thank you notes 2/17
i'm thankful for breakfast cereal, always, but especially today because i can't have it because i'm not supposed to eat before my endoscopy, which is at noon. i'm thankful to remember when we were visiting d's parents in california earlier this year and every morning they prepared a full korean breakfast spread: seaweed soup, rice, some sort of meat or seafood, an array of panchan, and slices of a large savory pancake. i'm thankful for how delicious the breafkast was (even though i don't normally like savory breakfasts), but also thankful for the moment when they asked us what we usually eat for breakfast and i said "cereal or sometimes oatmeal" and they laughed as if this was the most ridiculous thing in the world. i'm thankful for breakfast cereal, though, which i look forward to eating every day. i'm thankful to buy the large bags of store brand cereal so that i can fill up my white ceramic breakfast bowl as fully as possible without fear of running out before the end of the week. i'm thankful that though for a long time honey nut cheerios were my go-to cereal (with the occasional foray into granola or raisin bran), one day in the cereal aisle, i looked at the nutrition information of the store brand sugar smacks and apple jacks and frosted flakes and cookie crisp and realized they weren't, in terms of nutrition, fundamentally all that different from what i was already eating, a difference in degrees rather than in kind. i'm thankful that some people might take that information and decide that they should eat something healthier than cereal for breakfast, but that i took it to mean that i can eat the "fun" cereals if i want to (and i want to).
i'm thankful for the chance to revisit these cereals of my youth, which i had gone without for years because i was an "adult," and to wake up each morning excited for my daily bowl. i'm thankful for apple jacks, which are my current cereal. i'm thankful for the anecdote our friend k told us once, about how one day he decided he wanted to eat cereal for every meal and realized that he could and then realized that he could continue doing this for as long as he wanted and no one would stop him and did so for, i think, like a week straight. i'm thankful to remember how d found this anecdote disturbing and i found it revelatory, even if, cereal aside, i generally believe in the importance of a well-balanced diet.
i'm thankful that i'm almost done with you too can have a body like mine, which has many interesting and darkly funny things to say about eating junk food and being lost in the supermarket and what it feels like to be a person in the world today. i'm thankful for this passage later in the book about the narrator, who has become a member of a cult called the "eaters," receiving her daily ration of kandy kakes in a repurposed supermarket, which is an interesting variation on the rhapsodic passage describing the kandy kake commercial i sent you a while ago:
"Today was a five Kake day. I found some empty standing space and opened my sack. All around me other Eaters were doing the same, reaching in and rifling through their issuance, feeling it up with their fingers, searching around for edges within the gummed-up mass of Kandy Kakes, whose fudge coating was airproof and weather-resistant and impervious to pretty much everything.
We peeled them apart with our fudge-covered fingernails and felt the scrape of a Kandy puck beneath our clawings the wet surgery sounds, sounds like the ones made by the insides of our own bodies, accompanied our digging. We lifted globs to our mouths and sank our teeth through the muck, bit down on that chalky layer of fruity cocoa and eked away at it with our teeth. We drooled into it, let it soak us up and turn our mouths ashy and dry. We let it drain us, waiting until it turned soft enough to bite. Then we bit it.
The Kakes rubbled on our tongues, tasting of chocolate and bone, waxy with fudge and greasy frosting, and at the same time not tasting like much. Tasting like less than we had expected, even though every time we ate one we expected less. The gathering space was full of people standing alone and facing in random directions, all wrestling with their own mouths. And when we had won at last, cracking the Kandy Kore to reach the sugary fluid within, we gagged on the bitter slick. My mouth was raw and scoured and tasted of biled orange.
I looked down at my sack, at the four that I still had to finish. Down inside me, in a place near my heart, my stomach quivered."
i'm thankful that even though i live in a postmodern dystopia, it's one in which i can still receive pleasure from oreos, which if i had a church would be the communion wafers (i'm thankful to think of the ritual of untwisting as symbolizing something about the trinity)(i'm thankful for homer simpson's coinage of the word "sacrilicious" to describe the experience of eating a waffle stuck to his ceiling that he believed to be god).
i'm thankful for the latest brand of limited edition gimmick oreos that i bought at the grocery store, which are "filled cupcake" oreos that feature, sandwiched between the standard chocolate oreo cookies, an outer ring of chocolate cream surrounding an inner ring of white frosting. i'm thankful that, as with all gimmick oreos, of which i am a connoisseur , the first couple of the oreos that you eat after opening the package taste basically like a regular oreo, which is always slightly disappointing, and it's only through sustained study and focus that the small variations in flavor arise and reveal the true character of the gimmick oreo. i'm thankful i came to this realization after in one quick sitting eating half a package of cinnamon roll oreos, which i had initially dismissed in this space as tasting basically like regular golden oreos with a slight hint of cinnamon flavor, and deciding that perhaps the flavor was deeper and more deserving of the moniker.
i'm thankful that whenever i try a new kind of limited edition gimmick oreos, i text a photo to my dad, from whom i inherited my addiction to sugar (both, i believe, through nature and nurture), along with any initial tasting notes. i'm thankful that at first this was a bonding thing, a way to share, since written communication has never been our way of connecting with each other (i'm thankful for our traditional ways of connecting with each other, which have always been sitting and watching tv with each other and/or teasing my mom about various things) but now, because he and my mom have gone on one of their periodic sugar fasts (which were initially inspired by an acupuncturist and alternative medicine doctor who is friends with my mom feeling my dad's stomach and apparently being shocked by the presence of the masses of toxic sweetener embedded in his vital organs), are a way for me to tease and taunt him. i'm thankful for his response to my oreo texts, which is always some variation of "damn you!" i'm thankful that i know the temptation and teasing encoded in the message is cruel, but i also know that he would miss the love that's sandwiched in between the tempation and teasing if i stopped sending the texts, so i'm thankful to continue to buy oreos and send him pictures of them.
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: