Cereal Spiller
I have a confession.
I avoid eating cereal in front of other people.
Now, I like to think of myself as an intelligent and fairly capable human being. But I know my limitations. While there some things I don’t love about myself (my inability to consume spicy food and my constantly perceiving rooms as colder than they are being high on the list), many of them I feel are in my control (I avoid spicy foods and I bring giant grandmotherly sweaters with me everywhere). Most of these things are about comfort and ease. (I use digital clocks because it takes me longer than it should to read analog ones.)
But there are many things – random things – that I seem to not have the ability to do correctly and/or gracefully, and I have therefore taken to avoiding them altogether. I no longer use the word “ironic”, even though I think I know what it means, because I’m so in fear of making an error (that, and the word falls apart in my head when I wonder why it doesn’t sound like the word “iron”, and then I wonder if I’ve been mispronouncing iron…). I also avoid “hopefully”, as apparently it’s only correctly used as an adverb, and I’m worried that someone will hear me using it as an adjective and judge me. And I avoid the word “forte” when referring to people’s skillsets, as it’s apparently supposed to be pronounced “fort”, but I feel stupid saying “fort” in a world of people who say “forte”, but don’t want to say “forte” the one time I’m in a room with someone who knows it’s pronounced “fort” and will judge me for it.
But the worst, and most foolish thing I could ever do in front of other people is eat cereal. And it’s not merely because I’m worried that I look like a small woodland creature whenever I eat with a spoon. No, it’s because I am ashamed of my pouring skills.
It’s because I cannot properly gauge milk-to-cereal ratios.
I pour cereal into a bowl. It looks like an appropriate amount of cereal. It looks like an amount of cereal I would like to eat. Then I pour in the milk. A little, at first, and certainly not enough to get all of the cereal nice and milky, the way I like it. Why pour the milk into the cereal at all if half of the cereal is going to be dry? The milk is there so that it WON’T be a preschooler’s finger food. So it must all be as close to the milk as possible. Requiring more milk.
BUT WAIT. The milk makes the cereal float. TOO FAST. As soon as there’s enough milk in the bowl, all the contents levitate faster than I can anticipate. There’s usually spillage. And even if I manage to cut off the flow of milk BEFORE the cereal ejects itself from the bowl, I have now created a dangerous situation. The second the spoon enters the cereal, I become the cause of the spillage. So I try to scrape some of the still-dry cereal from the top into my spoon (which is not what I wanted) and getting completely obsessed with the leaning Jenga tower that is my breakfast.
I tried pouring “less cereal”, but that only left me pouring cereal, then milk, then more cereal, then more milk… It took too long and made me look like a mad scientist.
One day, I had a brilliant thought: MILK FIRST. THEN CEREAL.
And by George, it worked. And that’s what I started doing.
But for anyone to watch this would be surely embarrassing. And then I’d have to explain to everyone how bad I am at pouring milk into cereal. That’s just not something I want anyone to know about me.
Except you.
Love, Angela
