I hate breakfast—well, maybe hate falls short of expressing my true feelings. It might be more accurate to say that I absolutely despise breakfast. Actually, maybe I’d go as far as to say that breakfast foods might be my least favorite thing in the entire world.
That sounds about right.
Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Ben Greenly. I am a connoisseur of lunch, a dinner buff, and the president of the unofficial Anti-Breakfast Committee of the Colorado College, or ABCCC for short. This is to say that I have not once, in my total of three and a half weeks as a student here, eaten breakfast on the Colorado College campus. And maybe there’s a number of first-years or even later-years that could say the same, but I just wanted to emphasize this as an act of intention, perhaps even defiance. I have choked down a Sunday brunch on more than one occasion, but only because the majority of its letters stem from the word lunch.
If you asked me what they serve in Rastall at breakfast time, I wouldn’t be able to answer. I have never set foot in any cafeteria earlier than noon. Some friends have told me that the food is the same as what they serve on a weekend brunch, but I’m hesitant to believe them based on the sole fact that they eat breakfast. I can’t help but harbor a high level of distrust. The few times that I have let breakfast foods enter my mouth, more of it has ended up on my shoes than in my stomach, which is all I’ll say on the matter.
Imagine the array of breakfast foods that one shovels down in their lifetime, imagine them in all of their attributes. Imagine yourself surrounded by this slop, and in the early hours of the day no less.
It’s difficult for me to conceptualize how someone could wake up thinking: “Oh yes, you know what I’m feeling today? I would like some nice burnt bacon strips, that are more like potato chips than slices of ham, some partially cooked precracked (liquid) eggs, and, of course, a burnt piece of bread, smothered in a thickened milk substance and the crushed, jellified remains of a grape. Also, please give me a nice glass of the same fruit remains, but juiced.”
And don’t get me started on pancakes.
I remember the first time I ate breakfast; I was a baby—an extraordinarily intelligent baby, I might add. My mother, kind as she is, placed in front of me a bowl of Cheerios drowning in milk. Immediately, I launched the bowl of cereal at the wall and demanded dry Cheerios.
I must confess, I don’t understand the concept of cereal and milk. This summer, I sat alone in my house, bored beyond measure. On a whim, I decided to relive my unfortunate childhood experience to see if I had changed my cereal-hating ways (just to clarify, this occurred during lunch). I began with a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which I drenched in about a quart of milk. I guess it was about as good as one expects wet cereal to be.
It’s a bit odd. My mother used to joke all the time about how I never ate a “traditional” breakfast. Instead, she’d give me a bottle of water with Crystal Light energy drink mix while my sisters ate. “Here, drink this, that’s good enough,” she would say.
Back in high school, I was on the swim team, and we would have morning practice every Tuesday. After the workout, our coach would bring us a box of Santiago's breakfast burritos and demand that we eat them—but my refusal to eat breakfast is a refusal to eat anything during breakfast hours. I would sit through my Tuesday first period with no energy, and then second period, when I decided it was no longer morning, I would ferociously devour the two burritos that I smuggled out of the pool area.
Almost every day, my college roommate berates me for not eating my breakfast. He insists that he will become “so strong” from eating ten hard-boiled eggs each morning that he will beat me up for not respecting his favorite meal. Almost every day, I throw my pillow at him and shout, “You couldn’t beat me up if you tried. I drink Muscle Milk every day!”
I don’t know why I would ever eat breakfast—look at the incredible benefits one receives from skipping it! Most importantly, I have a couple of extra dollars on my Gold Card to spend on banana chips and salsa at the little store in Mathias (I don’t eat those together, by the way; I have regular chips for the salsa, which I also buy at that Mathias store). Surely, I must have saved my parents a fortune when I was at home.
I wasn’t always like this, though. I lied earlier about my inability to eat breakfast; I once ate breakfast every day. I used to eat buttered toast with cinnamon sugar, but then the taste of cinnamon sugar slowly became gritty and rough, and I ceased to derive joy from the crunch of toast.
In high school, I never had time to eat breakfast. I drove my sisters to school, and they would get mad if we were even a little late. Seeing as I preferred sleeping, I sacrificed breakfast for time in my bed. Now, I don’t have that problem since I’m not responsible for anyone other than myself. I complained on a daily basis that I didn’t have enough time in the mornings for my sisters, but now they’re gone.
On my first day of college, I tried to get breakfast at Rastall, but I couldn’t do it. There was just that feeling of something being different. I’m far away from my family, but when I don’t eat breakfast I somehow feel a little bit closer to them. Everything else in my life has changed considerably since college, making me want to hold on to at least one thing.
In reality, skipping breakfast just means that I have a little extra time, which I usually use to sleep. Sometimes, I also like to organize my backpack and make my Crystal Light energy drink, or I’ll snapchat my sisters, who go to school at 8:00 am, around the time I wake up.
So yeah, all in all I guess breakfast isn’t that bad. I might have been overreacting a little bit.
Mediocre Issue | October 2019