Growing up in Brooklyn we were eating Macaroni Junga-Junga and Frankfurter Soup because it was cheap and lasted the whole week. Buying quarter-waters by the case and drinking them until my teeth corroded. Beef jerky, fried pork chops, nestle crunch bars and a milk shake from the Mister Softee ice cream truck. A lucky day was when my pops treated me to a Vanilla Nutrament and a handful of jelly rings.

My lunchtime treat in high school was a hotdog smothered in cheese and barbeque sauce from the cart that used to park in front of Brooklyn College. If I didn’t skip out the school for lunch it was dollar hamburgers and chocolate milk from the cafeteria. It was around this time my mom learned how to make these kick-ass mozzarella sticks, she’d buy bulk cheese and breadcrumbs and make a hundred of them and freeze them only to have G and I polish them off over a day or two.

College was whatever the fuck I could steal from the cafeteria. Fluff and pasta were somehow incorporated into every meal. Pasta-pastamba-roots was my own little recipe – steak-um, pasta and marinara sauce, all fried up in a wok and served with parmesan cheese. One time I spilled tropical Kool-aid in it and instead of throwing it out I called it Tropasta-pastamba-roos.

When I first moved to DC we had jack-shit. Nothing. We didn’t even have an apartment for the first month and when we finally got one it took us another month to get a bed. Meals consisted of ramen noodles and chicken noodle soup. There were actually nights during that first month when we simply couldn’t afford to eat – no money in the bank, paycheck a day away, and you munch on some crackers and go to bed at seven because it’s easier to ignore the hunger when you’re sleeping.

But I went grocery shopping yesterday and halfway through unpacking the bag I realized I officially sold out – I officially got old. Organic beef jerky, goat gouda, Uncle Sam Cereal (full of flax, baby!), dried blueberries, organic blueberry waffles, uncooked sesame seed chicken, fruit salad, prepared chicken parmesan, Santa Fe Turkey breast, sunflower rye bread – every item in that bag was something that would cause my father to smack me with a pernil if he saw it.

This was a true crisis for me – I promptly went out and bought a package of Kraft singles at Safeway. I folded a slice into a stack of sixteen mini-pieces and ate them one at a time like I used to do as a kid. I repeated the fold-and-eat technique for about six slices of cheese. After watching LOST, I spent the rest of the evening in the bathroom doing Penny Press logic puzzles.

Sometimes you just can’t be a kid again, I guess.