Bill and I got home from a whirlwind of travel (as mentioned in passing in my last post) about ten days ago, and I’ve been pretty discombobulated every since.

I should be clear. We both got home about ten days ago, but Bill left again not quite a week after that. So I have been home about ten days. And pretty much the first week of it was filled with adjusting to being home after being gone so long, and then getting ready for Bill to leave again. As you can imagine, this has been a point source of the discombobulation. Other things, like coming down from seeing far-away friends, also played a role.

But, surprisingly, food has also been a huge factor in my being out of sorts. We first left “on travel” on 20 June 2012. By the end of June, I’d had my first rumblings about being grouchy in the direction of food. Some of it, as an example, was traveling to Minnesota during prime Midwestern strawberry season (aka missing it back home), and still seeing big-ass California strawberries in sauce on Bill’s pancakes. Some of it was going to a California farmers’ market, seeing all the lovely produce there (that I was missing back home!) and not buying anything. Some of it was missing out on a restaurant I wanted to visit in California, some of it was the repeated exposure to a sub-par IHOP. (And that’s all just in June!)

Baltimore was a bit of a restorative, thankfully. We stayed with some friends who fed us well and cooked a few meals, breaking the “out to eat while traveling” cycle. I’m very grateful for this. Then we and the friends went up to New York City, which is supposed to be a food paradise. And, in many ways it was. We had super bagels, crazy good ramen, sushi, who knows what else. I don’t even remember. The visit was stellar, the vacation fun, and the food and drink full of awesome.

So why, when I got home, did I feel toward food like Rob here does toward the camera?

Why did Bill and I eat out or get delivery the first, I don’t know, five dinners home? After a solid week, almost, of eating out every meal? What led to me muttering, then flat-out saying, “I hate food”?

I couldn’t explain it. I could only say I had a great deal of frustration with “food” as a concept. I liked absolutely nothing about it. I didn’t want to cook, I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to shop, I didn’t want to think about any of it. I especially didn’t want to read about it (others’ blogs or books) or think about it on any higher level.

Basically, I came home with an attitude of “FUCK food.” An attitude that had started in California, and mildly persisted until it erupted about 24 hours after landing in Chicago. And I simply could not shake it. I just got a bit angry, a bit frustrated and a bit confused. I couldn’t figure anything out about what was going on. I only knew things weren’t working the way they were supposed to work.

What a “welcome home” I gave myself, eh?

You’ll note everything here is in the past tense – thankfully. In the next couple of days, I’ll have a post up talking about where I am now.

ETA: Those posts are now up. I not only got into where am I now and how I got here, but I spent some time exploring how I ended up in a funk in the first place.