Chapter XII: Honey Bunches of Shit™

I never paid attention to cereal commercials when I was younger. I had no disposable income to speak of, and besides, the cereal that my mom bought--the cereal I would be eating--was determined solely by one factor, which was (of course) the price. For example, my mom once bought 15 boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats (henceforth referred to as HBoO) for a dollar each.

Some weeks prior to this, she had bought a couple boxes of HBoO for the first time as a trial run. Us kids--my brother, sister, and I--ate them and expressed the sentiment that they were passably esculent. This, apparently, was interpreted as validation and taken as a green light to capitalize fully on any deals local supermarkets were offering on HBoO, including 3 boxes for $3 (up to 15 boxes at this price), with your Vons Club card.

You can guess what happened next. The process was slow, but implacable. Breakfast took longer and longer to eat and by box three (five, if you count the two we ate before), what was never really a cheerful time of day to begin with became downright shitty. Sometimes my siblings and I would look up from our bowls of soggy sweetness and sigh. Our eyes would meet silently, since at that point words were no longer necessary--the eyes said everything. They (the eyes) said, "This fucking sucks. I fucking hate HBoO. Why the fuck did she buy 15 fucking boxes?" And whatever variations on that theme one 10 year-old and two 15 year-old (they're fraternal twins) minds could think of.

Furthermore, HBoO turned our cheap nonfat milk blue for some reason. This takes a few minutes, so we hadn't noticed it before when we were still eating the cereal reasonably quickly. Eventually though, this transformation became a fact of daily life. Thus, even after we had finished the cereal, we had to deal with a bowl of bluish milk, not quite cold anymore, with specks of cereal dust floating aimlessly around, like the frozen bodies in Titanic. Not to put too fine a point on it, this phase of the meal was very unappetizing and usually took longer than the main cereal phase.

I don't quite remember when we decided we had had enough. Each one us probably had a slightly different threshold. I'm guessing Charlie lasted the longest. He's like that. In any case, the expiration dates passed, and then passed again and again as the years went by. Everytime we opened the cupboard, they were there to mock us. Row upon row of pristine white unopened boxes (and one opened box). Our mom refused to buy any different cereal until we finished what we had, reasoning that unopened cereal can't expire, but we never ate another bowl. Just the thought of HBoO leaves a sour taste in my mouth. And by sour, I mean sickeningly sweet. Honestly, I can still taste them if I think about it hard enough. They have all sorts of different colors for the insignia on the front now, but I remember distinctly: our boxes were the ones with blue.

Basically I never ate cereal or drank milk for the next several years, not even when I first escaped to college last year. This summer though, I took to eating Honey Nut Cheerios, which I find delectable. That brings me to last night, when the incident occurred that jogged my memory of the tale of woe I just recounted. Last night I had just enough Cheerios left in the box for one last bowl, but the milk had run out the bowl before. Being ever so resourceful, I immediately weighed the options in the refrigerator: water, Gatorade, vodka, or orange juice. I decided to go with orange juice--after all, it's all "part of this complete breakfast" as cereal commercials are so fond of saying at the end, whilst displaying a table loaded with a bowl of cereal, a giant glass of milk, a giant glass of orange juice, two apples, a banana, scrambled eggs, a stack of pancakes, and a head of lettuce.

Bottom line: bad idea. The sweetness of the Cheerios made the mildly tangy orange juice downright sour, and everything got a million times stickier, and the gobs of cereal dust that came out of the bottom of the bag looked plain gross. Orange juice may float Cheerios, but it definitely doesn't float my Cheerio, so to speak.

Darron, one of my roommates, bought more milk today, but now I'm out of Cheerios. If there is a word for the evil version of serendipity, this would be an example of it.

In other news, this is actually the second time I've written this. My computer mysteriously turned off half an hour ago and took draft one with it. Fortunately, Word rescued the philosophy paper I was writing at the same time about Plato's Phaedo and the Theory of Forms. Exciting stuff, I know.

Thank you Microsoft.