When I was Caffetto a couple months ago some guy sauntered in with an entire case of these rectangular pouch drinks, kind of like the old Hi-C juice boxes.
I asked what they were. Rice milk, he said. I don't know how he procured an entire box of rice milk juice boxes; I'm not going to pry. But he encouraged me to take some. Rice milk is healthy -- says so on the box. So I took three.
One problem: There is no mini-straw stuck to the back of each box, like the Hi-C ones did. I did not notice this when I brought them home, I think. Luckily, I had mini-straws in the house. Just days before, reacting to a cold weather-induced cough that I couldn't shake, Mother brought home some Chinese medicine. The doses were encased in vials and put in a box ... with a set of mini-straws. Buddha works in mysterious ways.
So I dug into the box of Chinese medicine vials, punctured the rice milk box with it, drank ... and kind of threw up a little in my mouth. It wasn't wretched, but it just tasted ... bland. Ever cook rice? You have to add water before you cook it. Well, imagine that you let the rice sit in the water uncooked, then strained out the rice and drank the water. It'd have a faint rice taste, but otherwise it'd taste like water. It's a whole lotta nothing, and what it has besides water is just yucky enough to ruin what was merely inoffensive.
But I finished the box, and since I brought these damn things home, I resolved to drink the other two boxes. Just give me a day or two to get the aftertaste out of my mouth. But a night or two later, I noticed that my folks took away the box of medicine. The cough cleared, so they thought they should put them away somewhere. They didn't know that I was using the straws for the rice milk in the refrigerator I still had to drink. But because I didn't like it, I didn't ask them where they put the medicine. I just ... let the boxes stay there.
And they stayed there while my folks went to Las Vegas for the winter. Sometimes, when I opened the fridge door and saw the boxes staring at me, I would replay how it tasted, and I reminded myself that I would need a straw to drink them. But did I try to find a straw, or a way to drink the rice milk? No. So I grabbed what I wanted to take out of the fridge and shut the door.
Well, tonight I went to the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, and I saw both rice milk boxes in the garbage. My Fucking Father probably saw the two boxes (which were in front and to the right on the top shelf, very prominent), remembered seeing them from before they left, and decided that if I wasn't going to consume them, he'd throw them away.
Typical Father: Throwing shit away without at least consulting me. But I have to admit, he's right. I don't like wasting food, but after trying it once I was in no mood to try it again, so I'm not hankering to get it out of the garbage. Besides, My Fucking Father threw a lot of other nasty garbage shit on top of it, and I'm not going to fish the rice milk out of that. I should be mad, I could try to get back at him, but ... come on, those rice milk juice boxes were just going to sit in the refrigerator until someone did something to them. Someone not me.
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