My husband was at the pharmacy one night picking up some munitions, in case zombies attacked or the world ended. Like Twizzlers. Thoughtfully, he called me to see if I needed anything.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I need some Slim-Fast. The strawberry kind, please. Whatever you do, please don’t get me the chocolate stuff.”
“If you say so,” Dave said. “I think it ALL tastes like donkey ass. But whatever, where is it?”
“It’s over by the dietary stuff, against the south wall,” I informed him. Then I giggled. “Wait, I thought YOU were all directionally superior to me!”
“Dude, not here. The layout to this place makes zero sense,” he snipped, annoyed that I was mocking his directional sense for the eleventy-hundredth time that month, after he’d gotten lost in Wisconsin, the state WHERE HE CAME FROM.
“Okay, so do you want the 200-calorie or the 300-calorie stuff?” He asked me, obviously standing in front of the dietary aids.
“Wha …?” I asked him while lighting a cigarette. “SlimFast comes in one variety and it’s all about 200 calories.”
“Well, all they have is generic in your fancy STRAWBERRY flavor,” he replied. “Do you still want it?”
Knowing that drinking the generic stuff was better than being tempted by the bacon and eggs he and Ben would be having for breakfast the following morning, I agreed to have him grab the 200 calorie stuff.
About a half an hour later, I pulled into our shared garage, about 4,000 years away from our actual condo building and about twenty minutes after that, I was finally up the twenty flights of stairs, and standing in our armpit of a kitchen, panting in the sweltering heat.
I immediately noticed, sitting jauntily on the counter, was a case of Ensure.
Generic, strawberry-flavored ENSURE. Which, were I a geriatric with digestive issues trying to pack on the pounds, would probably be a delicious and high calorie snacky-poo. But, since I was a twenty-three-year-old with digestive issues trying to REMOVE the pounds, I wasn’t so thrilled.
