To Be Full

Since the time when I began to live away from my family, it has been up to me to go out and get things. No longer was I to be surprised by a selection of new clothes brought home from the store for me to try on. More serious is that it has been up to me to get the food. I do it begrudgingly, and the results suffer from my lack of great enthusiasm for it. All my decisions about what to get are predicated on devoting the smallest amount of resources possible while at the same time ensuring that a return trip will not be necessary for the maximum amount of time. The two priorities apart from that are to have foods that I can make myself eat and which are very filling.

It's quite a thing to be full, though it may be of not the finest cuisine. There's a circle that one traverses. You go from being uncomfortable because you are hungry. You then eat, and hopefully stop when you are no longer hungry. If you pick food that is more pleasurable than is necessary to get to that point, then you're enjoying it just too much to stop there. I occasionally have that problem. When you keep going, you become uncomfortable for precisely the opposite reason as the initial incident. Better to be in pain due to abundance as opposed to inadequacy, I suppose, but the pain does not lessen on that basis. Now, in the media this is a comical condition, with the portly but lovable uncle leaning back, unbuckling his pants and making loud noises and crude remarks meant to convey his enjoyment of the meal. It seems to me that not any of those things is humorous when seen for real.

I find the thinking that goes on when full to be interesting. It's sort of like Popeye's friend Wimpy, who you'll recall would often express a willingness to pay at a later date for a hamburger immediately. I sometimes consider that there's something I'd like to eat, that I perhaps have on hand, but that I can't eat on account of how full I am. I feel remorseful, wishing I'd gone easy on other things in order to ensure room for this other thing. I suppose that it would only be the same thing with the two foodstuffs reversed had that been the case.

Also interesting is after the fullness ends. I become hungry once more, and no later for having eaten so much. This is a real shame, because I start pining for the things I had already eaten. "Why," I wonder, "why did I eat the second half of my sandwich then when I was not so terribly hungry? Why could I not have been more hungry then so that I need not be so hungry now?" I guess it's a primitive mental process. I often remark how I am and others are like goldfish, always consuming all there is even to the point of death. Who knows when there might be more empenadas, for example? There might not ever be more, and so why take that leap of faith?