The Cereal Frog

             

           This past week I have been in a cereal kind of mood. Cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be a-okay with me. (put it in a giant ceramic mug, listen to norah jones, and watch the Los Angeles rain pouring down from the infinite gray clouds and your will: A. feel very hipster and B. go through several boxes before you can hum the chorus to “Don’t Know Why”). Today after acting class I went to the grocery store, decided on a box of plain Special K, and rushed home with My Little Ponies galloping around in my stomach. I was so excited! Granted, I get excited very easily, but while in the cereal aisle I had been remembering my trip to Italy and how yummy their breakfasts were. Each hotel my family and I stayed at had new and interesting dishes that I indulged in each morning. However, whether we were in a tiny bed and breakfast in the middle of rural northern Italy or in the grandest hotel in the heart of Rome... each breakfast had original Special K. I loved me some European Special K! Naturally, this afternoon when I giddily scooped a mouthful of the American version into my mouth and found that it tasted entirely different, I was about ready to write a scathing letter to Kellog’s president. 

“WHAT THE HELL!” I thought. This tastes like card board with a chemical after taste and looks like a Rice Crispies became obese, run over by an 18 wheeler, and then fried. Where are those seeds and whole grains? I want to eat my cereal and feel like it came from a field of daisies... not from the spaceship food dispenser in Wall-E!

  I don’t know this for sure, but I bet that when Special K tested the cereal on the populations around the world, Americans preferred the bleached white flour taste and the Europeans leaned toward the nature/homemade/wholesome taste. I feel like Kellogs traded using the healthy whole grains and seeds in the European version for what would appeal to most American’s taste buds. It makes me wonder how many times I’ve traded something that I know has more quality for something that is not necessarily good for me, but that the majority of the people around me are doing. I wonder how many times I’ve exchanged something true and good, for something that I see the crowd mobbing around. Probably more times than I’m conscious of or would be willing to admit to. 

My mom always says that if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and then put it on the stove to boil, it will end up being cooked alive and will think everything is hunky-dory until they die. However, if you drop a frog in a pot of water that is already boiling, it will leap out (and probably far away from you too!). I bet that if I ate the American Special K for a few weeks, I’d think it started to taste pretty good. I wouldn’t know any different... but, I’ve never been one to go with the flow of the crowd or sit in a pot that is slowly heating up. I hope to always be a frog who excels out of leaping out of pots. 

King of Gym

  

        The few weeks before spring break, I was the girl who everyone hated. I was lounging on the couch, helping myself to thirds on sugary desserts, and sitting out in the sun reading a book while other girls on my college campus jogged to spin class and found time to squeeze multiple workouts in between their midterms. While I was going back home to El Paso to chow on Mexican food and snuggle with my dog, they were preparing for a week in a string bikini in Cabo. However, I decided after spring break I would get my act together and stop living a double life as a sloth. I live in an apartment complex on campus that is literally less than 20 feet away from the gym. I decided that it was going to be silly easy to go to the gym everyday sophomore year. Lets just say that I have spent more time watching the water polo team come and go from practice from my window then I do at the gym.

        However, by some miracle, I made it to the the gym and onto a treadmill yesterday afternoon. I was fiddling with my ipod and grumbling under my breath to the beat of my sneakers slapping against the machine, “i. hate. run. ing. this. is. not. fun. i. hate. run. ing. this. is. not. fun,” when I noticed there was a very gangly boy about my age making his way through the sea of weight machines. He had on jeans, a plain t-shirt, and sunglasses. I looked closer. He also had a stick that aided him to feel for things in front of him. This boy was blind. For the next half hour, I watched him make his way from machine to machine. He would put down his stick, feel around to get a sense of what kind of machine it was, and figure out how it worked if he wasn’t familiar with what it was supposed to do. He wasn’t intimidated by not knowing how something worked. He made no apologies or excuses. He didn’t let the hordes of muscly frat boys fist pounding and saying things like, “Hey wanna grab some muscle milk at Cafe 84 and then head to the house to pregame the mixer?” let him shrink away into a less populated section of the room. He was there to get done what he came to the gym for... and nothing was going to stop him. 

       Obstacles will always be present. Some people are handed little obstacles and others are handed bigger ones... but either way, overcoming them is dependent on attitude and determination.