For a stunningly large raise of $7800, and the possibility that I may be able to escape the clutches of my current employer, I switched from one legal department to another.  The old department was a large group of relatively in shape people who moderately pushed cake on you about once a month.  My new department, aarrgghh, is full of food pushers who are far from this side of thin.

Recently one attorney, who I’ll conservatively say weighs 250 pounds (ahh, one of the side effects from getting heavy myself is that I have a much better idea of how much other people weigh), pulls me aside into her office to tell me how well she eats, and she can’t figure out how to lose the weight.  I didn’t volunteer, ’stop eating all that cake, but listened, nodding like a bad bobble head.  I’ll digress here — why do people constantly want to tell you about all the ‘healthy’ things they’re doing in life — even though it’s obvious from looking at them they’re not.  Anyway, I leave this attorney’s office, not even mentioning that keeping a candy bowl (not even the barrier of a lid) on her desk may be a bad idea.

A week later there’s a birthday party - it’s like Seinfeld’s Frogger episode at work.  An attorney who is creeping up on (or may have passed forty) says no to cake and instead orders a fruit basket.  I thought it was a great idea.  The cherries were good, the berries, too out of season for ripeness, but it was okay.  The healthy eating attorney I mentioned earlier was in a tizzy, literally.  She was upset and disappointed that there wasn’t cake.  She was denied her right to cake.  To correct this egregious error, she makes her way to Von’s or Ralph’s or something, and actually purchases (on that paltry salary, again), and brings back two pies - banana and chocolate cream - and pushes, and pushes.  I took a slice just to get her to stop bothering me and deposited it in the trash (though somehow I know from that action my carbon footprint expanded).

Fortunately everyone took some vacation, so except for the endless supply of cookies, there was no food pushing for a small window between Christmas and New Years.  Last week it was Carvel ice cream cake - which made me for a moment, wax nostalgic about the Brooklyn Carvel runs of my youth.  That was shattered however by my realization that it was purchased by a megafoodcorp - and is now industrial ‘food brand’ like everything else.

Yesterday, it was someone else’s birthday and the food du jour was mud pie.  I’m not sure what in the heck that is, but it seemed to involve about a million calories of refined carbohydrates - just what we all need for an unhealthy mind.  After turning it down no less than three times, I was able to escape with my afternoon dentist appointment excuse.  Thank goodness.

They’re relentless with cakes and cookies and whatever else they are pushing today.  And somehow I’m treated as impolite for failing to indulge with them.  Writing this blog will buy me some time.  It’ll stop me from sending out that department wide, and eerily unpolitical, e-mail asking them to stop with the food already.  Sometimes people scare me, especially when they act like every meal is their last.