the Unexpressed Advantage

I'm no longer a cereal fan.

My whole life I've tried to convince myself that eating cereal is a good thing. I noticed that most of my friends ate cereal; when I was growing up and even now that everybody is an adult. It seems like eating cereal for breakfast is a good idea. It seems like eating cereal is an important part of eating a "healthy" breakfast, as opposed to a daily dose of eggs & bacon on a bagel with lots of cheese and plentiful douses of hot sauce.

So on the way to work this morning I grabbed a bottle of 2% milk and pulled some cereal out of my desk drawer, and then I had a bowl of cereal.

I pickin' hate cereal.

I'm currently washing it down with a peanut-butter granola bar, some thick black coffee, and starburst candy.

It's taken me 31 years and change to realize, but it's not that there's anything wrong with me or anything particularly right with anybody else. I just really don't like cereal.

First off, when you drop it into the bowl, regardless of how crunchy, almondy, or bran-flaky it is, as soon as you add milk you've got a quickly shrinking window of opportunity to get it into your stomach before the whole thing turns into a big spongy mess of carbohydrate & protein filled goo, which is utterly disgusting

But the problem is that you can't really eat it fast, because it doesn't taste very good, and for some reason, even though it's already broken up, each bite requires something like 90 chews before you can actually swallow it.

Bite after bite, it's not particularly good, but you have to eat it because the whole process is time sensitive.

In rare cases, where you do make it to the bottom of the bowl, but you only have a little bit of the goo left, the obvious solution is to pour more cereal in your bowl, thus counteracting the goo effect for a few moments.

Did I mention it doesn't taste very good?

If for some reason you do manage to make it to the bottom of your bowl, having dealt with all the goo, you're still left with about a quarter cup of sugary, bran-flakey, warm milk. Which, since you don't want to be wasteful, you reluctantly drink from the bowl as if it were the final remnants of a beautiful french onion soup. Except for of course it's not supposed to be warm and it tastes like crap.

Now of course some of you will point out that not all cereal is bran-flakey and granola-almondy. Some people like cheerios or captain crunch or the Dracula stuff.

Gross. Basically it's just sugar milk you're eating there. I couldn't even eat that stuff as a kid.

So my whole life I've preferred a nice egg dish with a bagel, perhaps some sausage or bacon, potatoes, pancakes, or even a waffle for breakfast. Somehow in my foolishness I've convinced myself that eating breakfasts of that nature is extravagant, and truly sensible people eat cereal.

Today it occurs to me that cereal is gross. I can't believe I’ve been trying to force it down my own throat for 31 years. I should have paid attention to my childhood. My mom never bought cereal, we didn't eat it growing up. Because we didn't like it

Enjoy your gruel, tomorrow I'm cooking me an omelette.

: – dan – :