eating right

A few days ago, I enjoyed one of those Subway subs. And I tend to enjoy these little subs despite my distaste for all those Jarod commercials – Jarod with his size 67 ½ pants that are now much too large, Jarod with his insistence that Subway brand subs are so very healthy for you, Jarod and his bland personality proclaiming to the world that Subway will single handedly solve America’s obesity problem…if only we would all eat there all day, everyday.

Because at Subway, you have your helpful sub preparer poised in front of a salad bar of toppings, just waiting to make you a healthy, sure-to-lose-weight, sandwich. Now, I have never been a fan of any food that has a green hue. No cucumbers, lettuce, peas, beans, celery, or broccoli…never, ever, broccoli. Yet, when combined with a miniscule amount of chicken (which is the way chicken comes at Subway) and that Sweet Teriyaki sauce, I can handle some green hued food.

So at Subway, I basically get a sandwich with a side salad thrown on top…all for four tiny bucks…two if I go on ‘half-price Tuesdays’. And my last visit was no exception. After ordering a sandwich with toppings that included extra spinach, extra green peppers, extra pickles, extra onions, extra tomatoes, and extra olives, I was quite sure that my vegetable quota would be met for the next month. I could spend the next four weeks extremely proud of myself that I was doing such a good job at keeping healthy.

Shortly after eating my sub, though, I noticed a strange bumpish thing near the back of my mouth. I was pretty sure that no bump had been residing there prior to the sub, so I automatically jumped to the most logical explanation I could think of…obviously I had suddenly developed some type of allergy to either spinach, pickles, onions, olives, tomatoes, or green peppers, and my throat was swelling up…which obviously meant that I would soon be unable to breathe and most likely die an excruciating death. And the worst thing about dying this way is that, being dead, I wouldn’t even be able to enjoy the multi-million dollar lawsuit that would result from my Subway induced death.

Since I’m unemployed, I have no health coverage. Granted, I did find an ‘economical health plan’, but this only covers me in case of ‘severe emergency’, such as if a chunk of the moon falls to Earth and lands on my foot. My current coverage would pay for about half the cost of the cast that I would need. So, being certain that I was near death, but not wanting to actually call 911 since my rapidly constricting throat probably wouldn’t constitute severity enough to be covered by my discount insurance, I called several friends and instructed them to call me every 30 minutes and that if I didn’t answer the phone it would mean that I was lying on the floor, gasping for air, slowly being suffocated by my newly acquired allergy. This way, they could alert the proper authorities and I would be saved.

Oddly enough, not one of them called when instructed. Lucky for those lazy bastards that I call ‘friends’, my allergy wasn’t an allergy at all, but just some little bump.

A bump which was probably just an ulcer caused by the sudden shock of having healthy food in my system. Fortunately, this is nothing that a few weeks of fast food won’t cure.