Women are nothing like breakfast

Something ruined my breakfast this morning. It's probably ruined dozens of breakfasts for you, too. And the worst part about it is: it seems like it could be fixed so easily. If we can get to the moon, if we can cure cancer, if we find a way to make billions selling products on the internet with a click of a button, then we can definitely find a way to stop thousands of people from having their breakfast experience spoiled on a daily basis.

When you wake up, still groggy, still in a bit of a haze, there is absolutely no way you can have the foresight to anticipate the incredibly unimportant yet heinously demoralizing experience before you. You trudge to the kitchen, open your favorite box of cereal, and you look to the bottom. There, you find cereal. Enough cereal to give you the bowl that you desperately crave. But there's a problem with that cereal. It is littered with former cereal, now mutilated to powder, the weakest in the cereal herd, the remnants which could not survive the brutal grind that is life in a cereal box.

It's a helpless feeling. There's absolutely no way to segregate the powder from the full-fledged flake. Like an apartment that just endured a few strong sprays from a fire extinguisher, the powder at the bottom of the cereal box is everywhere. After about five seconds of game-planning, of trying to come up with a way to outsmart the physics that lie in front of you, you quickly resign yourself to the cold, hard truth: you have two options. Throw away the box of cereal altogether, or play with the cards you've been dealt, turn the box upside down, and commence the landslide of half-snow half-cereal into your ceramic bowl.

In the current state of disappointment, the first option is compelling. When faced with a challenge, I've always been the kind of guy that either does it right, or doesn't do it at all. Knowing my breakfast experience is about to be tainted, I look at the clock and figure out how long it will be before lunch, trying to talk myself out of eating the sand before me, which when doused with milk, will certainly turn into mud. But then, the Catholic guilt kicks in. There are thousands, nay, millions of starving children on the planet desperate for the good parts of the cereal still in the box. I can't, in any good conscience, throw that cereal away.

And thus, the decision has been made. Is the cereal perfect? Far from it. But the B-grade breakfast is still good enough to sustain me, to keep me happy for the time being, and to get the job done.

Then it occurs to me, since the cereal's not so bad afterall, maybe most of the women that I meet aren't all that bad either. I've had a fair share of women to come into my life, and I usually escort them out rather quickly. I have high standards, I'll admit, but higher than the standards is my expectation of immediate sparks of chemistry. If I don't find myself falling for a girl within five minutes of meeting her, my interest plummets. Maybe I need to give them more of a chance. No one's perfect. But if I could look past the immediate shortcomings, I could find someone wonderful for who they are, who, just like the powdery cereal, can sustain me, keep me happy and get the job done.

I'm down to the last bite of real cereal. After this, there's nothing to look forward to but akward-flavored milk with clumps of golden sawdust. This is the part in the relationship where the infatuation wears off. It's the part where you start to notice how annoying her laugh is, or how her eyebrows aren't even, or how she overuses certains words, or how her mom is completely unattractive and that's how your partner's going to look in 15 years. It's time to bail. It's time to throw that little bit of milk down the drain and cut your losses.

I learned something today. Some look at the box as half-dust. I see it half-crunchy goodness. But women, they still need to be perfect.