Healthier.

By Conor | November 17th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

In New York City, smoking is so rare that the mere sight of somebody walking down the street with a cigarette in their hand is arresting; he or she may as well have cymbals fastened to the insides of their knees, squeezing an oversized novelty car horn. It’s strange, because New York never struck me as a particularly healthy city. Maybe New Yorkers do still smoke, but just not out in the street, not while walking among the discriminating masses. Maybe it’s an etiquette thing. After all, I may love my wife’s lasagna, but I’m not going to be seen on Lexington Avenue shoveling forkfuls of it into my mouth, dodging the upstream pedestrians. It would be uncouth. No couth.

Is our city that much healthier? Can we really count the smokers we see each week on one hand? I can, I swear. Or do they just hide it better, like porky people who have large Meat-Lover’s pizzas delivered to their face in the privacy of their homes? (And by those people, I mean me, when Liz is out of town.)

Smoking is never going to be a problem in my house. I don’t smoke, Liz has never smoked. The dog shows no interest. Finn cares only about how much Tupperware he can get his hands on at any given moment. You give him a cigarette, he’ll just eat it, then crawl off to search the nursery for Tupperware. No, for me, the problem, the temptation, will never be cigarettes. For me, it is food.

Not that I eat a lot, I don’t. I’m still a trim guy, if I do say so myself. I almost never eat ice cream and only drink diet cola. The problem, though, is that I eat what I consider “normal” food and everybody around me seems to be eating watercress salads and lightly steamed fish, and I’m done pretending like that’s any way to live.

I don’t like healthy food. I just don’t. Gummi bears – those aren’t terrible, I guess, and they’re sort of healthy, since they’re made out of non-toxic colored water and recycled Michelins. But the rest? I’m done with it.

I think I came to this conclusion a little while ago, when we were with my college buddies and their wives. There were about ten adults and six kids in this big farm house we rented in Maryland. It was awesome. We would all take turns cooking dinner, and everybody did a bang up job. People were busting out stuff like seafood linguine so you know that I’m not even joking around here.

But the kids, who are all under the age of 5 – they weren’t eating seafood linguine. They were eating chopped up hot dogs and Kraft macaroni and cheese. They had ketchup. They could eat, like, a ton of hot dog bits if they wanted to. They were encouraged to. And I realized that I was totally jealous. Totally jealous! And they didn’t even finish it! I’m scraping their plates into the trash; I may as well have been tossing an American flag into a kiln.

I would eat that stuff every single night if it wasn’t for my wife. But Liz, God love her, keeps this family healthy. She came home from the grocery store a couple of weeks ago with food for us and food for Finn, who is almost nine months old now. The food for us was couscous. It’s tasty and healthy and it is the kind of thing that grown-ups eat. But Finn got a box of something called Crunching Blocks. Specifically, graham cracker and honey flavored Crunching Blocks. How delicious does that sound? Who wouldn’t want to eat Crunching Blocks? You’re imagining it right now – admit it! They had letters on them too.

But I wasn’t allowed to have any. Sometimes when I’m giving Finn little Cheerios in the morning, I whisper “Live it up now, little man. Next stop: couscous,” but he doesn’t look up at me because he’s too focused on getting that delicious Cheerio into his mouth and also he doesn’t seem to really speak English. Also, he’s probably love couscous right now. He’d probably scoop up a whole handful and jam it right in his little pie hole. Show off.

The nice part about all this is that once a year, my birthday rolls around. This year it fell on a Saturday, and Liz took me to this phenomenal steak place called The Palm to have a huge rib-eye. The best part about it was that I didn’t have to do that thing where I pretend to consider the artichoke heart penne, or when ask the waiter about what fish he would recommend. I asked him which steak was the number one most delicious steak and I ordered that and then Liz let me get extra French fries – I could hardly even see her over this enormous pile of French fries! – because I love French fries so much especially with ketchup. And I would have ordered the hamburger which is my favorite food but I had one the night before. So it was a pretty awesome birthday. (Oh, and she took me to see Hair on Broadway because I adore musicals and got me an iPhone (did I do the capitalization right there?) and we had dinner with friends.)

So with another entire year before my birthday, I’m thinking I need to set a good example for the whole family on the eating-healthy front. Liz eats well already. Finn is also doing pretty well, he eats only oatmeal and mushed veggies or fruit. The dog is more like me. She’ll eat whatever is in her bowl . Brown pellets of Purina, usually, unless you accidentally drop your wallet or something in there – in which case say goodbye – but you know she’s just killing herself to get at that sidewalk trash pizza on Lex.

And that’s my thought as well, me and the dog both. I’ll eat healthy in front of the family. I shall continue to try to impress my wife and set a good example for my son and avoid the stares of the dog who just wants anything that will fit in her mouth. I shall keep my cholesterol down and live a long life. If couscous lets me do that, then fine. But if they find out that Crunching Blocks are super healthy, Finn better learn to share. I’m just sayin’.