Mixed Signals: Stomach, meet Brain.
For the past few weeks in Korea, I have been insatiably hungry. I wake up hungry, I go to sleep hungry, throughout the day I feel a hunger digging inside of me.
That’s not to say I haven’t been eating. I eat regularly. Every day at school I stuff myself with rice, kimchi, spicy vegetables, soup, and some odd meat dish at lunch. Fairly often, I go out with friends for dinner, and we eat galbi (barbequed ribs), or samgaetang (chicken ginseng soup) or nangmyeon (iced noodles) or bibimbap (rice and fresh vegetables and spicy sauce, mixed) or samgyeupsal (pork, think really thick slabs of bacon) or occasionally we’ll get pizza (always with corn on it… why, Korea? Why the corn on pizza?)…. and I fill myself. In Korea, the method is generally eat until stuffed, and yet… I still feel hungry.
Granted, my meals at home are fairly piecemeal and undesirable, odd snacks, rice and dried seaweed, bowls of ramen, hard boiled eggs, cookies, bananas, milk…. but still, this hunger is there.
I don’t know how to describe it. It’s quieter than hunger. It’s as though my torso has been filled with a soft resonant ache that reminds me of hunger. It’s almost as though my hunger receptors had been replaced by desire receptors, and my system is confused.
I’ll admit it, I’ve been having some cravings lately. Take, for instance, a grilled turkey sandwich, like the ones from Panera. The mere thought of it has me drooling.
Grilled. Turkey. Sandwich. Commence drool.
I have vivid daydreams about food. Sometimes, during lunch, as I’m arranging a pile of spicy sweet bean sprouts on top of my rice, I daydream about taking a bite of a turkey sandwich, the alfalfa sprouts squishing into the guacamole, the thick center of grilled turkey and hot melted cheese squishing between my teeth… and as my chopsticks reach for a bite of kimchi, I imagine red slices of tomato sliding out from the sandwich as I taste that sweet, seedy inside mixing with that earthy bread flavor… and as I hold one chopstick steady and pull the other along the spine to separate the meaty portion of my breaded fish from the stomach cross section portion, I imagine lasagna, hot from the oven, layers and layers of melted cheese, fresh parmesan, goopy unsweetened tomato sauce….
and as I wrap up my meal, scoop the uneaten spine and somach of the fish in with the last few pieces of turnip kimchi I didn’t finish, I feel insatiably hungry.
I can’t describe it. I’m hungry, in so many ways I can’t describe, in a manner I’ve vaguely felt before, but never for so long, and never so strong as this.
I daydream of basil omelets, french toast, blueberry flaxseed oatmeal pancakes, oatmeal with sliced apples, bananas and cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top, Malt-O-Meal with a dash of brown sugar and sweet cream, thick slabs of homemade wheat bread, hot from the oven with a dab of butter melting on top, cheesy scrambled eggs on the side, fresh blackberry jelly from the Famer’s Market, a pot of fresh coffee on the countertop, summer breezes through the window, the Current drifting lazily on the radio…
Every day I eat, but…. oh brother, how I hunger.
