I Am Eating and I Am Awake

In two weeks I will embark on what academic calendars call “Winter Holiday.” As I will theoretically have graduated college this time next year, this is to be my last. I’m hoping to spend most of it asleep.

Observant readers have by now noticed the bizarre hour at which I am writing this. It’s certainly not lunchtime. While 9:07 AM is a normal rising hour for bakers, coal miners and astronauts, it is an unfamiliar place to a college student, especially on a Saturday. But this is that season when students are assaulted by work, and for two weeks find themselves, like the aforementioned black lung victim, forced to complete tasks on certain days by certain times. In a student in such a state wakes up early on a Saturday, the feverish racing of his mind combines with self-pity and a thirst for coffee to make returning to sleep impossible.

Being awake at this time demands a hearty breakfast. It’s the farmery thing to do. And a bleak winter morning like this, a few hours after the first frost has (hopefully) descended on the mosquito population of Manhattan, demands hot cereal. To wit, oatmeal.

“Oatmeal?!” you cry. “Does he mean it?!”

Indeed, I do. I have some stuck in my teeth right now.

Since I first made oatmeal freshman year, I realized that it is apparently something I do wrong. While other people are slathering them with butter, honey, sugar and maple syrup, I was always happy to consume it plain save for a pinch of salt. When I say that people usually retch, so if you just choked on your breakfast burrito, I apologize. The fact is that oatmeal (and its superiorly mushy cousin, Cream of Wheat) is bland, and the sort of person who is awake in the morning doesn’t have time for blandness. Frankly, I don’t blame them.

But for me, the smell and texture of these strange grains flavors their white weirdness with a remembrance of breakfasts past. The winters of elementary school were built on hot cereal, and it was always served plain, since a man who rises before dawn (as my farmer-like father likes to do) isn’t going to want to fill any tiny people with sugar. (My mother, a late riser, was the opposite. On the rare days that she fed us and drove us to school, she usually made cinnamon toast. In a word: wowwee!) Every morning my brother and I chose—oatmeal or Cream of Wheat—and were thrilled by the blandness.

Apparently the conditioning has stuck. I can’t taste dry, dull Cream of Wheat without feeling like an eight year old again, and my brother spends his breaks trying to collect the energy to let my father show him the correct way to make oatmeal. As far as I remember, the method has two steps:

1. Ignore everything on the back of the box
2. Undercook

If oatmeal were a steak (and what a breakfast that would be!), my father would serve it cold in the middle. Good rare meat doesn’t need A-1 sauce. Good hot cereal doesn’t need syrup.