Has anyone ever stopped to consider that I might be pro-Oxidant?

As science gets less scientific, food gets moreso. Why? Why does food have to be so... enhanced? And not good enhancements, either.

Sweetie and I went grocery shopping last night. On a week like this, that qualified as a high point for us. Sweetie's had an especially rough week of it, beginning with Mr F trying to get out of going for his nap by head-butting her so hard that she almost had to go for stitches. She called me at work to tell me about it, and this is what I heard:

"I may neev to vo vor svives."

She turned out to be okay, and didn't need to go to the emervenvy room. Having to onlyput ife on her lif was probably the high point of her day, given how the week went. The news was so bad this week that at one point I told Sweetie, quite seriously, that I might have to stop calling home from "work", and then told her, too, also seriously, that I was going to have to have her stop calling me.

I wasn't going to stop the calls because I was "busy." Reading Wonderella, blogging, and googling "Paul Is Dead" to see why everyone thought Paul was dead doesn't exactly qualify as busy in anyone's book, and is yet another example of why I never, ever, complain about having a hard day at "work." The worst day I've had at "work" this year was the day the Internet went down, and it was the worst day I've had because I had nothing to do but actual "work." I've never gotten so much work done in one day. I was miserable.

It wasn't business; the reason I was going to stop taking phone calls from Sweetie and stop making phone calls to Sweetie was a lot simpler: I couldn't take the bad news anymore.

It wasn't Sweetie's fault, and we kept the phone calls up because I'd have had to hear all the money we needed to spend and all the other bad news at some point, so it might as well be at "work," where I'm not doing anything important anyway. And to be fair, it wasn't just this week and it didn't start with Sweetie. The bad news actually started last Sunday, when The Boy and I "fixed" the garage door -- fixed it to the point where it no longer did anything.

I blame The Boy, which is what I'd do anyway, but in this case it kind of almost is actually his fault, so blaming him is almost kind of sort of fair.

The Boy and I fixed the garage door because it had been acting up a little, stalling sometimes and not opening or closing right all the time. So Sunday, two weeks ago, I'd been doing some work in the yard, and The Boy, for some reason, had come outside -- a rare occurrence in itself, since so far as I knew the TV was still working and there were still at least sixteen different ESPN channels available on the TV, and those two things usually meant that The Boy wouldn't see sunlight; he won't get off the couch if there is the possibility of seeing something related to sports on TV.

I had finished up the yardwork, which was to make a path to nowhere in our backyard out of the bricks that used to be a path that led to our shed. Having torn out the shed, I decided that it looked dumb to have a path going to where the shed once stood, a path which now led to a shed-shaped area of dirt with the kind of scraggly bushes that you can buy for $1.50 at Wal-mart if you get there late enough in the season. Rather than have a path going to nowhere in particular, I had The Boy pull the bricks out, and then I dug up a different portion of the yard starting at the path that already led around the house, and extending that path out into the yard. But I misjudged the number of bricks I'd need to have this new path go somewhere, so instead of a path that leads to a dirt area bounded by the Sorta Great Wall, we have a path that winds gracefully between the trees I got for $4.50 each and ends... nowhere in particular. I'm thinking that next year, I'll use some of the lumber we have left over and build a shrine to the Backyard Basketball at the end of the Path to Nowhere.

Once I'd finished the dead-end path (I knew I was done because while I had plenty of yard left, I was out of bricks), I was heading inside when The Boy met me in the driveway and said he thought he knew what was wrong with the garage door. What he thought was wrong was that some of the hinges were loose. So we tightened those, and found that the garage door didn't work any better. Thinking "scientifically," we then loosened the hinges we'd just tightened, but that didn't help. We then tried tightening and loosening other things, and had the garage door opener go up and down and up and down, and loosened the things we'd tightened, and tightened the things we'd loosened, and ran the opener some more, until we got it just right. It worked perfectly. The Boy was outside and I was inside and it had worked perfectly and I said "Don't touch anything, I'm going to adjust it like that."

The Boy said "What?" and hit the opener to run the door so that he could hear what I said, and it never worked again after that and now I have to open and close the garage door myself like it's the 1970s or something.

That began a run of bad luck and expenses that included paying for Middle's senior pictures, and their athletic fees at school, and their parking fees at school, and Chocolate Herman James Brown The Wonder Kitten's trip to the vet because he'd taken up peeing on the carpet for some reason, and more fees at school, and then more equipment for school, expenses and bad news and sick cats that just seemed to keep on coming.

I usually call home and check in with Sweetie just before noon. I'll call and ask how things are going, and we'll trade celebrity gossip, comparing notes on which celebrities we want to make fun of that day. Sweetie herself is on top of the news and reads the paper and watches the nightly news and has opinions about presidential candidates and murder investigations and the oil prices and things like that: actual knowledge about actual events. She's married, though, to someone who can kill two hours reading those "Paul Is Dead" websites while listening to "New York Groove" by Ace Frehley, and that tends to limit the conversation she can engage in.

This week, I'd call home at noon and instead of getting updates on, say, Jennifer Aniston (whose side we are still officially on in the breakup although there's been a little thawing because Sweetie saw a picture of Shiloh that was cute), I'd get her saying The Boy needs a sleeping bag because he's going away to camp for football and they're supposed to bring it. The next day, it would be that Bluey, our old car, had to go into the shop. The day after that, The Boy also needed an air mattress for camp (so football players apparently do not rough it.)

It wasn't just coming from Sweetie's end, either; I had to be the bearer of bad tidings, and not just "I've run out of internet comics to read" bad tidings. For example, we've been trying to refinance our house and I had to call her one day this week and let her know that it didn't look like we were going to refinance the house in August, at all, as we'd hoped to do, because the guy we were using to refinance, as it turned out, had his license revoked. "At least," I said, "This explains why I could never get a hold of him on the phone."

So the week was getting expensive and getting us down, and ordinarily we'd take a little break and go out someplace fancy, like Dairy Queen, but we also had to grocery shop this week, so our romantic night out was a trip to the grocery store, where Sweetie left me alone to pick up the pizza sauce we needed to use for the meatball sandwiches we're going to have on Saturday. That usually cheers me up pretty well; there's no week so bad that finishing it up with meatball sandwiches on a Saturday can't bring a smile.

But in this case, I was disturbed. When left to buy pizza sauce myself, I head to the bottom shelf, to the unglamorous steel cans of pizza sauce that aren't fancy, that don't have pictures of Paul Newman on them, and don't have accent marks in their name; I head to those because they don't cost a lot and pizza sauce is pizza sauce. I am certain that there's just one pizza sauce factory out there, and it makes one kind of pizza sauce, and then various companies go buy it and package it up and sell it under their own names, kind of the way Ben Stiller keeps making the same movie over and over again but they just change the name, so why pay four bucks for a jar of pizza sauce?

But I wasn't cheered up this time, because the cheap pizza sauce that I like to buy to show that I'm no patsy getting taken advantage of by Big Sauce had a little label on it that said "Now with antioxidants."

Let me be perfectly clear: despite having an education currently valued at many tens of thousands of dollars, I have no idea whatsoever what an "antioxidant" is, because my entire education was geared at getting me into the kind of job where it's perfectly acceptable to have a working knowledge of which websites have the best Ace Frehley downloads and also perfectly acceptable to have no apparent duties and no way to measure whether I'm actually doing anything. I have a degree in "political science" and people used to ask me, in college, what a "political science" degree was good for. "What can you do with that?" they'd ask, and I'd shrug and tell them "Lots of things," while privately thinking "Beyond go to law school, I have no idea." I took political science mostly because nobody else including the professors knew what it was, either, so they couldn't fail students on the exams because nobody knew if anyone else was right or not.

If I could have looked into the future, I'd have said this about my major: "It's good for making people think that you know something about politics, so you get to be an expert every four years, and it's also good for getting the kind of job where sometimes in the office people will actually start drinking at eleven a.m."

That's exactly what happened today -- people were celebrating something, a birthday or winning a case or something; I never know because I try to avoid talking to people at work -- and they started drinking at about 11 a.m. "Aren't you drinking?" someone asked me, and I shrugged and said "No," but I wanted to say "No, because I haven't even eaten lunch yet." I stayed in the office until 5 today. Almost nobody else did.

It's not a bad job to have, though; when all your coworkers are drunk by 2, it's a lot easier to kill an afternoon watching Batman Lego videos on Youtube. Still, you probably shouldn't hire our firm to do any serious legal work.

It is the kind of job that can be held by people like me who have no clue what an 'antioxidant' is. It doesn't matter that I don't know what it is, because whatever "antioxidants" are, I don't want them in my pizza sauce. I don't want scientifically enhanced pizza sauce that's good for me. If I wanted food that was good for me, I wouldn't be getting the ingredients for it off the bottom shelf of a mega-super-market and I wouldn't be putting those ingredients onto a meatball sub.

But there you have it: food is getting healthier and enhanced and good for us, even if we deliberately avoid things like vegetables and meat that hasn't been fried. A guy like me can keep his life moving in a good direction, in the direction of sandwiches that get ever more and more delicious/bizarre, like a sandwich that has sliced up bratwurst and cheddar cheese and potato-stick-snacks and Ranch dressing, a sandwich I actually ate this week -- a guy like me can keep pushing ahead with that kind of life and then one day he realizes that his pizza sauce is chock full of antioxidants and his orange juice has calcium in it.

That's something I can't tolerate, either: adding calcium to orange juice. Calcium comes from milk, and milk is to be ingested only as a side effect of cereal, or when used in certain cake and brownie mixes. If you eat enough brownies and Captain Crunch, you'll get all the calcium you need. That didn't stop food manufacturers from adding calcium to orange juice, which grosses me out to no end, because when I see that calcium has been added to something, all I can think of is this: Calcium means strong teeth. There are probably teeth in that orange juice, just floating around. And then I can't drink it. So now I'm not even getting the one good thing about orange juice, which is vitamin C, and I have to hope I get my full daily allowance of that from the Crunchberries in my cereal.

Food manufacturers keep on doing this, adding healthy things to food and further limiting the choices for people like me who don't want to be healthy, we just want a meatball sandwich that doesn't have antioxidants and teeth and guava in it And all the while they're getting away from adding things to food that should be added, things like "Funfetti."

It's a good thing for me that some food manufacturers still understand what the public really wants: "Funfetti." On the same trip in which I had reluctantly bought the antioxidanted pizza sauce and glumly concluded that my meatball subs would no longer be oxidanted and I would have to just live with that, Sweetie had used a coupon to pick up some brownie mix. In the baking aisle, she'd said we needed to get brownie mix, and she'd picked up a mix of chocolate and "Funfetti" brownies, the box for which promised not just that the brownies had "Funfetti" candies, but also that they were Extra Rich and Fudgy. That's an additive for you: forget about antagonizing the oxidants; start adding extra Fudgy to the foods and we'll all do just fine.

To make matters even better, Sweetie said, too, that for the coupon we needed to get frosting, also, which is a rare treat because I'm the only person in the house who likes frosting on brownies and cakes; Sweetie and all the kids say frosting is "too sweet," as though such a thing was possible. So she picked out a frosting, and the frosting, too, had Funfetti!

I tried to play it cool: "You don't think that's too much Funfetti?" I asked, and held my breath. Sweetie said it would be okay, and I pushed us on ahead before she could reconsider.

So when I put the scientific cancer-curing pizza sauce into the cart, I tried to focus on the fact that we also had copious amounts of Funfetti, and that helped cheer me back up, because while I might be forced to eat meatball subs that would be good for me, or would at least be not so bad for me, I'd also be topping them off with a Funfetti Festival, since with frosting on them the brownies would almost certainly be all mine to eat. Probably while watching Ace Frehley videos.



Want to see what I mean about science not being scientific? Read "Me: 2, Science: 0"

Or, find out why tearing down the shed showed me I'm no Indiana Jones.