Dear Mom and Dad,
Proceed with caution.
Sincerely,
Your Loving Daughter
I
woke up on Sunday morning feeling less-than-enthused about life. It’s not that
anything was wrong, per se. It’s just that it was Sunday morning, soon to be
Monday morning, and I didn’t have any plans for the day, and my bladder forced
me out of my bunk bed at 9am when I would rather have slept until noon. Somewhere
between opening my computer and losing faith in the possibility that I could be
productive that afternoon, my mind wandered to the kitchen.
I
needed to find myself some breakfast so I took a tour of my mind-refrigerator
(like a mind-castle but made out of groceries and exaggerated poverty). There
came a point in my search where no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to
navigate away from the freezer. I was hyperaware of the fact that there was a
pint of Ben & Jerry’s Red Velvet Cake ice cream on the bottom shelf of the
freezer door, and nothing in the world sounded better in that moment than tiny
chunks of red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting swirls in frozen cow milk
with sugar.
The
part of my brain that plans to go on a diet once a month adamantly refused the
proposal. No, she said. It isn’t proper. You aren’t allowed to eat
ice cream for breakfast.
But
the part of me that doesn’t give a damn Googled “ice cream for breakfast.” The
third result in the search looked most promising to me, a column titled Go AskAlice! wherein a reader called “icecreamlover” had asked: “Is there anything
wrong with eating ice cream for breakfast?”
I had
no reason to trust Alice. I didn’t know this woman, nor did I know her
qualifications to be giving me nutritional advice.* However, somehow the phrase
“if your body is able to deal with the high doses of sugar and fat first thing
in the morning, which many adults cannot, there might not be reason to toss out
the ice cream scoop just yet,” really spoke to me. By this I mean that I
completely and totally ignored her cautionary tone and somehow managed to read:
“if your body can handle it, then who the hell cares!”
Well,
challenge accepted. I was downstairs in an instant devouring the tiny red
chunks of cake. Looking at the nutrition facts didn’t even phase me. 250
calories in half a cup? Ha!
I
went so far as to imagine what would happen if my roommate (the girl, not the
fish) came downstairs and challenged me.
“Is
ice cream a breakfast food, Julia?” she would ask, giving me a look.
You
know, one of those looks designed to
make you feel like you’re doing something wrong.**
“It’s
no worse than your sugary cereals!” I would cry, pointing at her accusingly.
“Everybody knows nobody only eats three quarters of a cup of Cap’n’Crunch!” Of
course I was wrong but at this point I was past the point of no return with the
delusions of grandeur that came with eating ice cream for breakfast. Eating ice
cream made me feel bold. I felt like I used to when I was ten and would
successfully sneak sugary treats for breakfast:
MIGHTY!
Will
I suffer for my Sunday breakfast choice? Probably not in any lasting way. Ultimately
it’s just one little thread in a tapestry of decisions I get to make for the
rest of my life. I don’t eat ice cream every morning. (That’s why it still
makes me feel MIGHTY! when I do!) Most mornings I eat boring old oatmeal or boring
old cereal or boring old toast. But yesterday I didn’t eat boring old just
anything for breakfast. I ate something that transformed into an extraordinary breakfast simply by being just a tiny bit rebellious.
I ate
ice cream, and it was delicious.
Notes:
*Later I would learn that "Alice" is actually a team of professionals from Columbia University.
**It
is completely beside the point that Laura (my actual roommate) never would have
given me one of those looks, and that
if she had, it would have been the most sarcastic and accepting edition of those looks possible. Nonetheless, when
you’re eating ice cream for breakfast, everyone’s a critic in your brain.
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