Why I had Mountain Dew for dinner

This year the adults in my house have stopped feeding us children. They never cook dinner anymore, and rarely go grocery shopping. My problem is, how am I to respond to these new developments? I’m not so helpless and spoiled that I cannot cook anything (it is true that I can only cook a precious few things, but it still isn’t nothing), but if they hardly go grocery shopping, what can I cook? I could get money of course and simply do the grocery shopping myself, but I am still undomesticated and therefore lack the skills necessary for shopping, such as knowledge of what items a family would require, and the always important “bargain hunting” instinct. In addition, it is unlikely that if I did make the offer to go shopping, they would provide the necessary funds to go. Perhaps it is the current state of the economy, and perhaps they’ve simply learned that you don’t give Emilee a credit card and send her to Wal Mart.



The saddest part about this whole situation is that I seem to be the only one affected. On certain nights I am the only person home, and the rest of the time the other people who live here seem quite content to eat the frozen meals that are contributing to our nation’s obesity epidemic or whatever else they can scrounge up from the kitchen. But on Mondays, my sisters go to Norfolk. They spend their entire evening there and usually both of my guardians accompany them. Naturally they all eat something while they’re out, though I have never seen any evidence of it nor have I heard it mentioned, but I assume that these actions are very furtive since no one has ever offered to get me anything.


You may be thinking of course, that I have reached the legal driving age in this country, so I could go get myself something. This is what I had planned to do this evening. But my stepmother surprisingly was home this evening, rather than being in Norfolk with them. I then had to face the dilemma of telling her where I was going. Should I tell her I was going to get food and ask her if she wanted anything? She would surely refuse. Ask her if she wanted to come along with me? Then what would we talk about? I honestly have no idea what to say to her in any situation. Anything could be the wrong thing and could ignite something I’m simply too tired to deal with as I did frequently in my youth (the tumultuous period two years ago).



So the decision I did end up making was whether to eat a bowl of leftover (leftover from going out, not from cooking, obviously), overly exalted Brunswick stew, or eat a frozen corndog. I ate a sampling of both and ended up consuming merely 12 fluid ounces of high fructose corn syrup and yellow dye number 5. This cannot be good for my health.