Eating Vegetables for Breakfast

I love fad diets.  They are always so full of promise, style, and simplicity.  Drink six glasses of lemonade, eat only meat for five days, have smoothies for every meal, take this horse pill, have food delivered to you by this creepy delivery man who never shaves or showers.  As mcuh as their lack of science and shiny newness attracts, I never follow them. (Except for that one time when my roomie and I ordered Nutrisystem meals.  Never again!)  So when my coworker kept tagging #GGS to a picture of toxic slime in a glass repeatedly on Instagram, I was equally intrigued and alarmed.

That is when I found Kimberley Snyder's blog.  First of all, do not look at any pictures of her until you read the stuff because then you will be both supremely jealous and feel ugly and fat.  Secondly, homegirl is fanatically into using "!" no matter what the sentence is saying.  Usually this bothers me, but for some reason when you're reading it, it makes you a little more excited about the possibilty of eating kale.  Third, I found the source of the #GGS; it's not a goverment code name for the spaghetti monster or radioactive sludge.  In fact, it's the recipe for a green smoothie loaded with lettuce, greens, and fruit.  So I guess it's the opposite of radioactive sludge?

After spending hours on her blog and reading one of the books she wrote, I got suckered into trying a  plant-based diet.  I am not going to go into the details of the rest of her eating philosophy--because it is slightly confusing, scary, and reminds me of my best friend from high school that now is a hippie living in New Zealand-- but the Glowing Green Smoothie is basically the hot friend you bring with you to the club to make your whole group seem more desirable.  (I don't believe in the ugly monkey theory.)  It's trendy, Mindy Kaling drinks it, it has vegetables in it, and I constantly feel more enlightened than all of the people in my classes who had Poptarts for breakfast .  Here are my pointers to those of you who immediately googled Kimberley Snyder, had a panic attack because you think you are slowly killing yourself by eating dairy products and then had another one at the thought of never eating cheese again, and decided to start with the smoothie:

1.  You need a fancy blender.  Trust me, do not even try to make it in a regular blender.  It will make you ugly cry.  I have a BlendTec because that's what Jamba Juice uses and it's about $200 cheaper than a Vitamix.  However, Vitamix blenders have more street cred.  The decision is yours.

2.  I left out the spinach the first time and loaded up on romaine, but the spinach is what makes it taste so delicious.  So don't skimp on it.  I've tried making it with baby kale, arugula, and bok choy before because according to the internet, you are not supposed to eat too much spinach.  The results were alright, but the spinach ones are the best.

3.  I hate celery.  I used cucumber instead.  That is all.

4.  Pears are delicious.  I tried subsituting them for mango, papaya, double apple, and strawberries, but pears make the blender go round, if you catch my drift.

5.  The recipe makes about 3-4 servings.  So I usually force feed the rest of the smoothie to anyone within fifty feet of me in the morning.  Today, it was my neighbors.

6.  I still can't over the fact that this is my breakfast because I love breakfast so much.  It's been two weeks of it, and today is the first day where I didn't want to swallow a plate of pancakes whole.

I still need ungodly amounts of caffeine to get through my day, but in all seriousness, my skin glows now...Now I really wonder if it is radioactive sludge.  Also, I no longer have weird back fat that makes me look like a cross between the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Madea.  I do not take pictures of the smoothie and post it all over the internet, but I do work it into conversations to make myself look like a health guru.

Silver Linings Playbook is a Novel?!?!

I'll start out by saying that I have not seen the movie yet, even though every other self-respecting hipster has.  I think, this time, I outhipstered everyone by not watching the movie until I read the book.  That's right, it's a book.  I think SLP probably falls into the same category as The Notebook, Drive, Shutter Island, The Prestige, or any other book-based movie carried by charismatic leads.  (Yes, I am huge Ryan Gosling fan.  Lars and the Real Girl, anyone?)  Sure, the premise is interesting enough--but not wholly original--and Pat has a lot of shit going on because he's mentally unstable, but none of these elements pull together to make it any more complex or deep.  Matthew Quick managed to write a whole novel about a sensitive, agonizing issue without ever delving past "I feel like hitting my head" and "Ahhhhhhhh!"

In a way, I think he should be commended for it; having been close to people that have gone through similar experiences, the repetitive and simple way Pat expresses his frustration is really true to life.  I still didn't like it, though.  This is literature, and Quick's decision to warp reality by having Pat miraculously run into his friend, Danny, from the "bad place" while not polishing up the apparent lack of self reflection in the protagonist is not a choice I would have made as a writer.  My guess is that Pat comes off better in the movie adpatation; maybe he doesn't considering Bradley Cooper didn't get an Oscar.  It was probably that stupid Eagles chant that ruined it for him.

My real beef with SLP is with the last few chapters of the book, mainly when Katniss Tiffany writes a letter to Pat about her husband's death.  My first issue is that I'm pretty sure that if I had a husband that wanted to have nonstop sex to the point where I couldn't watch T.V., I would bring up that he needs to chill way sooner than ten years.  Really, Quick?  You couldn't come up with anything else to be a source of guilt for Tiffany?  Second, after implying that Tiffany lost her job because she did terrible things throughout the novel, it was kind of a WTF moment when I realized the terrible thing was that she had tons of grief sex.  I think Black Swan upped the ante for dance-fueled drama, because I had been imagining way sicker things than promiscuity.

I have to warn you, I am about to get a little feminist right now.  If you are one of those people that hates women with opinions, scroll down to the next paragraph.  The backstory for Tiffany is what really cemented my opinion that Matthew Quick won't ever be classic and I won't read any of his other books in the future.  It was so painfully obvious that a man wrote this, and he couldn't even distance himself enough from his masculine-fueled, sport-crazed perspective to write realistic female characters.  Pat's mom is too selfless, Nikki wouldn't have thought Veronica was a bitch, and I think Tiffany being a sex addict (for whateve reason) is weird.  As a woman, I did not conenct with any of the female characters whatsoever.  There are tons of great male writers that are fully capable of creating dynamic, believable female characters (Jeffrey Eugenides, Arthur Golden) while still writing a story with strong male characters.

Now that it has been a couple of days since I finished the book, I definitely am going to go see the film just to find out if the producers were able to succeed where the novel writer faltered.  If you watched the movie and didn't read the book, I wouldn't sink into a fathomless pit of regret over it.  You should only feel like that if you didn't read Harry Potter before the movies.

The Beginning

I thought for a long time about what I would title a blog if I ever decided to make one.  So you should know that "Filbert Gallery" was the product of concetration, creativity, and hallucinatory goji berries.  (If you don't believe me about the goji berries, run to your nearest Whole Foods, buy a ridiculously expensive bag of them, and consume an ungodly amount because you are bored during a lecture on regression lines.)  My title may not be edgy, or hipster, or dope, or whatever the chicest descriptor is right now, but it really represents the essential struggle I have faced since becoming a (semi)functional adult.  I am always a step behind everyone else.  For example, my grandma had an iPhone before I did.  

People don't eat peanuts anymore, and I am convinced it's not just people that are allergic to them.  Hazelnuts are way hotter, and I kid you not I heard someone say that in the nut aisle of Trader Joe's once.  However, I don't think Nutella has put in enough effort or been a staple in homes for long enough to give them such esteem place. (I'm lying.  Nutella deserves its own religion.)  So, I only refer to them by the infinitely less cool name: filberts.  This blog is dedicated to people who try so hard to stay on top of things but still manage to wear leggings as pants on a week where society is against it, have gone on a juice cleanse and immediately started binging on doughnuts, write Facebook statuses that the same two people that always like your statuses like and feel ashamed--people who are trying to find a place of togetherness in world that shifts every thirty seconds.  

If you take one thing away from this almost meaningless post, I want you to know that my blog is not about nuts (literally or as a euphamism).  Usually, I will write about crappy T.V. shows, "green" food that I tried to make, good books (because I still believe that people read books), and weird phenomena such as bathroom graffiti.