Stuck on the Subway

We’ve all seen the articles. Someone lives to be a hundred and two and share that the secret to a long life is eating two hard-boiled eggs and a slice of wheat toast every morning. We even find the shot of bourbon and a Lucky Strike crowd endearing, if not concerning.

For some reason, breakfast gets a pass as the one time per day where repeating a meal over and over is encouraged at best, indifferent at worst. It can even be lauded as a sign of maturity and the general sense of having one’s life together. The further you go into the day though, the less accepting society is of a narrow variation to one’s diet. Eating the same lunch every day is sure to turn some heads; maybe it adds to your quirkiness, or maybe it sparks a light-hearted conversation about trying a different type of sandwich. Tuna seems to be pretty popular.

But the same thing for dinner every night? Get out. Get out now. I don’t feel safe around you, you’re clearly deranged.

Now I’m not advocating either way, change up your breakfast or leave your dinner menu stagnant, it makes no difference to me. But why does breakfast get a pass to be so unrelenting?

Methinks it comes from agrarian tradition: it’s morning, go get some eggs from the chicken coop, fry ‘em up, along with some bacon or ham, because it’s a farm and we have some fat hogs around. Never in my thirty-four years have I retrieved early morning eggs from anywhere other than my refrigerator, and there are no pigs around to speak of (although my place is sometimes a sty! …I’ll see myself out).

Even a well-rounded, nutritious dinner straight from the Surgeon General’s happiest dreamscape, if repeated, brings such narrow judgment for being juvenile or mundane. Yet a repeated breakfast means you’ve grown up a bit and probably also used notecards to study when you were in college.

Now why should that be.

It is Thursday, August 29^th and my Wisconsin Badgers debut tomorrow night against Western Michigan. Bucky is favored at a 23.5 point spread, but if my years of proudly repping the red W have taught me anything, this will either be a victory of twice the spread, or come down to one field goal. I’m here for it, On Wisconsin.