Breakfast

Everyday when I get up I eat a cookie. They sit atop my fridge, waiting for me, and I bite into a crumbly cookie before I even reach for the coffee pot. Then I get so distracted doing battle with the coffee pot (an espresso kind of pot) that I usually don't get the cookie finished until after the coffee is on the stove. Then I wander off, munching my cookie.

When the coffee is done, I go back into the kitchen to get it, which forces me to walk past the cookies again. So I have one or two more. In most situations I can use the considerations of economy (I have a keenly attuned sense of miserdom and impending poverty) to discourage these sorts of flagrantly profligate behaviour. However, in the case of these cookies, it doesn't work. It happens these cookies are not only the best ones in the store, they are also the cheapest, at about 50 cents for a box of 12. If you divide that per cookie, and I am prone to doing such things -

(many times when people catch me looking like I am deep in profound thought I am actually trying to figure out the cost of the sandwich I just brought from home. How much the cheese cost, roughly how many slices we could get from a lump that size, how many slices in a loaf of bread, cost of tomatoes per kilo, X number of tomatoes per kilo, X number of slices per tomato, How many spoonfuls of mustard in a mustard jar?)

- which I really ought to avoid not only because it is futile, but moreover, I have about as much sense of mathematics as I do of Chinese algebra, which usually results in a sandwich that costs as much as one of NASA's space trials, because I have forgotten to move a decimal point somewhere along the line. But anyway -- if you divide that per cookie you can see that each cookie costs me about 4.17 cents. Which is eminently worth it, considering how it makes me feel.

When I have a cookie in the morning, I feel utterly depraved and decadent. I feel as if I have just mocked the laws of the Universe, and got away with it. I feel as though I have looked my Monday's destiny square in the eye, and tweaked its nipple.

Because one is not supposed to have cookies for breakfast. To do so violates the order of the Universe, and deep down inside I know it. If the forces in the universe are actually as beautifully balanced as Stephen Hawking claims, then I am quite sure that every time I have a cookie for breakfast somewhere in China a diligent mother suddenly bursts out sobbing for no apparent reason.

I have been experimenting with my daybreak decadence for some years now. And to be honest, there were times I overdid it. Once I took a goodly number of L'il Debbie Swiss Rolls, mashed them with a fork, poured milk on them, and proceeded to eat the resulting cheap chocolate and faux whipped cream mass of artificial flavors and preservatives with a large soup spoon while watching cartoons. Oddly enough, this action coincided with what in retrospect was the lowest point in my life. I am forced to conclude that I was driven to such extremes in my morningtide repast to reassure my psychically wounded self that I could still assert some control over my life. Or, alternatively, I just wanted to see what it would taste like.

For anyone who would like to know, the Swiss Rolls experiment was an utter failure, and resulted in a repugnant brown mix that ended up being chucked out. Fortunately, the four swiss rolls in question, including the milk, only cost approximately 29 cents.

However, I feel as if my life, and my breakfast, have reached a more stable plane. No longer given to such ridiculous excesses, I am now content to flout my contempt daily and flauntingly contravene the world's sense of decorum with a mere cookie.