Rock Opera for the Digesting

Last night we went to a 2nd Thanksgiving dinner party thrown by my girlfriend's good group of friends. After a week of digesting turkey & an assortment of leftover carbs, we did it again. A good problem to have no doubt. Any food, an overwhelming amount of feast food, is a good food, nothing to complain about. I will say though my body has been "de-energized" since digging in a little over a week ago into the traditional foodstuffs. Some talk about the fact of tryptophan making us sleepy as only a myth, but some recent scientific studies talk on tryptophan being enhanced by the sheer amount of carbs in the typical Thanksgiving feast, thus making such a meal more coma inducing than a turkey sandwich at the local deli. Whatever the science may be, the sheer amount and variety of food items is certainly causing a load on the digestive tract. Particularly this variety. You have thick potatoes, green beans, french fried onions, turkey meat, gravy fat, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sugary pie, etc, all of which digest at different rates. And being eaten in conjunction with one another makes for a strange fight to sneak ahead of the acid line to be broken down at it's ideal speed. Yet the pie you ate at the end of the meal, breaks down quicker, due to the sugars, than the meat hunks ahead, so the sugar sits there for a bit, gets impatient. This big belly party exhausts the guts.


A colleague of mine once brought up the diet theory of eating all food groups separate from one another. So you eat your meats in one meal, wait a good couple of hours, then eat your pasta. Then a few hours later eat your fruit. This allows for an ease in digestive flow. And it makes sense. You don't want that fruit to rot while it waits behind the sirloin steak. I've yet to commit to such an eating standard. And clearly Thanksgiving breaks the rules of this diet. Though I'm thankful to be privileged enough to enjoy pounds of food and indigestion. Again, these are good problems to have. 


After the massive feast last night, I was quick to desire bed when we got home. I drifted into intense dreams derived from the images of outer space my girlfriend and I have been subjecting ourselves to in watching The History Channel's: The Universe in our Blockbuster queue. One of these dreams started out with swimming through space, hopping from asteroid to asteroid, until I swam from the depths of this black vacuum to crawl up the shores of some European country, looked perhaps a bit like Portugal. The outer space behind was indeed just some big black ocean waters. Once on the shore I stepped on a snail, and this I could feel in my dream, a vivid slime ooze between my toes. I wound up starting my own small business refurbishing apartments. During the course of one project I kept ordering food from a diner. The owner himself delivered the food and we developed a good friendship. After this project I decided I was going to swim back out into space, and so I went to say good bye to the diner owner. I stopped in at the diner and he laughed at me, telling me I couldn't go! He was retiring and liked my business sense and wanted me to take over! I resisted, but then he asked me to follow him into the kitchen. He led me through the kitchen, into another larger, seemingly unused kitchen. Gates made of jagged spikes closed off one section of it. He told me to wait to the side. He wanted to show me something special locked inside a secret tomb, but he had to go in and disarm the booby traps first. I watched him dodge swinging blades and dropping spikes to disappear through a sliding glass door, down a long dark tunnel. He was gone awhile. Then he returned, on fire, playing the electric guitar, singing! I wasn't sure if this was his doomed body from the detriment of a booby trap, or if this is what he wanted to show me. But the rest of this dream took on the feel of a rock opera. 

Sleep Blip

Everyday when I leave work I notice there is a touch of coffee left in my travel mug. I tend to forget about that touch in the early morning when I arrive and smell the fresh brew, as I gravitate to pouring that fresh cup. So I dump the touch of coffee out in a patch of dirt with now budding flower poking up. I wonder if plants feel the effects of caffeine and bop microscopically.

I read today that a 3rd air traffic controller has been caught sleeping on the job and terminated from his position. I do understand that the air traffic control field is probably one of the most stressful fields, yet I'm curious for the sudden trend in sleeping in front of the radar blip. It certainly calls out for more attention to be garnered if you get caught sleeping while governing the safety of the runway strip versus sleeping at an accounting desk. No one's truly at risk if you sleep during an audit. So I'm on the side of the terminators in their canning of those sleeping in front of that radar blip. Despite the stress of the job, which I can certainly understand the desire to sleep after the anxiety wanes, I do believe if you want to keep that job, find a way to stay awake. If my bus driver fell asleep I'd want his head. I work in sales, and that can be a stressful job, but I've yet to fall asleep at my desk. But if I do one of these days, in my field, I'd probably only hurt my companies revenue, and my income.

Coffee. I may be immune to it to a degree yet, coffee can be a good decision if you start drifting at the sleep blip. Perhaps diet may be making them so sleepy. Are these air traffic controllers gorging at Chili's Too on their breaks(I ate at one of these twice in 24 hours)? I learned today that different types of foods such as meats and starches and fruits digest at different rates, and it is therefore ideal to eat them separately, not as one big square meal, as some of those foods types can get clogged and gunked and ferment behind the slower digestion of a different sort, which can also hog necessary enzymes for the other. I did not know this. A co-worker informed me. So tonight I focused on the meat type for dinner. And I do not feel so sleepy as to crawl into bed at the 9 o'clock hour as I usually wish to do.