Lunches

My holiday dearth of Optimistic. is over, and the only thing that rivals my happiness that he's back is my happiness that he's developed a new habit. Every night at about eleven p.m., Optimistic. puts assorted food items into a brown bag. He makes school lunches! I think it's fantastic.

The whole thing kind of makes me nostalgic. When I was younger, my parents made my lunches. (Go figure.) I'm sure my mom made them a bunch of times, but Dad would sometimes make school lunches his Project. My dad was a champion lunch-maker. Instead of PBJ's, Dad would make egg-salad sandwiches. Or, he would make BLT's. We didn't want the tomatoes to make our sandwiches soggy, so he would put them in a separate bag, to be added to the rest at time of consumption. They were awesome. Other times, he would make us cinnamon and sugar sandwiches. (In our family, we use brown sugar instead of white.)

The really cool thing about Dad making school lunches, though, was that he would personalize the bags for us. He knows how to draw pretty well, so he'd grab a Sharpie, and draw a funny cartoon on each of our bags, every day. People at school loved them.

Sadly, I had forgotten about all of this until Optimistic. began making his lunches.

I don't make lunches. I leave work at 12 or 1, so I usually plan on eating lunch at home, after work. I also usually get hungry by break time, at 10. Instead of pulling a snazzy brown bag out of the refrigerator here, I stare at the vending machines. Lately I've been eating Twix bars.

They're not the most nutritious, for sure, but yesterday I came up with a theory:

1. Drinking soda is bad because it dissolves (-) stuff. Like teeth. Let soda = "s". "s" = -x

2. Eating candy is bad because it adds (+) stuff. Let candy = "c". "c" = x

Therefore, eating candy and drinking soda together can be expressed as the equation:
c + s = ?

Let's solve!
We'll replace the variables.
(x) + (-x) = ?
x - x = 0.

What a pleasant discovery! By using a simple algebraic equation, we can prove that soda and candy cancel each other out.

Someday, I'll jump on the brown-bag-bandwagon again, too. For now, at least I can be content in knowing that I'm doing my body good.