provide free condoms, and as a result the average age for a French teenager to lose his or her virginity is higher than the average age for an American teenager, and the French teenage pregnancy rate is only 25% as high as the American rate. So tell me, which country has their head screwed on correctly when it comes to food and sex, the most fundamental components of life?

Lest all of my American friends are now afraid to visit after reading the above diatribe, I have this recent anecdote to report. I had some American friends stay in the house for a night when I was in San Francisco, and I left the key with Monsieur Besse so he could let them in. When he returned the key to me, he said, “I thought that all Americans were fat, but all your friends are thin.”

Back at the restaurant, when the waitress came to ask me if I wanted dessert, I haughtily answered, “Non.” I wasn’t going to put my American pounds back on! No double-chins for me. No round body for me. So I by-passed the tiny dessert that Monsieur Fargal ate, the one with the yummy looking whipped cream on top, paid my bill, and then walked my svelte self to the car, where some workmen were kind enough to stop traffic on the road in both directions so I could back out safely.

Then, craving something sweet, I DROVE to the supermarket, BOUGHT a box of six rather large Belgian honey-waffle cookies, and ATE THE ENTIRE BOX!!!!!!!

So the moral of this story is two-fold: Judge not least you be judged and learn to eat dessert like the French do!