Feed the Machine

They called kids like me 'late bloomers' to make us feel better. By Taiwanese standards, I was only a bit on the skinny side, and of average height, though weak in both strength and constitution (my player min-maxed, in RPG parlance). Moving to the States came as a shock, as I suddenly found myself a runt in a world of giants.

A part of my problem, I decided, was that I did not eat enough.

Like many children, I was a picky eater. On top of that, I found it hard to give up the familiar foods of Taiwan--not to mention my grandmother's cooking. The fact that my mother loathed cooking and expended as little effort doing so as possible (not that I blame her) did not help matters.

So, like any sensible teen from East Asia, I cooked myself ramen. I would spruce it up with whatever I could find in the refrigerator, and drop an egg in it at the end. It provided extra nutrition, but it rarely tasted good by any stretch of the imagination.

My father taught me from an early age to persevere. Often, faced with an unpleasant task, I would repeat one of his mantras: "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it." Somehow, this just did not work so well when it came to eating. Perhaps not having an appetite is different from just 'not wanting' to do something.

Eventually, I invented a game to make myself eat. The game did not have a name back then, but I now refer to it as 'Feed the Machine'. It involved turning the noodles into some unnamed natural resource, the chopsticks into a robotic harvesting arm, and my mouth into the processing plant. The object of the game, of course, was to harvest the 'resource', 'process' it thoroughly, and send it down to the 'factory'.

Call it a very elaborate game of 'here comes the airplane' that I play with myself. It still comes in useful when my maladaptive body decides that it just does not really like food, even though I regularly get so hungry it physically hurts.

I have been 'feeding the machine' a lot lately, to offset the loss of both weight and appetite from a string of winter illnesses. The game has started growing old, and I long to find some semblance of enjoyment in my meals again. Patience, however, is a matter for another post.