goblinbox

In which a tradition is born.

A year ago, Left Coast Girlie and I went to see the Shakespeare Uncork’d production together and had such a great time we did it again this year.

Here’s how it went:

She said she’d be here at six, but for some reason I remembered it as seven and fell asleep. G’ma called up the stairs at ten of, inviting me to watch something about daredevil pilots on television and woke me; I grabbed my phone and saw that LCG was going to arrive in moments and damn it why didn’t I take a shower earlier?

I dressed quick like a bunny and we got into her car and went to the Peony, where we sucked down a couple cocktails each. We got to the amphitheatre just as the show started; the weather was perfect and the show was great. (We both totally cried when poor Hero was defamed.)

After the show, we went back to the Peony for a couple of rounds and hooked up with TonyG, Toni, and Renee. Then we picked up Jayrob and went to the Green for awhile. Afterhours was at Jayrob’s place, and LCG and I sat on the patio and hollered at each other about organized religion and spirituality until we decided we were exhausted. I threw her into the front bedroom and went to bed myself.

At eleven the next morning, I woke up and went and found LCG. I made some falafel; we watched Screamers on SyFy. She hung out until she had to pick her son up at three. It was a supremely mellow day.

Yay Shakespeare! Yay hanging out with friends half the night!

In which there’s a recipe. Sort of.

After my last post, I went to the kitchen feeling poor and dejected. I knew I had corn tortillas, some cheese, and half a can of refried beans in the fridge. I figured I’d nuke the beans and have a taco or two. AGAIN.

Instead, I made enchiladas!

Not only was there half a can of refried beans in the fridge, but also milk and most of an 8 oz container of sour cream, and some grated Parmesan that was just about expired. I also had a can of fire-roasted chiles in a cupboard.

I nuked three tortillas to soften them, put in some beans and rolled them up. Then I covered them with a chile cream sauce and nuked them, finishing with some leftover salsa and a chopped green onion.

The sauce loosely follows the one in this recipe, but made use of what I had lying around, so it contained Parmesan and cumin instead of Swiss.

Not only was this totally delicious, but I have enough sauce leftover to pour over eggs on toast in the morning. Yum!

In which I do a meme.

A quick google doesn’t reveal to me where it came from originally, but the 12 of 12 idea is that on the 12th day of the month you take 12 pictures and put ‘em on the innertubes. Vuboq does it sometimes. It’s what I did today.

Behold, twelve images of my twelfth of July:

I made eggs for breakfast. Mexican eggs. This is mainly because all I had in the pantry was tortillas and a can of tomatoes, and not because I love huevos rancheros. Honestly I’m pretty indifferent to the dish, but it fills the belly. Plus: it’s Mexican food.

I worked on a data entry project for NLW. It was pretty fun until the upload failed and I couldn’t fix it ’cause I had no freakin’ idea what to put in the PID field, since there were successful uploads with blank PID fields. I was all, WTF, AMAZON DOT COM, YOU COQUETTISH BEAST, YOU.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which I’M dieting, so YOU get to look at pictures of food.

Here’s my breakfast! Only 400 calories!

Here’s some soup I had the other day!

That soup was good! GAWD I MISS THAT SOUP!

Hmm, soup.

Oh, yeah, this was really good, too:

And this:

And this:

And this:

AW HELL!

Oh, wait! Guess what! I’ll be having this for lunch today:

Argh!!! All I wanna do is eat, and I JUST ATE.

This dorky, obsessive post brought to you by
the bastards evil geniuses over at:

In which there’s a fourth chapter. (Go to chapter 3.)

19.

“My dome? What?” I replied, grabbing my helmet so I could actually talk to the guy. “What do you mean?”

“There’s something wrong with the cameras, Fred,” someone said calmly.

“It’s a fucking Martian! Ye gods, even worse: some bastard child of human DNA and Mars!” someone else shouted.

“Can you see the video feed?” asked the man from Higher, who was apparently called Fred.

“Nope, I’m in the restaurant,” I said. I can just walk over there–”

“She can fix the cameras,” voice #2 said.

“No! Don’t go into the dome until we establish communication with it!” said voice #3.

“Restaurant?” said yet another voice.

“Listen, listen!” Fred said, and I could literally hear him flapping his arm for silence. “It looks like there’s a life form in the dome. We want audio. Can you manage that?”

“A life form,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“In the dome.”

“Yeah.”

“The dome is filled with dead people, Fred,” I said. “All my friends’ bodies are in there, Fred.”

“Get somewhere you can see the video feed and call back, okay, kid?”

“Okay,” I said.

“And then we’re totally gonna need audio,” Fred said.

“Whatever,” I said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being a running list:

• exiguious
• manque
• approbation
• ratiocenation

In which I share the story of my 2010 pilgrimage to Mother’s feet.

Guru brahma gurur visnuh
gurudevo mahesvarah
guru saksat parambrahma
tasmai srigurave namah

(I prostrate to that Sri Guru who is Brahma, Vishnu, and God Maheshwara, and who is verily the Supreme Absolute Itself.)

At the very front of the archana book, there is a 3-and-a-half page manasa puja. I read through it once several years ago.

I don’t remember having any particular response to it other than perhaps the vague opinion that it was a simple or childish form of worship.

Now it elucidates my longing so much that I wish I’d written it myself.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
The Seattle programs are awkward. There’s a public program, then a paid retreat, then a public program. The only way to get to both public programs is to be in Seattle for three days; if you’re going to be there anyway you might as well sign up for the retreat. And, if you can’t afford the retreat, well, only one public program for you then.

I couldn’t afford the retreat. Hell, I couldn’t even afford transportation to Seattle. The only reason I was able to see Mother at all this year is because a friend, Toni, saw my sad complaint on Facebook and offered to drive me across the state.

When I asked her why she wanted to do that, she said she’d “felt compelled” to take me to Amma. When I sent her a link to amma.org, she cried looking at an image of Mother.

“It happens,” I told her. “If Mother wants to meet you, She’ll meet you.” How lucky am I, that Mother found me a ride?

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After getting a ride, I got the very last room in the “Amma Tour” room block at the Hyatt, but it was $109 per night. I later found a motel through Priceline for $65. It was five miles away from the program, but at least I could afford it.

So my friend Toni picked me up at 8:45 on Monday morning and drove me across the state in her little red late model car so that I could see my beloved Sat-guru, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
At the motel I loaned Toni a green punjabi, and dressed myself in a white skirt-and-top set I bought at a Chicago program a dozen years ago.

We looked at the map in the phone book for awhile, then we left to find the Hyatt Regency Bellevue. Toni navigates almost entirely by vibe; when I admitted I hadn’t seen the Hyatt where I’d expected it to be (I was looking at the wrong side of the street) she laughed and flipped a U-turn and drove us straight to it.

Parking, miraculously, was free. (We’d already filled the tank. Between the two of us, we had maybe forty dollars.) We went into the Hyatt and got in line with hundreds of devotees. I saw the clothes and the hair and the jewelry and the tattoos and wondered vaguely why humans like to adorn themselves as tribes… I felt some relief: I feel weird about the way I dress because I’m basically the only member of my tribe where I live.

The line started to move. We got to the hall and were handed darshan tokens. Then we followed the directions across the hall and sat for the puja. Toni has bad knees from a car accident she was in, but magically we were seated on the right side of the stage next to the wall so she could stand up when needed without bothering too many people. There were over a thousand people in the hall. Most of the people around us were wearing retreat bracelets.

I sat and relaxed into the vibe. These people had all spent two days with Mother; was that what felt so wonderful? Or was it my own expectation of seeing Mother? Or was Mother thinking about us? If God is everywhere and we’re all capable of producing this ourselves, why don’t we? What made this different than any other gathering of people in any other room?

Amma arrived. Toni said she had a clear view of the pada puja even though it was all the way across the hall. (I don’t think I even knew about pada puja for several years. Everyone’s experience around Amma is so different.)

After the holy water was distributed, something about the shape of the ceiling magnified the sound of thousands of lids being snapped onto thousands of little cups into this wonderful groovy clicky-popping sound. “I LOVE that sound!” I whispered. “I want to sample it RIGHT NOW!” The guy next to me and I started giggling and couldn’t stop.

“It’s like a crooked Zen koan!” he replied. “Like, ‘What is the sound of many lids that don’t fit?’”

Each time one of us stopped giggling, the other would start again. Silly, non-ironic, joyful, childlike laughter. It felt WONDERFUL.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Mother gave satsang. I took notes on my iThing. This is what they say:

Dispassion, three types: temporary, gradual, intense.
The body is like a rented house
Awareness – like a bird on a dry twig (at any time it could snap)
When we develop intense dispassion we get peace of mind.
What is the point of blaming others for our sorrow?

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
When Swamiji began the Ma-Om meditation, Toni, who had had to stand up during the satsang, came and sat back down. Meditating in Amma’s presence was, as always, a lot like stepping

calmly

off the edge of the world

into an eternal abyss.

The rest of the puja completed, Mother went into the temple to change and they closed the curtains. Toni and I went for a walk because she’s not used to sitting on the floor so much and her knees were killing her.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Dinner was pretty good (especially the mattar paneer).

I would have had Indian snacks instead, but there aren’t any at the Seattle programs; I guess there aren’t really any Indian devotees in the area to make them. I can’t even tell you how much I was hoping for idli and sambar and pakora. OMG what I would give for some samosas! Srsly.

Our tokens were numbered O-3. I told Toni we wouldn’t be getting darshan until three or four o’clock in the morning. We hit the bookstore. I bought a rudraksha japa mala and a new bottle of Marikolundu.

I got some chai. Eventually Toni went and found a couch and napped.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
I went up to the stage and stared at Amma for a couple of hours.

Well, when I could see Her at all I stared. The devotees doing their various sevas on stage insisted on standing directly in front of me, and I kept crying to Her in my head: “Let me see You! I can’t see You! This is my only time with You all year and this guy has to stand there!” I was feeling extremely sorry for myself that I didn’t get my usual three days with Mother and instead had only a few hours with Her and that guy! Why couldn’t he freakin’ kneel when he wasn’t actively doing his freakin’ seva?! I paced like a caged cat up and down the side of the stage, looking for a glimpse of my beloved Mother. Eventually I perched sideways behind a chair and I could see Her, but it took a toll on my neck and meditating was out of the question.

I went and sat down in front of the stage in a place left empty because the corner of the temple blocked any view of Amma, and meditated for about forty minutes. I’m not sure, but I think I may have fallen asleep. I didn’t nod off or start to fall over – usually a good indication that one has passed out – because I had very carefully arranged my body so that it took no effort to keep it upright, but there was a definite lack of conscious continuity.

Maybe I slept, maybe I had a very deep meditation. I don’t know. The issue caused me to wonder what the difference between “awareness” and “consciousness” might be. Do I have to be one to be the other?

I guess that I possess “consciousness,” because popular opinion and scripture alike say I do, but honestly I don’t know how to define it. I think I’m here and that I’m me, but I can’t tell you why I think that. Am I still conscious when I’m asleep? Can I be conscious without being aware? Can I be aware without being conscious? Most importantly, how do I know I’m me? I don’t have an unbroken recollection of my life; I have chunks of memory bordered by periods of sleep: each iteration of myself as the doer is utterly discrete, and yet I insist that these memories are all beads on the same string. Why do I think that? And how, if indeed at all, does this small-s-self relate to any capital-S-Self I might be trying to become?

I don’t meditate regularly because, honestly, the ever-changing world is more charming than whatever I find inside myself. I understand that the space within is infinitely vast (I can fit a model of the entire universe in there with room to spare), but it doesn’t draw me like the manifest world does. At best, meditation – even in the presence of my Satguru – is no better than just really pleasant, thank you very much.

So it follows that either I’m Doing It Wrong or that I’m missing the point. What is the point? When we see images of saints deep in samadhi, it sure looks like there’s a point. What are they doing in there? And why after twenty years of meditation don’t I know the answer to that question?

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After a yummy masala latte, I went back to the right side of the stage and found myself a place sitting on the floor directly behind the stairs. From that position, I could see Mother’s face more often than not. (I wanted to be much closer to Her, but everyone was being invited to sit after darshan and between them and the prasad people I figured I’d get booted in a couple of minutes anyway.)

I leaned against the metal banister and rested my chin on the floor of the temple and wondered, as I always do, why She bothers to do this. Why come into the world and do this incredible, endless job of work? Each year She comes, and each year she bootstraps us out of our mess, and we go back into the world full of love and compassion and ready to serve… and slowly, we forget. The next year, She does it again, and so do we. Rinse and repeat. She could just be sitting somewhere in samadhi. Why pour this little bottle of milk into the vast ocean?

“I’m a waste of Your time,” I thought. “These others probably utilize Your grace much better than I. I’m lucky I get even one darshan this year. I deserve less than even this, to sit where I can see You.” I briefly considered leaving without darshan, but even at the time I saw it was some sort of self-pitying ego dance. The mind really is a terrible thing.

“All I care about is You. All I want to do is be around you. Everything else is a waste of time.” I wondered if I wasn’t being a passive Westerner: I have ONLY A FEW HOURS IN HER PRESENCE and am I really just going to sit here? She’s right there! I thought about begging myself onto the prasad list: “I used to be one of the Iowa seva coordinators, but three years ago I moved and now I don’t have a local satsang and I’ve done no seva all year and this is the one and only chance I have to see Mother. How about it, can you get me up there?”

I cried because She’s so perfect and so beautiful. It seems that I had, compacted into my eight hours in Her presence, the same journey I would have had in three days if I’d been on the retreat.

Eventually, the sign said O-1. I went to find Toni. We got into the darshan line. It moved much too fast for me. I was on stage before I knew it, and in the lap almost instantly. I’d been in line between two first-timers, and had harbored a fantasy about sitting right next to Mother for a couple of minutes. Or maybe I’d get to be in the lap while She did mantras… but suddenly, moments after I got into the temple, She hugged me. I thought, “I love You so much, Ma, and all I want is You,” and started to cry, and then my darshan was over. She smiled at me as She handed me my prasad. She knew me – I quit wondering if She recognized me years ago – but there was no super special darshan for me this year, even though I’d been feeling so sorry for myself about only getting the one.

I got the impression I had been officially weaned off of Her form a few years ago (the first time I had had the “I really need to look within and see what’s in there” revelation) and that She knew I knew that. I mean, I remember it. This child doesn’t get long silly darshans; this one is supposed to be doing seva or meditating.

The sevite near the stairs motioned me to sit on the side of the stage. Toni sat behind me after her darshan. The monitor was making the front row get up and leave every 60 seconds. After scootching forward twice I was behind the assistant prasad person and finally close enough to Mother… a minute later I was asked to leave so the people behind me could get their turns too.

I most emphatically DID NOT WANT to leave, now that I’d gotten where I wanted to be.

I left the stage anyway, because I was supposed to.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
I considered staying until the end of the program; I could maybe catch a cab back to the motel, or Toni could come back get me… After walking to the car and sitting for a few minutes, I decided it would be selfish not to leave. Yes, I was wasting the four to six more hours I could spend in Amma’s presence, but I didn’t have cab fare and it was clearly unfair to steal sleep from Toni, who had so graciously driven me to Seattle in the first place.

It was four o’clock in the morning. We’d been awake for over 22 hours and had driven for over five of them.

We left.

I imagined Mother behind me, giving darshan endlessly, and sniffled a little. The sky was lightening in the east and birds were beginning to sing.

We set an alarm for 10:30 and crashed for six hours. I slept wrapped around my Amma doll.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After brunch at a Red Robin in Bellevue, we drove back to Walla Walla. It was overcast nearly the entire way. I plugged in my iPod and we rocked Amma bhajans the whole time.

I did a lot of japa. I got a mocha in Cle Elum. We stopped at a fruit stand-slash-antique store outside of Yakima and browsed for an hour.

I was starving by the time Toni dropped me off. I nuked a bowl of rice and beans immediately. I tried to stay up until a decent hour but I was so tired I failed. I went to bed around six and slept for a very, very, VERY long time.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Today I found the manasa puja in the front of my archana book and recognized in it literally all of my current feelings. “Oh Mother,” it says. “You are pure love. I am too impure to deserve Your Grace. I know that my egoism and selfishness must be repelling to You. Still, bear with me. Mother, please be with me. You are the holiest river. I am a stagnant, filthy pond. You flow to me and purify me, overlooking my shortcomings and forgiving my mistakes.” I miss Her so much, and doubt entirely my ability to do anything at all of use outside of Her influence.

Something wonderful must be going on in there, because why else travel the globe merely to hug creatures like me? If enlightenment is loving all of creation as Self, well, it must be more wonderful than it sounds.

In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.

Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.

I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.

Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.

The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.

So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.

Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.

My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.

But then there’s Amazon’s party line:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

- Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.

Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.

In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.

Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.

All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.

Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.

Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?

In which I recap my madcap, whirlwind, SUPERfun trip to the cit-ay!

By 8:30 Friday morning I was in Sheila‘s van, heading west. Her awesome daughters let me ride shotgun, which was supercool of them. The ride was lovely – watching the land change from desert to rain forest is beautiful every single time I see it – and the company was lovely.

I was at the Hollywood TC before one in the afternoon. I called Dave. He told me to start walking down 39th and he’d come and get me.

I can’t tell you exactly how long, but it’s been a loooooooong time since I last saw Dave. We were in the MHCC jazz program together in the late 80′s. We had beers, and his neighbor (who also happens to be his bass player) set up an ad hoc wireless network for me so I could get online.

Adie came and picked me up after she got off work, and we went to her house, where I was attacked by terriers!. (Hah!) I put my bag in the guest room, changed my clothes, and after a bit we wandered over to Alberta for dinner at The Hilt. (Falafel! Hummus! Mojitos!)

My friend Leila dropped in and had a little nosh with us. It was a wonderful visit. After she took off we walked home, watched some TV, and were in bed by 10:30. Read the rest of this entry »

In which there’s about to be a wee bit o’ travel.

I’m going to Portland this weekend!

My girl from the paper saw my tweet about wanting to go see Cory Doctorow sign books at Powell’s and offered me a place in her van! I’ve got a ride up the Gorge and back! Squee!

I texted 80 and asked if I could crash at her place and she said yes. I texted Leila and told her I’d be in town. Via FB, I told David and Maija and Lisa and Jana that I was coming and hopefully some of ‘em will have time to hang out.

Sometimes the very best thing to do is get out of town for a night or two. Plus: Cory fucking Doctorow, can a fangrrl get a hell yeah?

Update: My schedule’s filling up nicely! Hang with db on Friday afternoon, see Adam & 80 Friday night, catch Miriam’s Well at the Saturday market, hit Powell’s on Saturday afternoon, mebbie sit in with db on Saturday night… Oh yeah. I’m totally gonna need a transit map.

Being a running list:

• eponymous
• dysesthesia
• lecanomancy

In which I eat REALLY OLD FOOD. For fun!

I’d never eaten an MRE in my life. So it was about time, I think.

MRE stands for, obviously (not) enough, “meal, ready-to-eat.” If that doesn’t convince you that that military is awesome, I don’t know what will. Because HELLO? MEAL, READY-TO-EAT? What?!

Anyway. My dad rolled into town yesterday, and when my brother and I were over visiting him he produced a couple of vegetarian MREs from the case of meals, ready-to-eat that my uncle had given to him. I immediately freaked right out with joy because I’d had no idea there was such a thing as a vegetarian MRE, and I pretty much wanted to eat one on the spot except I’d just had a Gardenburger.

Behold! Two vegetarian MREs of my very own! They’re adorable, dense little aardvarks of beige-colored food goodness, OMG would you just LOOK AT THEM:

MREs are irradiated and VERY well-packaged (read: you could probably store one under water for a year), so they last a disturbingly remarkably long time. People have been known to eat them five, ten, even fifteen (or more!) years after they were manufactured without dying.

Each meal contains about 1,300 calories (nearly an entire day’s worth of calories for me) and weighs probably 1-1/2 pounds.

I opened one of the packages on the spot and oohed and aahed over the contents, and then I got online and read about C rations (what grandpa ate in WWII), K rations, and MCI (what dad ate in Vietnam), (all of which came complete with four cigarettes at every single meal), MREs, FSRs (they have caffeinated gum in them, for reals) and other kinds of pre-packaged meals (like HDRs – humanitarian daily rations).

My dad, who couldn’t use his computer because I was in the way, commented that he could almost see the blog post taking form in my head. “You’ll have a few thousand words, probably,” he remarked.

“Oh, man! I totally want to try the Indian food meals!” I replied, apropos of nothing. “And look! Omelets! There’s no fuckin’ way those are edible!” I tried to get dear ol’ dad to give me all of the vegetarian MREs he had – apparently meal 12 is a rice and bean burrito! – but he would only part with the pasta dishes because he doesn’t like noodles.

Today, I decided to go ahead and eat one of my precious veggie MREs. It was labeled “Meal, Ready-to-Eat, Individual, Vegetarian, Menu No. 14,” and contained the following items:

Pasta with Vegetables in Alfredo Style Sauce
TS Fruit (Pineapple)
Granola Bar
Peanut Butter
Crackers
Fruit Filled Bar
Hot Sauce
Accessory Packet D (Lemon Tea w/Sugar, Apple Cider, Salt, Chewing Gum, Matches, Toilet Tissue, Towelette)
Spoon
Flameless Heater

Yay! Science! Quite possibly fatal science! Let’s rock this project!

I opened the granola bar first. It was technically edible, but the oils in it had gone rancid some years ago. I ate about 20% of it, but the smell bugged me. If I was truly hungry, though, I would have eaten it anyway. It may not have contained all the nutritional value it once did, but I’m sure it was harmless.

The fruit bar didn’t smell or taste bad, but it did look a little weird – the fruit had turned black, and the bar was kinda smashed. I took a couple of nibbles, but didn’t finish it.

The accessory pack is the best part because it not only has salt, matches, and toilet paper, but it also contains the famous tiny glass bottle of Tabasco sauce that MREs are famous for:

The crackers also smelled just slightly rancid, but were certainly edible. I put some of the fortified peanut butter on them. I was certain the peanut butter would smell off because it contains so much oil, but it didn’t. I ate one cracker and about a third of the peanut butter.

Then, feeling a little nervous, I turned to the most foreign and interesting part of the MRE: the flameless ration heater. I read the directions twice, grabbed my water bottle and pouch of pasta, and proceeded to “cook” my dinner.

The directions have you open the heater bag, insert your entrée, and add a few ounces of water. Then you fold the bag over and put the whole thing back into the entrée’s box. Let it sit horizontally for a minute, then prop it on a “rock or something” (that’s verbatim from the instructions, I kid you not) for another eleven minutes. Apparently the heater is non-toxic and can safely be thrown away.

I nuked a mug of hot water, poured the apple cider mix into it, and drank it while my entrée was heating. The cider tasted just fine.

The heater bag emits steam and makes homey little gurgling noises while it heats your food. It’s SO FREAKING COOL. It’s charming as hell because it’s warm, food-oriented, and a bitchin’ use of science. I can imagine it being really pleasant if you were somewhere cold and/or dark, because you could hold the thing while your food was heating and feel good for a few minutes.

Lacking a rock in my bedroom, I leaned mine against a wooden asana next to my yoga mat. I’m such a fucking hippie.

The entrée, when I opened it, was definitely hot. It was, I think, supposed to resemble shells and cheese, but I don’t know if the sauce was actually supposed to be cheddar-colored or if it had discolored with age. It had virtually no aroma. I tentatively took a bite.

Amazingly enough, the peas were still pea-shaped and had even retained the slightest amount of texture. I can’t recall what other vegetables were in there… carrots, maybe? The dish was much more palatable after I salted it, and that’s saying something since I never salt anything.

About an hour after I ate the entrée, I mixed up the lemon iced tea drink mix. It tasted just like instant iced tea. I don’t know that I’ve ever drunk two instant drink mixes in one day before in my life!

The pineapple and the gum remain unopened. I’m definitely curious to see how the pineapple will look. I expect that the gum will be indistinguishable from new gum.

I learned how to date the meal, and it turns out that the components were packed sometime in late 2000, making the meal just shy of a decade old. The Tabasco has 1008 stamped on it, which means it was packaged on January 8, 2001.

I saw nothing that would make me suspect the safety of the food – no bloated packaging, no spores or mold on the food – but its age makes me wonder if I should really be eating it. (Hah! Too late!) Plus my dad has eaten some out of the same case and he didn’t drop dead, so it’s not like I’m undertaking a dangerous activity.

All in all, a really fun and weird experiment, and I pretty much haven’t had to leave my room all day.

In conclusion, the heaters are AWESOME, the food is probably meh if you ever have to eat it for any reason other than for fun, the technology that allows this stuff to still be edible after a decade is AMAZING, and the fact that I actually ate it means I’m crazy brave and fierce!

Want more pics? View my goofy MRE gallery.

Update: The gum was hard but otherwise totally fine.
Update: The pineapple smelled like pineapple and was juicy, but it was also brown. I didn’t eat it.
Update: MREs can be purchased on eBay. There’s a bunch of people out there who apparently collect them, and others who stock them in case of The End Of The World, and others who stock them In Case Of Emergency and others who take them camping and still others who are clearly batshit insane militia people. Point is, the vegetarian MREs are often sold separately! Yay!
Update: Now that I’ve eaten two of these things, I can probably go the entire rest of my life without needing to eat any more of them. They’d make killer diet food, I think.