Day 45
Snow swirls around Nick and me as we wait outside for our table to be prepared. He stands patiently in front of the glowing Olive Garden sign, and with some hesitation, tells me that I have been acting strangely. He would know as well as anyone, I guess - he's been with me since day one. I ask him to clarify, and take another few pictures.
"I don't know. It just seems like you've changed."
"Are you telling me I got fat?"
"Well, not just that. You're different."
I don't press him further. We all knew how it would end from the moment I first told the family that I was going to eat all the pasta. Still, it's strange to think it's already happening.
Lunch was Spring.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
Four days left. Then what?
A special thanks to my dining companion, Nick!
Day 44
Angelhair pasta is the most challenging pasta in the oeuvre of the Neverending Pasta Bowl. It breaks easily, it doesn't hold sauce well, and it's more dense than a Gawker writer on Jupiter. Eating a bowl of an angelhair is akin to consuming a loaf of wet white bread.
So you can understand why I wanted to get them out of the way. Eating three in a row was probably a bad idea, but now I can go the rest of my life without ever touching this black hole of carbs again.
Lunch was skipped.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
NOTE:I'm doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) tomorrow at 8pm eastern time, so if you have a question, feel free to post it there! I'll link it here on the blog and on Twitter when it's up.
A special thanks to my dining companion, the three pounds of pasta stubbornly resisting my futile attempts at digestion!
Day 43
Today my highly-trained team of computer crackers, mainframe hackers, proxy smackers, and CPU jackers finally broke through the
armies of spambots that were waiting at the gates of our comment section. Apparently, All Of Garden was the number one site in Japan
for both pop-culture-based reviews of pasta AND knockoff designer handbags.
In celebration of this victory, I'm dedicating today's blog to our spammer friends, who I assume are every bit as pale and saucy as these pastas!
Lunch was Bulgari ashtray sale.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
Disney collaboration Takashimaya Kashiwa dress
Ladies clothing Moncler down super copy Men's clothing shopping site
owl monster
What a way to start my last week! Please feel free to celebrate by making a comment in the comments section, unless you're a spammer, in which case, please just go away!!!!!
A special thanks to my dining companion, just me!
Day 42
Never been a huge fan of alfredo sauce. Something about scooping up a spoonful of butter, cream, and cheese directly into my mouth makes my stomach ache after the third consecutive bowl. Some people might scoff at that, and make some ridiculous suggestion about portion sizes. These people are quitters, and have probably never had to work under a deadline.
Today's pastas all fall under that calor-ffic umbrella. Warning - you may gain a pound or two just by reading the names!
Lunch was skipped.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
Bites In White Satin
The White Shrimp of Dover
Dirty White Bambino
Seven days left! :O
A special thanks to my dining companion, all alone~!
Day 41
Feeling pretty good today! I spend a lot of time thinking about the future. What will life hold for me after the blog is completed, my belly is full, and my magical pass loses its powers and reverts to a hunk of useless plastic? There's a lot of things I haven't been able to do in the past month. Here are some of those things I haven't been able to do that I'm really looking forward to doing in eight days:
-Eat any kind of fruit
-Get drunk
-Have a date somewhere other than Olive Garden
-Feel that my life has meaning
-Consume fewer than four breadsticks
-Not dread a trip to the bathroom
Lunch was skipped.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
Spaghetti Western
Whole Hweat
Marinara Trench
Every day's a step closer!
A special thanks to my dining companion, Vinegar!
Day 40
Happy Hell-oween, boils and ghouls!
Tonight's boo-log will creature four kill-licious pain-stas from everyone's favorite die-in restaur-haunt, Olive Gore-den! Axe yourself: is there anything more scare-ifying than italian sausage?!
These epi-gore-ean treats will definitely tick-kill your funny bone while they fill your stom-ache! Ehehehehehe!
Lunch was Night Of The Living Bread[ed Chicken].
Dinner was decomposed of three plates of pasta:
An Italian Sausage In London
I Know What You Ate Last Supper
Rosemary's Gravy
See you tomorrow, kiddies!
A special thanks to my dining companion, Nosferatu!
Day 39
When I was fourteen years old, I saw a dying squirrel in my backyard. I don't know why she was dying. No obvious injuries, no predator animals nearby. Writing that out, now I wonder how I even knew she was dying. Maybe I'm just looking back and realizing she must have been dying, since she was dead a few minutes later. Or maybe dying is a state that anyone can recognize.
Anyway. She died and I wrapped her up in a t-shirt from my Mathlympics club that I paid $8 of my mom's money for and buried her in the backyard, next to a tree. I thought to myself that this was a very meaningful and poignant thing to do, and I was looking forward to sharing the anecdote with somebody, many years from then, in a private moment. It would foster a kind of intimacy, the kind that stories like this always seem to foster in movies and books.
Lunch was Roberta.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
I never did share that story with anyone, but I hope you all got something out of it, though what I'm not sure.
A special thanks to my dining companion, Nick!
SPECIAL NOTE: Guest comments are disabled only temporarily while we sort out some spammers! Rest assured they will be back soon.
Day 38
Communication today is different than it ever has been. With so much of our day-to-day interaction being purely text, we miss a lot of the subtlety and nuance that tone, context, and body language play in conveying meaning. Enter the emoticon, and, since 2008 or so, the emoji, which serve to fill in these gaps. Can pasta be represented in this medium?
Lunch was ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
To be honest, I mostly just wanted to see what kind of URLs these titles would generate. The pages actually wouldn't load properly (at least in my browser) so I had to rename every URL by hand. Weak.
A special thanks to my dining companion, Billy Joel!
Day 37
In many ways, a dish of pasta is like a band. Each part contributes to the whole, and they must work together in harmony to achieve the desired effect. Any part that is lacking, or overpowering, brings down the entire performance.
Consider this as we review today's pastas.
Lunch was Bass.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
I hope your own efforts in finding your personal pasta "jam session" are fruitful!
A special thanks to my dining companion, no one!
Day 36
A lot of people have been talking about the blog, emailing in words of support and caution, asking for interviews and such. That's great. I'm really happy my blog is something people find interesting. Everyone wants to know why I'm eating all this olive garden food - am I "just really hungry?", they ask, and then laugh. I laugh, too.
What I don't say is that I'm not hungry. I haven't felt hunger since sometime in week three. Maybe that's just an early symptom of diabetes. I don't know, I'm not a doctor. What I do know is that the only thing that can fill the hole inside me is pasta. And I'm still far from full.
Lunch was Denial.
Dinner was composed of four plates of pasta:
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
It's been 36 days since the start of the challenge, and 795 days since she left.
A special thanks to my dining companion, myself!
Day 35
It's a strange sensation to look at a pasta you ate and enjoyed just a few weeks ago and discover you don't remember it. I recall how wonderful I thought alfredo sauce with meatballs was. When I picked up today's pasta I could only remember it was a creamy sauce, and now I can't make sense of it.
I stood up and closed my eyes and saw Vino, myself - six or seven years old, sitting at the dinner table with a cookbook, learning to review food, saying the words over and over with my mother sitting beside him, beside me...
"Try it again."
"A fine bouquet. A certain je ne nais quois. Delicate notes of basil."
"No! Not basil! It's caraway!" Pointing with her rough-scrubbed finger.
"A fine bouquet. A certain caraway. Delicate notes of je ne sais quois."
"No! You're not trying. Do it again!"
Do it again... do it again... do it again...
"Leave the boy alone. You've got him terrified."
"He's got to learn. He's too lazy to concentrate."
Caraway. Caraway. Delicate notes of caraway.
"He's slower than the other children. Give him time."
"He's normal. There's nothing wrong with him. Just lazy. I'll beat it into him until he learns."
A certain...a certain je ne sais quois. Sais ne je quois. Quois sais ne je.
And then looking up from the table, it seems to me I saw myself, through Vino's eyes, a forkful of pasta, and I realized I was bending the utensil with the pressure of both hands as if I wanted to snap it in half. I threw the fork against the wall, the creamy sauce smearing and then slowly sliding down the wall. I let it lay there and its ragged white tongues were laughing because I couldn't understand what they were saying.
Lunch was skipped.
Dinner was composed of three plates of pasta:
I've got to try to hold onto some of the things I've learned. Please, God, don't take it all away.
A special thanks to my dining companion, Tawnya!