Good Morning, How May I Help You?

I think perhaps breakfast is my new favorite meal. Maybe this is just a temporary affinity to the first meal of the day, since I had a particularly good one this morning. I never used to like it, because it meant ten minutes of cereal and water before starting yet another day of work. But today's Saturday, and while I'm still up to my elbows in work (procrastinating right now, in fact), I was overcome with an unusual and atypical excitement to get started with my day. Granted, I had breakfast at noon just after releasing an extreme amount of endorphins at the gym, but a side of cheerfulness with my waffle was especially nice.

It's just that everything begins again at breakfast. You get your first helping of fuel for the day, hopefully prepared by enough sleep to take full advantage of that fuel. Have you ever noticed how subtly social breakfast is? It more often is eaten in a car, on a train or in a plastic booth at Dunkin' Donuts than at a proper table, and is often accompanied by a newspaper rather than a friend or business associate, but everyone does it. There's something invigorating to me about being part of the world's morning hunger craving - standing in line to order a bagel kind of puts you in your place, in a way. Yes, you're tired, yes, you're hungry, yes, you can't think of anything you'd rather do than get back into bed, but yes, everyone else feels the same way. Good Morning, how may I help you?

And then there's the best breakfast of all, which I always take for granted - a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter. What's so special about eating carbohydrates hopped up on sugar and preservatives, racing through the bowl to insure that the last few mouthfuls won't be soggy from sitting in the milk for too long? Absolutely nothing, except for the fact that everyone else does it too. We're lucky to hate breakfast for being so early; it means that we have so much to do that day that an extra hour of sleep just didn't fit into the schedule.

Or maybe you just skip breakfast entirely, like I do on my Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. I gotta stop doing that.

Hopefully I'll see you at breakfast more often :-)