A testament to poor eating

Since I've been back in Berkeley things have kicked into high gear. I have to do my qualifying exam in a month, so I have a lot of prep to do. Simultaneously, I also wish I was still on Spring Break. Thus, I have very little time or energy to devote to cooking.

Fortunately, Safeway had mandarin oranges (well, Clementines, but who cares) and Giants- and A's-themed sacks of peanuts: perfect nosh for a guy like me. Mandarin oranges for an easy-to-eat sweet-tart pick-me-up, and peanuts for my upbringing in a blue-collar suburb.

Unfortunately, I bought a 1.5kg bag of salted peanuts, which I'm realizing now is a lot of peanuts. Also, I already had a few oranges lying around from my last box of oranges, which by now are all shrivelled up and/or moldy, so I had to eat those first. I took the biggest bowl I own and started eating peanuts and throwing the shells into the bowl. Later, I dug into the oranges and threw the moldy ones into the bowl, and the peels of the ones that weren't so shrivelled up that I wouldn't eat them with them. The next day I added another layer of peanut shells and two more orange peels and one more moldy orange. One more layer of peanuts today and the bowl was full.

My first thought was not to empty the bowl and start over, but to pour in alternating layers of green jello and cream until it formed a trifle. I thought it would be a conversation piece... a testament to poor eating. But then I thought that perhaps aspic would be a more appropriate choice, since the peanuts were salted. Also, the orange layers were too thin compared to the peanut layers.

In the end, I emptied the bowl and started over. I was hungry.