Anyways, on one of my weekend days (they're sort of blurred together in my mind because of how much I crammed into them), a friend of mine held up a roll of Sprees (remember those?) and said something to the effect of "hey, remember these?" and I offhandedly reminisced about how I used to eat those (and Shocktarts and Sweetarts) until my tongue bled.
If you're cringing in absolute shock and disgust, you're reacting exactly as the room full of my friends did.
But I feel obligated to give you some background on how candy played a role in my childhood so that you will better understand the phenomenon of Young Me eating candy until I bled. So, here goes. First disclaimer: A lot of my memories of this were around when my parents got divorced, so some details are hazy. Anyways, when my sister and I were little, we didn't really get dessert. I do, however, have memories of my dad letting us have four Skittles on Fridays after dinner. Yes, you read that right: FOUR SKITTLES. Not four bags of Skittles...mmmk? Four Skittles. We had this tin that sat on the corner of the bookshelf in the living room that had Skittles in it. And we would get three or four after dinner. Only on Fridays. So, you can imagine, I tried to make those four delectable morsels last as long as humanly possible. I sucked those things (yes, laugh all you want) over the course of an hour or more. Chewing= candy being gone sooner. Sucking= longest lasting. Did I mention that we only got four of them?
When my Stepmom came into the picture, she pointed out (rightly) to my dad that giving us four Skittles was completely and totally insane, and, all of a sudden, after years of deprivation, I got to have LOTS of candy (at least, what was "lots" to me at the time). I won't say she was trying to win our hearts with sweets (although that would have worked), but you can see how that might occasionally have worked in her favor. Anyways, whenever I did get any kind of candy, I ate any and all of it. And, I still had the habit of trying to make the candy last forever. So, when I got to have a whole roll of Shocktarts or Sweetarts or Sprees, I would suck on every single piece of candy until it was gone (and, please remember, those rolls of candy were pretty big). So, on multiple occasions, I would suck on the candy until my tongue or the roof of my mouth bled. But the Young Me still remembered that awful deprivation and those four Skittles, so I was unable to eat candy in any other way and I had to eat it all and eat it all slowly.
And to this day I have an insane sweet tooth. Ok, I'm going to go eat a WHOLE BAG of Skittles now. Cuz I'm a grownup now (Hi Dad!)!
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I once chewed a 17 stick pack of juicy fruit until it started liquefying in my mouth at one of smith's old coffee shop gigs in Hightstown. I couldn't just pull it out or spit it, it moreso had to ooze out. Lotsa fun there.
ReplyDeleteHahaha, EW!
ReplyDeleteI LOVE Sprees!
ReplyDeleteA long time ago, I ate a whole package of original flavor Starbursts...not just the little stick of 8, or whatever. It was one of those small bags of them. There were probably 30 of those things in there, if not more! I was bouncing off the walls for HOURS. I don't know what got into me.
And I was, like, 22...so really. No excuses here! I'm just a dumbass like that sometimes, is all.
I once bought a box (2000 pieces) of the large gumballs for me and my cubicle mates. We would have "how many can you shove in your mouth at one time", "how fast can chew the flavor out of one piece", "how far can you spit a wad of gum" daily contests. After several weeks of having the gumballs, chewing became difficult for us - to the point where our jaws and teeth hurt. The thought of placing one of those nasty sugary tasting green, yellow, red or blue gumballs makes my stomach turn.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, you did not treat Skittles the same way we did Double Bubble Gumballs, when you were finally allowed to have more than four!
I am so glad I'm not the only one who has gone overboard with CANDY!
ReplyDeleteMy husband used to do that too! Particularly with sour candy. I don't think I've ever bled for candy. Chocolate, now,...that's a different story.
ReplyDeleteOkay, no it's not. But it definitely could be.
hahaha! ah this brings me back. i'd forgotten how insane that was for us :-P i kind of wish i still treasured 4 skittles at a time instead of wanting to eat every kind of candy in sight!
ReplyDeleteCuriosity, I can do some serious damage on some chocolate too!
ReplyDeleteKathleen, yeah, I wish 4 skittles was all I needed to be satiated as well.
I was flopping back and forth between my grandparents place and my folks for a huuuge chunk of my childhood. Sweets were just stereotypical par for course at the Grand's house. Sugared cereal, donuts, candy, cookies, large piles of sugar with spoons... Heck, my grandfather could open a bottle of Coke (NOT Pepsi) from the kitchen and my finely tuned ears could detect the Phhhhhhisssssssssshh from the bottle equalizing from the basement or backyard. I'm fairly sure I was constantly vibrating.
ReplyDeleteThe 'rents place was devoid of glucose. I still remembering learning to make my own cookies or drinking sugar water for a fix. You know you've hit the rock bottom of childhood sugar addiction when you would snatch sugar packets from the restaurant tables to hork enough to make a batch of cookies... at age 11. :-D It was like heroin withdraw every time I went back. :-)
As for now, I can take it or leave it. A Twix bar or a Dark Milky Way will sometime trigger a Pavlovian response, but not in the CookieMonster destroying a bowl of choco-chips kinda way.
Now... a bag of Doritos is another story altogether... unless you want to loose a finger, get yer own bag. ;-D
Chris, I used to steal sugar cubes out of the pantry to eat on my way down to the bus stop, so it all sounds familiar!
ReplyDeletehaha! i forgot you used to eat sugar cubes! iiiiiiiiiiiiiiicky! :-P
ReplyDelete