When I was first living alone, I found food to be such a burden. It took too much time to cook. Without my mother to make the meals, I found the easiest path in forgoing eating. I thugged out starvation for a while, but my mood was noticeably worse. Tired of having sleep for dinner, one fateful day, I decided to cook pasta.
Drive. Grocery shopping. Chop veggies. Turn on the stove. I looked at my canned tomatoes as I poured them into the pot. What an arbitrary thing, to only use one can. What if… I just made more? And so I poured in a second. Then a third. Then chopped more vegetables and put in more beef. I finished with a week’s worth of cheap ($1.19/meal!), nutritious (763 kCal!), and relatively tasty meal.
And so it began, my pasta era. I would be eating this pasta for breakfast, dinner, and lunch. When there was no one else for me in this world, I had my pasta noodles. I experimented. I was buying pasta by the 10lb bag. I figured out I could cook several pounds at once in a pressure cooker. Peak Pasta Performance. Half my meals for this period were pasta.
On weeks where I was off of pasta, I prepped other meals. Like bean burritos. At one point, it had been 7 days of bean burritos, 3 burritos per day. This week had been particularly challenging for other, non-burrito related issues. On the last, the 21st burrito, I felt a surge of anger. I deserved better than this. I stood up sharply and fucking yeeted that burrito full force into the trash can. My roommate, sitting on the couch, was bewildered. I often wish I could see how this outburst looked from his perspective.
I visited my ex-roommate a year after this era.
“I got you something for your birthday!”
“How sweet”, I though, naively smiling.
Grinning, he opened the fridge and pulled out… pasta.
I had optimized the fun out of food and cooking. The P in my PTSD stood for pasta.
Pokémon was so fun as a 7 year old. I bonded with each of my Pokémon. I had an Infernape I trained to level 97. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing, though. To me, there were moves that did damage, and useless moves. All I was doing was spamming Close Combat through each battle.
But I grew older, and I learned. Each Pokémon has base stats? Some moves are physical or special, and those non damaging moves have useful effects? Held items actually did things? And the final nail in coffin: EVs and IVs. I saw then that my old play style was unsophisticated and primitive, barbaric, even. It was beneath me. So I optimized. The main games got to easy, so I played hacks that upped the difficulty. I played Showdown competitively.
And then I noticed I was no longer having fun. My Pokémon, I no longer cared for them as individuals, they were tools, easily replaceable if they didn’t have perfect IVs. I tried playing the old way, but I couldn’t. It was stuck in my mind. I’d always be resetting to get a good nature or something. I haven’t played Pokémon in years.
Spaghetti for days