Boy, is this going to be an interesting blog post. It’s about SNACKS (three separate snack-related stories!) and WATER as the title suggests. Am I doing this blog-thing right or what?
- Birthday Snacks
We have one birthday celebration every month here in my department which is mostly just an excuse to get a sugar high while pretending to like each other. (J/K we’re all friends here.) I’m one of the birthday babies for this month so the new admin lady, Margie, emailed me and the two other people I’m forced to share the limelight with this month to see if we have any preferences for birthday treats. One of the other recipients on this email is GLENN because he had the audacity to be born in July too (he’s not cool enough to be a Leo like me, though), so I replied and said that I like cookies and brownies, and that Glenn doesn’t get an opinion. Margie thanked me profusely for teaching her something new (that Glenn doesn’t count). I’m sure he will eat the cookies and brownies and like it.
I’m always happy to help a new co-worker learn the ropes.
2. You Can’t Sit At Our Snack Table
One of the many great things about the head of our department is that she spoils us, and I mean totally pampers us, with a snack table. Now, I’m not talking about pretzel sticks and Saltines, OK. She makes us feel like royalty with a spread that may include fancy Cheez-Its (those Duo things that have two flavors in each bag!), Fig Bars (like the hipster, Whole Foods version of Fig Newtons and so insanely good), good granola bars, fruit cups, single-serving bags of Chips Ahoy and Teddy Grahams, etc. Legit snacks. Snacks that serve as status symbols in elementary school lunch boxes.
All of the snacks sit on a table by the door to our department, and facing that table is Debby, who has taken on the role of Snack Sentry because this table sits right outside of a conference room that anyone from the firm can use, so we often have “visitors” on our floor. (See also: the guys that come down from other departments to poop in our mens room.)
Remember when that guy came down here and thieved a bagel and I was like HE IS SO LUCKY THAT DEBBY WASN’T HERE TO SEE THAT? Well, last week, another guy came down and wasn’t so lucky.
Allegedly, he had come to our floor to see someone who was not in their office at the moment, so on his way back out, he hovered over the snack table and treated it like a buffet, taking AT LEAST TWO THINGS.
“Oh hello, who are you?” Debby asked sweetly, but I have been working here for 8 years and knew that she was currently weaving a web with that honey dripping from her mouth.
“Blank from Blippity-Boo,” the man answered. (LET’S NOT GET FIRED, ERIN.)
“Oh hello, Blank from Blippity-Boo. Just so you know, those snacks are just for our department,” Debby answered, calm and calculated.
Now Blank was approaching her. Where was this going to go!?
“I was just down here to see [someone],” Blank said.
“OK, but those snacks are still just for our department,” Debby reiterated.
By this point, our whole quadrant was pin-droppingly silent, hands pulled back from keyboards, waiting with bated breath. I was half-slid under my desk in case this guy pulled out a potato gun or something, who knows. He may have been down this snack-standoff road before.
And then, completely unpredictably, HE ASKED HER IF SHE WANTED HIM TO PAY FOR THE SNACKS.
This guy REALLY wanted those snacks.
“No, I just want you to put them back,” Debby said calmly, which is where we differ because I would have taken the money. Also, I would have definitely just let him take the snacks and then told on him later.
And so the guy returned the snacks to the table (sadly, I never did see what his choices were) and then mumbled, “Please tell [person] I was here to see her” and then we all waited until we heard the ding of the elevator before laughing our faces off at our desks and then Debby was worried she was going to get in trouble for being snack-stingy but someone’s gotta put the smack down on snack scavengers from other floors, amirite?
Also I think this is hilarious because I used to be such a little freaking candy pilferer at one of my old jobs but at least I waited until all the daylight people went home before raiding other spaces.
Snack Table Epilogue: This morning, one of the IT guys was on our floor helping Debby with her laptop and then he went over to get some vittles from that vixen of a snack table, and I braced myself because I like this IT guy a lot and didn’t want him to get yelled at, but Debby let it slide and told me later that she figured he’s been on our floor enough times that it was OK. I mean, he’s always down here fixing our computers so I would say if he wants a pack of peanut butter crackers, let the man eat, you know?
3. Snacks from the Sea
Before I left for KCON, I promised my work buddies that I would get some new K-snacks for the Pumpkin of International Horrors because we were going to stop at H-Mart on the way home. However, I forgot that H-Mart, of all Asian markets, is really lacking in the candy aisle. Most of the options were things that I have already brought in or things that were just too astronomically-priced (I have a price-cap on how much I’ll spend on that fucking pumpkin, OK).
One of the things I grabbed was what I thought was a bag of some sort of melon candy but then I got already back home to Pittsburgh and realized that I grabbed a bag that was in the wrong spot because what I actually bought was….
DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN.
Look, I love kelp. I love how it tightly bear-hugs rolls of kimbap. Dried laver sheets are my go-to snack. But the common factor here is: dried and savory. This kelp jelly was sweet and it’s not even that the flavor was horribly offensive, because it was very subtle (just a hint of sea, like the tag-line boasts up there), but it was the fact that the vehicle in which it was delivered was JELLY. It just felt wrong.
I brought them to work anyway and only told Lauren the secret flavor. She emailed me later and said she decided to try one and was OK until she got halfway through and couldn’t stop imagining that she was chewing on the ocean floor and had to spit it out.
I left one on Glenn’s desk while he was at lunch and the next day he was like, “THAT GREEN CANDY WAS DISGUSTING” except that it was less capslock-y and more monotone because Glenn’s volume doesn’t really ever vary.
So then I gave one to Todd but told him that it was one of the good chewy peanut things I also bought, and he was like, “But why is it green though” and I was like, “Because Korea, just eat it!” He was not a fan.
Lloyd loves them though! He said it reminds him of the kelp candy he used to eat as a kid where it was literally just dried kelp, already naturally salted, and then candied. The texture was brittle and dry, and THAT sounds like a kelp candy I could get down with it.
Speaking of Hmart, we grabbed some Korean pastries from the Tous les Jours bakery by the exit (basically a Korean twist on French pastries, cakes, macaron, etc and I miss those effing milk buns so much and all of the things stuffed with red bean, ugh) and G-Dragon was playing!
4. The Jug
Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight knows the struggle, especially when you’re doing so well and then you just plateau seemingly out of nowhere. For me, this almost always happens in summer, which is crazy because winter is so often associated with rich, hearty comfort foods, but what it boils down to for me is that I just don’t drink enough water. I always thought this was a myth when I was younger, like how important could water possibly be (there are still openings in my online nutrition classes, just Paypal me 00).
But if I’m diligently logging the water I drink, I start to see results. However, I suck at that. For some reason, when we were coming home from Newark last week, I bought the biggest jug of water the gas station had in its cooler, in spite of Henry’s, “Really. REALLY?!”s and Chooch’s daring ribs of, “Lol, you’ll never drink all of that.”
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED MOTHERFUCKERS.
I did drink all of it, I’ll have you know. And then Saturday morning, I decided to try that again, because weekends are when I’m especially awful at drinking water, like I could go the whole day without drinking even a cup and would never notice until at the end of the night when I’m pissing for the first time and it’s dark orange.
So, Presidential Piss.
Yesterday, I was watching an episode of Why Not the Dancer when I started screaming because there was a scene where Taemin takes a break from working on his choreo and starts to chug-a-jug. “YOU GUYS IT’S JUST LIKE ME!” I cried and Henry was like, “That’s nice” and Chooch was seething because I had the audacity to lure him away from the computer just to show him that.
I MADE THIS:
Henry was like, “Oh wow, and it moves.”
Anyway, it’s in the 90s this week in Pittsburgh so I decided that I was going to take the jug to work with me because I need to stay hydrated. Henry was like, “Have fun with that, nerd” because I apparently look dumb lugging around this jug with me. As soon as I got to work, I was on the elevator with some girl from another floor. I could sense her side-eyeing me, judging me and my water jug that I had resting on my hip like a plastic gas station toddler, when she finally spoke.
“So, does that actually help you drink more water?” she asked, and at first I couldn’t tell if she was snarkin’ on my tactics, but it turns out she was genuinely curious and said, “Maybe I’ll try that, I really need to do SOMETHING” after we had a really nice convo about the Hydration Struggle. It was awesome! I texted Henry and he was like, “OMG.”
Here I am with my spirit animal Taemin in the background. #BigJugClub
Wendy saw the H2O vessel on my desk and yelled, “ARE YOU DRINKING OUT OF THAT?! I hate you.” And Sue seemed genuinely concerned that I might drown, to which I told her that becomes a real danger when I’m in the car and Henry is driving all jerkily.
Marlene and Debby caught me on my way back from my refill and Marlene was like, “THIRSTY MUCH” but then they were all GOOD FOR YOU without a shred of sarcasm when I explained what was going on and that was nice.
I was talking to Nate before I left for the day and he too commented on the size of my jug, which was back on my hip like I had just retrieved it from daycare. “How did you get anything done today!?” and the idea of wearing a diaper honestly did cross my mind at one point.
“I guess I didn’t think anyone would really notice,” I said to Henry after work.
“Really? You’re drinking out of something that’s bigger than your head.”
I could tell that he literally meant my head, too, and not my ego.