Okay, maybe the long stretches are unusual for people who eat mostly at home, but I mostly eat out and that tends to put breakfast off the menu right off, and removes basic items like milk and cereal from being in your house almost indefinitely. But when I'm on an on-top-of-everyting swing, I keep my kitchen stocked, and in those times I'm likely to at least have cereal and milk.

And if I do have it, most likely I'm eating it when A) it's hella early and I'm for some strange reason up anyway. and B) I don't feel like cooking anything, not even microwaving anything. Okay, cereal seems like a good idea then.

My original point: I only eat a couple of kinds of cereal. You figure, over the years of your life you've been exposed to cereal, and you should know what you like. Now granted, the main cereal I'm most likely to get is to breakfast what McDonalds is to fast food -- seems to dominate the market, in large part due to early childhood imprinting. So I'm essentially eating Frosted Sugar Bombs.

The other main cereal I'm most likely to get is just a more "adult" version of that, in that it's lacking the obviously sugar-coated goodness and has traded for healthy "good" things like granola chunks and oats and nuts and things of that sort. So that one's fine too. And every now and then I might throw in something a little different, just because ... well, it's only cereal, right?

Well, I contend that you can only say that about anything when you're doing it right and can therefore afford to not think about it. In other words, I implore you -- do not let yourself be lured into the deadly trap of trying entirely new cold cereals. You know what you like. There's a method to your madness. Going for the sushi/kelp-flavored flakes on a whim will always be a mistake, unless you can at least recall that you used to like such things.

Did you know they actually put real fruit in some boxes of cereal? I mean right, it's not like the concept is so foreign, right? Fruit in cereal, I've done that my self. But um ... yeah, that was fresh fruit. And while something like, say, granola or nuts might travel in a cardboard box easily enought, exactly what kind of fruit would?

Why, dried fruit, of course. And here's the funny thing -- being a product of this modern world, when I buy a "fruit-flavored" product of one kind of another, I don't really have any expectation at all that this product will either have any of the actual fruit in it at all, or taste even remotely anything like what the real fruit would. And I don't have a problem with that. I'm well adjusted to the fact that the chemical approximate of a certain flavor is as likely to show up as the flavor in the way that nature intended it.

But I have to say -- if you take a real fruit ... like, say, I don't know, strawberries for instance -- and you actually treat it in some manner as to give it the general look, texture, and consistency of really old paper -- right, I'm sure it'll travel easier. Unfortunately, the modern world has not sufficiently prepared me for real "natural" flavors that taste far less like the original than the chemically-approximated kinds. I'm saying, freeze-dried strawberries are fricking foul. For that matter, I seem to recall having eaten banana chips at some point in my life, and those are pretty horrible too.

So stick to what you know and love, I guess is the underlying message. Usually, I tend to think that trying new things is always a good idea. And maybe trying something new is often good, but we mustn't get trapped in absolutes. Sometimes, with some things, staying with the tried and true will just make sense.