Oatmeal for breakfast is awesome, but if you can’t have cinnamon in it, then what’s the point?

Two mornings ago, I woke up, drank two cups of coffee, read a few chapters of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and decided to make a bowl of oatmeal when I felt my stomach starting to growl. I poured the oats into a bowl. I mashed up a banana and mixed it in. I poured in a cup of almond milk. I went to grab the cinnamon so I could sprinkling a bit of it into the mix and complete the oatmeal-making process. Where was the cinnamon?

I scanned the counter. I put cinnamon in my oatmeal every morning. I always placed it back in the same spot on the counter, where could it have gone? I opened both doors to the spice cabinet and searched around. I moved the other spices- cumin, paprika, nutmeg- around like chess pieces, all the while keeping my eyes peeled for the cinnamon. It wasn’t in there. With my left hand still on the cabinet door’s handle, I spun around and looked toward the kitchen table and then did a once over of the entire room. Nothing. No cinnamon anywhere. I turned back to the cabinet, moved each and every spice all around for a second time, and when I could officially confirm it was not on the lowest shelf, grabbed a chair from the kitchen table for assistance in searching the two upper spice shelves. It wasn’t up there either. 

For a minute I thought about popping the bowl of oatmeal into the microwave and eating it without any cinnamon, but that notion didn’t last long at all because I remembered that oatmeal without cinnamon tastes like plain, boring oatmeal. Unacceptable. So, I had to call my mom, because it’s a rule of life that even when they don’t know where things are, moms always know where things are.

“Hi Mom, do you know where the cinnamon went?” I asked.

“Uhh, no. I haven’t used any cinnamon recently.” She said.

“But I always put it back in the same spot and it’s not there anymore so you must have moved it,” I complained.

“Kate, I didn’t move the cinnamon. I know it for a fact. Just look around, it has to be there somewhere,” she tells me.

She’s a neat freak, so deep down I knew that if she said she didn’t move it, she definitely didn’t move it. She would remember if she had put it away somewhere. But since I still can’t find the cinnamon and she doesn’t know where it is, I hang onto the notion that she must have moved it and just didn’t remember.

“Ugh, ok… whatever. Never mind. I’ll talk to you later,” I sigh.

“Bye,” she says.

At this point, like twenty minutes later, I was too hungry to care about the very specific tastes of my breakfast. My stomach was growing impatient and I was just going to have to settle for a less than satisfactory morning meal. I threw the bowl into the microwave and when it was ready, I leaned back against the counter, bowl and spoon in hand, and began to eat. Two-and-half bites into my delayed breakfast, for no reason at all (I swear I wasn’t still looking for it; I had fully accepted the absence of the cinnamon at that point) I nonchalantly turned my head to the right, and out of the corner of my eye saw none other than the stupid, little brown bottle that I had been searching for peaking out from behind the standing paper towel rack.

Thank god for my wandering eye, because I got to have cinnamon in my oatmeal that morning after all, which proves two of life’s undoubtable truths; the moment you stop looking for something, it will almost immediately reveal itself to you, and, your mom is always right. Always right.

2011: A year of reading in review!

(Most links lead to something I wrote about the book or a favorite quote!)  

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (again!)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (again!)

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Justice in Everyday Life: The Way it Really Works by Howard Zinn

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

What did you read this year?