Cereal Habits Are Hard to Break

Today was an auspicious day for my grocery habits. For the first time in my life, I was unembarrassed by the content of my foodcart. Normally I buy stuff like ten frozen pizzas, a sixer of Dr. Pepper and a can of beans that everyone quickly infers I will eat cold. I've been doing this for so long that as I approached the check-out I started to feel guilty out of sheer habit.

But then I realized that, without even trying, my groceries weren't that bad. I was buying stuff like cheese. And Capicola ham. And mustard -- And not French's Yellow Mustard with the little American flag either, it was the fancy spicy brown mustard that looks a little bit like poop when you squirt it out on your food. The closest thing I had to my usual groceries was a box of Lucky Charms, and even that was kind of a step in the right direction because I had actually worked up the courage to buy Lucky Charms.

That may require some explaining.

As a child, my household had some pretty strict rules about sugar intake. While I don't remember the exact numbers, I do know that there was a specific number of grams of sugar a box of cereal was allowed to have to enter our home, and I know that, as a child, I was well acquainted with exactly where on the side of the box the Sugar Grams measurement was. Every time I visit a new grocery store and we got to the cereal aisle, I would run ahead to give myself plenty of time to research which box would give me the highest amount of sugar while still containing nothing gross like fruit or nuts or anything that was made in a "mill".

I would only have to do this once per grocery store of course because once I got the research down, I was an efficient little motherfucker. I knew right where the best cereal was and I was not afraid to make it my bitch.

The point here is that after 18 straight years of this process, my decisions regarding cereal were far too firmly ingrained to change. When I went to college and walked through a cereal aisle for the first time, I remember thinking "Wow! I can get absolutely anything I want! It doesn't matter one hairy Republican armpit what the sugar content is!" I gazed, as if for the first time, at the bounty before me, and spread my arms to bask in the corporate glow of symbolism and mis-spelled puns.

I then promptly bought a box of Honey Bunches of Oats -- a cereal I've always been allowed to eat. I did this every week for five years.

But no more. Now, for the first time ever, a box of some ridiculous, sugary, tooth-rottening, life-span shrinking cereal sits in the cupboard of my new home, taunting me with its diabetic goodness. I'm even going to get around to eating it. Totally. Any day now.