Cereal Box Quotes

Don't let the cereal eat you. It's only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.

I didn't come out of a cereal box.

I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure).

I don't want you to have to handle it. That's the horror of my past. But you...you're the reality of my present. You're the proof I survived. The prize in the cereal box.

How awesome would that be? You open a box of Trix and wham! Out pops a hot guy! I would so eat more cereal.

Emperor, right." she retacked the curtain "That's weird to say, after eighteen years of listening to celebrity gossip feeds go on and on about 'Earth's favorite prince'". She claimed one of the lumpy sofa cushions, curling her legs beneath her. "I had a picture of him taped to my wall when I was fifteen. Grand-mere cut it off a cereal box." Wolf scowled. "Of course, half the girls in the world probably have had that same picture from that same cereal box." Wolf scrunched his shoulders against his neck, and Scarlet grinned, teasing. "Oh, no. You're not going to have to fight him for pack dominance now are you? Come here." She beckoned him with a wave of her hand and he was at her side in half a second, the glower softening as he pulled her against his chest.

On the morning of the fourth day, Jamie tipped a switchblade out of his box of cornflakes.   “I think these promotional campaigns have really got out of hand,” he said, freezing with his hand on the milk carton. “One shiny free knife with every packet of cereal bought is not a good message to send out to the kiddies.

Oblivion eyes on a cereal box, the warm blinds of a father lost and last to know lost and last to love last boy lost you can't see even a bubble once it's popped

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

I was on a mission. I had to learn to comfort myself, to see what others saw in me and believe it. I needed to discover what the hell made me happy other than being in love. Mission impossible. When did figuring out what makes you happy become work? How had I let myself get to this point, where I had to learn me..? It was embarrassing. In my college psychology class, I had studied theories of adult development and learned that our twenties are for experimenting, exploring different jobs, and discovering what fulfills us. My professor warned against graduate school, asserting, "You're not fully formed yet. You don't know if it's what you really want to do with your life because you haven't tried enough things." Oh, no, not me.." And if you rush into something you're unsure about, you might awake midlife with a crisis on your hands," he had lectured it. Hi. Try waking up a whole lot sooner with a pre-thirty predicament worm dangling from your early bird mouth. "Well to begin," Phone Therapist responded, "you have to learn to take care of yourself. To nurture and comfort that little girl inside you, to realize you are quite capable of relying on yourself. I want you to try to remember what brought you comfort when you were younger." Bowls of cereal after school, coated in a pool of orange-blossom honey. Dragging my finger along the edge of a plate of mashed potatoes. I knew I should have thought "tea" or "bath," but I didn't. Did she want me to answer aloud? "Grilled cheese?" I said hesitantly. "Okay, good. What else?" I thought of marionette shows where I'd held my mother's hand and looked at her after a funny part to see if she was delighted, of brisket sandwiches with ketchup, like my dad ordered. Sliding barn doors, baskets of brown eggs, steamed windows, doubled socks, cupcake paper, and rolled sweater collars. Cookouts where the fathers handled the meat, licking wobbly batter off wire beaters, Christmas ornaments in their boxes, peanut butter on apple slices, the sounds and light beneath an overturned canoe, the pine needle path to the ocean near my mother's house, the crunch of snow beneath my red winter boots, bedtime stories. "My parents," I said. Damn. I felt like she made me say the secret word and just won extra points on the Psychology Game Network. It always comes down to our parents in therapy.

In life, as in breakfast cereal, it is always best to read the instructions on the box.

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But...we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do NOTHING. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-the overstressed executive who goes on vacation but who cannot relax.

After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: no I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

If it had writing, I read it: cereal boxes, ads on the subway, billboards, highway signs. I

Even thought she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn't people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that.

 . . . since God’s God, I assumed He could hear me, so I’d ask Him what He thought. And here’s the weird part, I’d pick up a book, a box of cereal, or catch a random conversation at the gym and hear what felt like His next line in our conversation! It was wild. 

YO MAMA SO POOR... Yo mama so poor when I saw her kicking a can down the street, I asked her what she was doing, she said "Moving." Yo mama so poor she can't afford to pay attention. Yo mama so poor when I ring the doorbell I hear the toilet flush. Yo mama so poor when she goes to KFC, she has to lick other people's fingers. Yo mama so poor she went to McDonald's and put a milkshake on layaway. Yo mama so poor your family ate cereal with a fork to save milk. Yo mama so poor her face is on the front of a foodstamp. Yo mama so poor she was in K-Mart with a box of garbage bags. I said, "What ya doin'?" She said, "Buying luggage." Yo mama so poor she waves around a popsicle stick and calls it air conditioning. Yo mama so poor she has the ducks throw bread at her.

The guy had longer relationships with cereal boxes than girls." - Lyla

I think I’m like looking at the back of a cereal box for you. I’m just something you sit and stare at because I’m there.

The major influence on my writing has been my reading. When I was young, I read everything, including cereal boxes and coffee labels. Reading taught me sentence structure, paragraphing, how to build a chapter. Strangely enough, it never taught me spelling.

Yet as a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound "whole-grain goodness" to the rafters.

If Jane has to choose between 2 boxes of cereal, and Mike can choose from 20 boxes, Mike does not have more freedom than Jane. He has more variety. <...> Variety is not freedom.

Owen scooped up a mound of cereal. "Box said they were magically delicious." He cleared his spoon with a big bite. "Well, they're definitely delicious, but only you are both magical and delicious." She leaned over and pressed a sloppy kiss to his cheek.

I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt....With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I'd stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launched back, I was certain. But I recognized her life, I knew it so well! I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her--surely we understood some shared code (or surely not, surely she'd have thought me preposterous)--It's good on the other side, but it's good on your side too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder and the loneliness is the biggest part; but some things are easier.

THE BOUNTY In her kitchen, she saw many things she would like to eat. On the counter, there was a bunch of new bananas, yellow as a Van Gogh chair, and two apples, pristine. The cabinet was open and she saw a box of crackers, a new box of cereal, a tube of curved chips. She felt overwhelmed, seeing all of the food there, that it was all hers. And there was more in the refrigerator! There were juices, half a melon, a dozen bagels, salmon, a steak, yogurt in a dozen colors. It would take her a week to eat all of this food. She does not deserve this, she thought. It really isn't fair, she thought. You're correct, God said, and then struck dead 65,000 Malaysians.

I read trash. Empty cereal boxes, empty shampoo bottles, the bottoms of empty Kleenex boxes, and occasionally even a mystical self-help book.

If they wanted to slap my photo onto cereal boxes? Perfect. Leotards? Makes sense. Tampons? Sure, I’d go with the flow. (Ha.)

They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon.

If you love the backs of cereal boxes or still recall how much you loved the Archie comics, share all that with your child. Ingesting words, like fruit and vegetables, is just plain good for us, no matter where they are coming from.

We live in an age in which saving is subterfuge for spending. No doubt you sincerely believe that there is margarine in your refrigerator because it is more economical than butter. But you are wrong. Look in your bread drawer. How many boxes of cute snack crackers are there? How many packages of commercial cookies reeking of imitation vanilla badly masked with oil of coconut? How many presweetened breakfast cereals? Tell me now that you bought the margarine because you couldn't afford butter. You see - you can't. You bought the bread drawer of goodies because you were conned into them; and you omitted the butter because you were conned out of it. The world has slipped you culinary diagrams instead of food. It counts on your palate being not only wooden, but buried under ten coats of synthetic varnish as well. Therefore, the next time you go to check out of the supermarket, simply put back one box of crackers, circle round the dairy case again, swap your margarine for a pound of butter and walk up to the checker with your head held high, like the last of the big spenders. This is no time for cost-counters: It is time to be very rich or very poor - or both at once.

and like in a movie I appear in front of the D'Agostino's, sale's clerks beckoning for me to enter, and I'm using an expired coupon for a box of oat-bran cereal and the girl at the checkout counter--black, dumb,slow-- doesn't get it, doesn't notice the expiration date has passed even though it's the only thing I buy, and I get a small but incendiary thrill when I walk out of the store, opening the box, stuffing handfuls of the cereal into my mouth, trying to whistle "Hips to Be Square".

The next time some desperate parents beg me to take care of their children," I raged, sawing at my slice of chicken breast, "I will ask them for a full accounting of all the boxes of cereal in their pantry. And if they don't have at least three types of sugary cereal, then I will say no. No, I will not babysit for your whiny children in your cereal-deprived sham of a household.

The human world never figured out the phenomenal expense it took to create New Atlantis, or the unlikelihood that it would ever be possible again. To them, it looked as if we pulled our Gotham out of a cereal box. They saw their abandoned buildings turn into craters overnight, and assumed that that was the sort of thing we would always be capable of doing. Not a bad rep to have.

The classic errors in reasoning are often called “cognitive illusions,” and the parallels with the visual illusions familiar from cereal boxes and science museums are instructive. They run deeper than the obvious fact that our eyes and minds can trick us. They explain how our species can be so smart and yet so easily deluded.

How many boxs of Fruit Loops do you need to smash to be considered a cereal killer?

Nice car. Wow, it must have been a huge cereal box.

Amelia crouched and set the cereal on the ground beside the box of rice. She thought of James’s sperm, fanning out, a slow-mo explosion, how cool it looked,

The moral of the story, Charlie, is this: Don’t let the cereal ear you. It’s only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.

The driver’s licenses weren’t the only things that had RFID chips in them. These days almost everything did, from breakfast cereal boxes to key chains.

- dismissing any thought of me the way you'd walk past boxes of mac'n'cheese or mashmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids' stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn't worth the calories.

What do you like to read?” she asked. “Everything,” I answered, a vague reply but true. I loved thrillers, ghost stories, and stories set in different cultures. I liked reading about anyone who had an interesting life, from women who dressed up as men to fight in the Civil War, to the guy who invented Q-tips. If nothing else was available, I read junk mail and the backs of cereal boxes.

Lindsay said I was going to be the kind of old woman who memorizes phone books and keeps flattened cereal boxes and newspapers piled from floor to ceiling in her house, looking for messages from space in the bar codes.

...A certain amount of clutter is expected. Hell, you find it everywhere. Cyphers on cereal boxes, fractals in sidewalk cracks, dead cats who don't understand why you're not paying attention to them-- Why are you looking at me like that?

Ohmigosh. No food at all.” Tiara sank down on the sand as if the full weight of their predicament had finally hit her. She blinked back tears. And then that megawatt smile that belonged on cereal boxes across the nation reappeared. “I am going to be so superskinny by pageant time!

Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world.

There's a little bit of magic in every box!

Piano ducks swimming make noises like drowning saxophones. I taught them how to Mozart like powdered Michael Phelps on the bottom of a crushed box of cereal.

In life, as in breakfast cereal, it is always best to read the instructions on the box,

Out of the box' doesn't just describe how I eat cereal,” said Ray on his first job interview in several years, “but you could say the same thing about where my cats poo and my thinking.

If you want to understand the life of a foreign city, how people go about their day-to-day business, what they buy and what they look like, go to the supermarket. I rarely have the need to purchase a box of breakfast cereal or a loaf of bread while abroad, but watching others do it tells me more about a place than being led around in a crocodile behind a tour guide’s umbrella.

I’ve always liked numbers. I like how you can just keep stacking them up, one on top of the other, until they fill any space, any moment. I told my friends this one day, and Lindsay said I was going to be the kind of old woman who memorizes phone books and keeps flattened cereal boxes and newspapers piled from floor to ceiling in her house, looking for messages from space in the bar codes.

What about television?" a young man asked. "It's an octopus. It's no longer just a little box, it's the Love Machine." "Why the Love Machine?" a reporter asked. "Because it sells love. It creates love. Presidents are chosen by their appeal on that little box. It's turned politicians into movie stars and movie stars into politicians. It can you engaged if you use a certain mouthwash. It claims you'll have women hanging on your coattails if you use a certain hair cream. It tells the kids to eat their cereal if they want to be like their baseball idol. But like all great lovers, the Love Machine is a fickle bastard. It has great magnetism--but it has no heart. In place of a heart beats a Nielsen rating. And when the Nielsen falters, the program dies. It's the pulse and heart of the twentieth century--The Love Machine.

Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon. Visitors also encountered the latest and arguably most important organizational invention of the century, the vertical file, created by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. Sprinkled among these exhibits were novelties of all kinds. A locomotive made of spooled silk. A suspension bridge built out of Kirk’s Soap. A giant map of the United States made of pickles. Prune makers sent along a full-scale knight on horseback sculpted out of prunes, and the Avery Salt Mines of Louisiana displayed a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved from a block of salt. Visitors dubbed it “Lot’s Wife.

Do not use Tupperware to store cereal and other packaged goods. When used in a way that creates unnecessary extra steps, Tupperware becomes your enemy. For example, transferring your Cheerios to Tupperware containers when it already comes in a perfectly good box is a waste of time and energy. Do you really have all this extra attention to spend on repackaging all of your groceries? And are you planning to label each Tupperware with the appropriate expiration date every time you make this transfer? For heaven’s sake, I’m exhausted just thinking about it!

What You Need to Cut from Your Diet: 1.   Vegetable oil 2.   Added sugar and honey (to tea, coffee, etc.) 3.   Soda 4.   Juice, except fresh squeezed. (Why not just eat the fruit? It’s got more fiber and more antioxidants!) 5.   Energy bars and “health” bars 6.   Boxed cereals 7.   Fried fast foods 8.   Powdered “proteins,” and powdered milk 9.   Salad dressings made with any kind of vegetable oil, including canola 10. Low-fat products, including milk, cheese, salad dressings, cookies, and other baked goods 11. Snacks and desserts—if you want to lose weight

Jim and John are white, and thanks to the vagaries of statistical distribution, average citizens of this country. Contrary to the universal constant of partners, Jim and John are not tall and short, fat and skinny, jaunting into comic dissimilarity. They look alike, and look like a great number of other people. Their fraternity glut the police files of known assailants; they reach for the grocer’s last box of cereal to prevent the next customer from enjoying it, and don’t even like cereal. Banks are full of them, and movie theaters and public transport. The invisible everymen, the true citizens.

Where, exactly, did rainbow colored, sugar frosted, air puffed, marshmallow infused cereal come from? Was it raised by cartoon rabbits and harvested by mischievous leprechauns? These products were so distantly removed from the local farms, so thoroughly metamorphosed, that we couldn’t even be sure what the raw ingredients had been... Looking back on these farming families standing in line with their shopping carts, I wonder if the money they received for growing the right ingredients even covered the cost of their shopping bills. Could a farmer who planted fields of wheat and oats now afford a box of cereal made from his own grain?

TREVOR AND I WEREN’T SPEAKING when I went into hibernation. I probably called him at some point under the black veil of Ambien early on, but I don’t know if he ever answered. I could easily imagine him diving into a complicated, fortysomething-year-old’s vagina, dismissing any thought of me the way you’d walk past boxes of mac ’n’ cheese or marshmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids’ stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn’t worth the calories. He said he preferred brunettes. “They give me space to be myself,” he told me. “Blondes are distracting. Think of your beauty as an Achilles’ heel. You’re too much on the surface. I don’t say that offensively. But it’s the truth. It’s hard to look past what you look like.

There was a small mini-market serving the area. It was sparsely stocked, a few bags of crisps and boxes of cereal displayed under harsh strip lights that spat and fizzed. Alcohol and cigarettes, however, were well provided for, secured behind the Perspex screen from behind which the owner surveyed his business with suspicious eyes. Milton nodded to the man as he made his way inside and received nothing but a wary tip of the head in return. He made his way through the shop, picking out cleaning products, a carton of orange juice and a bag of ice. He took his goods to the owner and arranged them on the lip of counter ahead of the screen. As the man rang his purchases up, Milton looked behind him to shelves that were loaded with alcohol: gin, vodka, whiskey.

As a result, the lone, nightmarish panel appeared in the window as just a momentary peripheral snapshot or flash of a horrifying scene, much the way such single, horrible flashes often appear in bad dreams—somehow the speed with which they appear and disappear, and the lack of any time to get any perspective or digest what you are seeing or fit it into the narrative of the dream as a whole, makes it even worse, and often a rapid, peripheral flash of something contextless and awful could be the single worst part of a nightmare, and the part that stayed with you the most vividly and kept popping into your mind’s eye at odd moments while brushing your teeth or getting a box of cereal down out of the cereal cabinet for a snack, and unsettling you all over again, perhaps because its very instantaneousness in the dream meant that your mind had to keep subconsciously returning to it in order to work it out or incorporate it.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype—the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their freshman year. “Steve got into it even more than I did,” said Kottke. “He was living off Roman Meal cereal.” They would go shopping at a farmers’ co-op, where Jobs would buy a box of cereal, which would last a week, and other bulk health food. “He would buy flats of dates and almonds and lots of carrots, and he got a Champion juicer and we’d make carrot juice and carrot salads. There is a story about Steve turning orange from eating so many carrots, and there is some truth to that.” Friends remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.

More Activities to Develop Sensory-Motor Skills Sensory processing is the foundation for fine-motor skills, motor planning, and bilateral coordination. All these skills improve as the child tries the following activities that integrate the sensations. FINE-MOTOR SKILLS Flour Sifting—Spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and provide flour, scoop, and sifter. (A turn handle is easier to manipulate than a squeeze handle, but both develop fine-motor muscles in the hands.) Let the child scoop and sift. Stringing and Lacing—Provide shoelaces, lengths of yarn on plastic needles, or pipe cleaners, and buttons, macaroni, cereal “Os,” beads, spools, paper clips, and jingle bells. Making bracelets and necklaces develops eye-hand coordination, tactile discrimination, and bilateral coordination. Egg Carton Collections—The child may enjoy sorting shells, pinecones, pebbles, nuts, beans, beads, buttons, bottle caps, and other found objects and organizing them in the individual egg compartments. Household Tools—Picking up cereal pieces with tweezers; stretching rubber bands over a box to make a “guitar”; hanging napkins, doll clothes, and paper towels with clothespins; and smashing egg cartons with a mallet are activities that strengthen many skills.

It was brightly wrapped, and the card on it read, “To Daddy from Jannie.” “It’s fine,” I said. “What is it?” “Not so loud,” Jannie said, whispering. “It’s a potholder.” “A potholder?” “Yes, we learned how to make potholders in Starlight 4-H Club. And this is for Sally.” “A potholder?” “Yes, and this is for Laurie, and this is for Barry.” “A potholder for Barry?” “Yes, because in the mornings when his cereal’s too hot. Oh, golly.” Hastily she snatched the bottom package from the box and put it under her pillow. “You weren’t supposed to see that,” she said. “I didn’t see it,” I told her. “I never even noticed it.” “Good,” she said, “because that’s a secret, that one. I won’t even tell you who it’s for.

My mother worked as a saleslady at the well-known Five Corner bakery in Journal Square during the day. Her orders were that I do at least one page of homework for every one of my subjects before she came home. It didn’t matter what my teachers would assign, those were her rules and I didn’t dare to violate them! However, I usually allowed others to make the rules and then decide whether I would follow them. Turning on our small Bakelite radio, I would ignore my mother’s rules and listen to my favorite adventure shows. “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Superman, who could leap tall buildings in a single bound, and Tom Mix were my favorite daily half-hour radio programs during the week. Tom Mix was forever solving some mystery that I could help him with, since I had a decoder badge that cost only 10 cents, along with a box top from a Ralston Purina’s “Wheat Chex” cereal box. Since it tasted like straw, wanting to get a decoder badge was the only way I would eat this blah cereal for breakfast. The radio shows were way too exciting, and my homework always took second place. When my mother finally came home and saw that I had not done my work, she would get quite upset and make me do twice as much, seated at the kitchen table where she could keep her eye on me. Being under her direct supervision wasn’t much fun, but I would sit there until she was satisfied that I had finished my assignments. My mother showed no mercy! If my father found out about my being lax, there would be hell to pay! For whatever reason, I never seemed to learn…. Oh, woe is me, woe is me…. I was in trouble again… No, I was still in trouble!

I stopped struggling, going limp in his arms. He reached around us and shoved the door closed, spinning around and facing us toward the kitchen. “I was trying to make you breakfast.” It took a moment for his words and their meaning to sink in. I stared dumbfounded across the room and past the island. There was smoke billowing up from the stove and the window above the sink was wide open. Bowls and spoons littered the island and there was a carton of eggs sitting out. He was trying to cook. He was really bad at it. I started to laugh. The kind of laugh that shook my shoulders and bubbled up hysterically. My heart rate was still out of control, and I took in a few breaths between laughs to try and calm it down. He said something, but I couldn’t hear him because the fire alarm was still going off. I had no doubt half the neighborhood was now awake from the sound. He didn’t bother to put me down, instead hauling me along with him, where he finally set me down, dragged a chair over near the alarm, and climbed up to remove the battery. The noise cut off and the kitchen fell silent. “Well, shit,” he said, staring at the battery in his hand. A giggle escaped me. “Does this always happen when you cook?” He shrugged. “The only time I ever cook is when it’s my turn at the station.” His forehead creased and a thoughtful look came over his face. “The guys are never around when it’s my night to cook. Now I know why.” He snagged a towel off the counter and began waving away the rest of the lingering smoke. I clicked on the vent fan above the stove. There was a pan with half a melted spatula, something that may or may not have once been eggs, and a muffin tin with half-burned, half-raw muffins (how was that even possible?). “Well, this looks…” My words faltered, trying to come up with something positive to say. “Completely inedible?” he finished. I grinned. “You did all this for me?” “I figured after a week of hospital food, you might like something good. Apparently you aren’t going to find that here.” I had the urge to hug him. I kept my feet planted where they were. “Thank you. No one’s ever ruined a pan for me before.” He grinned. “I have cereal. Even I can’t mess that up.” I watched as he pulled down a bowl and poured me some, adding milk. He looked so cute when he handed me the bowl that I lifted the spoon and took a bite. “Best cereal I ever had.” “Damn straight.” I carried it over to the counter and sat down. “After we eat, would you mind taking me to my car? I hope it’s still drivable.” “What about the keys?” “I have a security deposit box at the bank. I keep my spare there in case I ever need them.” “Pretty smart.” “I have a few good ideas now and then.” “Contrary to the way it looks, I do too.” “Thank you for trying to make me breakfast. And for the cereal.” He walked over to the stove and picked up the ruined pan. “You died with honor,” he said, giving it a mock salute. And then he threw the entire thing into the trashcan. I laughed. “You could have washed it, you know.” He made a face. “No. Then I might be tempted to use it again.

He fakes a smile and then turns to unlock the door. I follow him inside; he stops me at the kitchen island. “I found it right here.” He points to the countertop. “You found what right where?” I ask, feeling my face scrunch up in bewilderment. “The crossword puzzle from today.” He pulls it out of his pocket. “I found it here when I was making breakfast this morning.” “Wait, you didn’t get it in the mail?” “I’m sorry; I thought I mentioned that.” “No,” I say, holding back from whacking him in the head. “I think I would’ve remembered if someone had broken into your apartment. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and then lets out a stress-filled sigh. “So, someone broke in here last night while you were asleep?” “I’m not sure. I was thinking that, too, but then . . . what if I just didn’t see it last night when I got home?” “Are you sure you didn’t set your mail down here, maybe even for a second, and then leave this piece behind?” “What difference does it makes?” “It makes a huge difference.” My voice gets louder. “The difference between someone breaking in or not.” I peer around the kitchen and living room, trying to see if anything looks off. “I don’t know.” He reaches for a box of cereal. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I would’ve noticed getting another puzzle in the mail, especially since we’ve been talking so much about this stuff.” “Who has a key to your apartment?” “No one that I know of.” “None of your friends? Did you leave a spare under the doormat, maybe?” “No, and no.” “Then what?” I ask, completely frustrated. “Look,” he says, running his fingers through his shaggy brown hair. “I don’t have all the answers. That’s why it’s a puzzle.” “This isn’t funny,” I tell him. “Someone’s sending you threatening notes, writing twisted messages on your door, and possibly breaking into your apartment. Worrying isn’t an option. It’s an order.” “So what do you order me to do?” “Call the police.” “And tell them what? That someone’s sending me crossword puzzles? That I got an angry message on my door, but I didn’t even feel the need to save it? They’ll give me a Breathalyzer test and ask me what I’ve been drinking.

If I were a box of cereal, I wouldn’t want to talk about myself any more than I do now. Just flip me over and read all about me if you’re curious. Everything you need to know is printed right on my ass.

An entire aisle of cereal...hundreds of choices....Of course I had eaten cereal before. I'm not a savage....Cereal was a small, affordable luxury. An effort. A point of pride. Something special....Those crates of cereal meant that we deserved what others do not.... Here the choices that stand before me in the store aisles seem to exist only to mock me. Cereal isn't a luxury...the boxes laugh at me...Two aisles down I count 27 varieties of peanut butter....it is really necessary?

Several of her students were engrossed in their work, but when she asked one of them, a PhD student named David Merrill, to give me a quick demo of his project, he readily agreed. Merrill walked us over to a three-foot-wide mockup of a supermarket shelf stocked with cartons of butter, Egg Beaters, and cereal, and he happily slipped on a Bluetooth-enabled ring he had been tinkering with when we interrupted him. He pointed directly at a box of cereal, and a light on the shelf directly below it glowed red. This meant, he told us, that the food didn’t fit the nutritional profile that he had programmed into the device. Perhaps it contained nuts or not enough fiber. He told me that there were a lot of “really cool technologies” making this happen—an infrared transmitter/receiver mounted on the ring, a transponder on the shelf with which it communicated, and a Bluetooth connection to a smart phone that could access the wearer’s profile in real time, to name a few. It was easy to see how this “augmented reality interface,” as Merrill called it, could change the experience of in-store shopping in truly a profound way. But what really impressed me during this visit was the close working relationship he clearly enjoyed with Maes. He called her “Pattie,” and my impression was that they engaged in give-and-take like true collaborators and colleagues.

TRACKING GAMES Hold an object in front of the baby. When you’re sure she’s seen it, let it drop out of your hand. At five or six months, most babies won’t follow the object down. But starting at about seven months, they’ll begin to anticipate where things are going to land. When your baby has more or less mastered this skill, add an additional complication: drop a few objects and let her track them down. Then hold a helium balloon in front of her and let it go. She’ll look down and be rather stunned that the balloon never lands. She’ll also give you a priceless look of betrayal—as though you cheated by defying the laws of physics. Let her hold the string of the balloon and experiment. Another great game involves your baby’s newly developed abilities to track moving objects even when they’re out of sight part of the time. Put your baby in a high chair and sit down at a table facing her. Slowly move a toy horizontally in front of her a few times. Then put a cereal box between you and the baby and move the ball along the same trajectory but have it go behind the box for a second or two. Most six-month-olds will look ahead to the other side of the box, anticipating where the ball will emerge. If your baby’s still having fun, try it again, but this time, instead of keeping the ball on the same path, make a 90-degree turn and bring the ball out from the top of the box. You can do the same kind of thing during games of peek-a-boo. Step behind a door so the baby can’t see you. Then open the door a little and poke your head out. Do that in the same place a few times and then higher or lower than where she was expecting to see you. Most babies find this endlessly amusing. Again, if your baby doesn’t respond to some, or any, of these activities, don’t worry. Babies develop at very different rates, and what’s “normal” for your baby may be advanced—or delayed—for your neighbor’s. And keep in mind that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on fancy toys. When my oldest daughter was about this age, one of her favorite toys was a plastic dish-scrubbing pad. And I remember taking her to FAO Schwartz in New York—zillions of fantastic toys everywhere—and thinking that she was going to want to play with everything. But all she wanted to do was play with the price tags. (She’s a teenager now, and I look back at that experience as a warning—she still spends an awful lot of time looking at price tags …) Give the Kid a Break Don’t feel that you have to entertain your baby all the time. Sure it’s fun, but letting her have some time to play by herself is almost as important to her development as playing with her yourself. And don’t worry; letting her play alone—as long as you’re close enough to hear what she’s doing and to respond quickly if she needs you—doesn’t mean you’re being neglectful. Quite the opposite, in fact. By giving her the opportunity to make up her own games or to practice on her own the things she does with you, you’re helping her learn that she’s capable of satisfying at least some of her needs by herself. You’re also helping her build her sense of self-confidence by allowing her to decide for herself what she’ll play with and for how long.

True, there's an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You'll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg's, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg's cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They're quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I've ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I've tried them all.) Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you'd see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice. When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world's car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.

Ifemelu told her about the vertigo she had felt the first time she went to the supermarket; in the cereal aisle, she had wanted to get corn flakes, which she was used to eating back home, but suddenly confronted by a hundred different cereal boxes, in a swirl of colors and images, she had fought dizziness. She told this story because she thought it was funny; it appealed harmlessly to the American ego.

from the couch and was littered about the floor, making it look as if it had snowed inside her house. An empty cereal box and assorted garbage made a trail from the kitchen. Cecil was napping on the windowsill. Higgins was nowhere to be seen, but Jessie followed the path of chewed-on shoes and debris through the hallway and into her bedroom. “Higgins,” she said. He was lying in a corner of her closet. He gave her a guilty look. Although there was a small fenced-in area in the backyard, it had been too hot to leave the dog outside. Instead she’d

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.

They all migrated to the front door. Dad and Dale carried the larger bags. Seth held a smaller duffel bag and a cereal box. The cereal box was his emergency kit. It was full of odds and ends he thought would come in handy for an adventure—rubber bands, a compass, granola bars, coins, a squirt gun, a magnifying glass, plastic handcuffs, string, a whistle. “This

Meredith threw up her hands in frustration. “That’s ridiculous. Ugh! They make me so mad with their uselessness. Do they even have to do an entrance exam? Or do they just accept those plastic badges you get in the cereal box?” I couldn’t agree more. The police in our town had never had a reputation for being particularly adept.

up and got out the ’greedients. ’Greedients is the stuff you mix together. Like the bowl. And the spoon. And the cereal. And the milk. Except for the milk carton was very too heavy for me. And so I just got the orange juice, instead. I put my bowl of cereal on the floor. Then I poured orange juice to the tippy-top of it. I took a giant bite. “Yum,” I said. “This is the most delicious breakfast I ever ate. Except for it doesn’t actually taste that good.

Imagine that you have a box of alphabet cereal, she said, and poured it out one morning, and the letters just happened to fall out in a pattern that spelled “Hello Meghan.” Would you be able to dismiss this as an accident?

Ellen Gorman purchased several boxes of cereal so that the family could eat quickly on the run. But when it came time to eat the cereal, no one could locate the boxes. They were later found in the fridge, freezer, and oven.

she was as ordinary as a box of cereal, so the only currency she possessed was to be outstanding whenever possible.

No-prep meals on the way out the door: • String cheese and a box of raisins • Yogurt • Breakfast or granola bars • A plastic baggie of cereal (fill these up Sunday night so they’re set to go) And try to inclue a glass of fortified orange juice and low-fat or skim milk.

The poor girl who only ever ate the moons out of her favorite cereal because she hoped it would make her invisible. The poor girl who made herself small to feel safe. The poor girl who only ever wanted peace. Conceived of violence. Lived a life of violence. Poor Lacey, the girl who only ever wanted peace…

did you know that most breads contain amino acid extracts derived from whey protein, a by-product of cheese production? And that whey protein or its dairy cousin, casein, can be found in most boxed cereals, crackers, nutrition bars, veggie “meat” products, and condiments?

I loved thrillers, ghost stories, and stories set in different cultures. I liked reading about anyone who had an interesting life, from women who dressed up as men to fight in the Civil War, to the guy who invented Q-tips. If nothing else was available, I read junk mail and the backs of cereal boxes.

The 49-year-old Bryant, who resembles a cereal box character himself with his wide eyes, toothy smile, and elongated chin, blames Kellogg's financial woes on the changing tastes of fickle breakfast eaters. The company flourished in the Baby Boom era, when fathers went off to work and mothers stayed behind to tend to three or four children. For these women, cereal must have been heaven-sent. They could pour everybody a bowl of Corn Flakes, leave a milk carton out, and be done with breakfast, except for the dishes. Now Americans have fewer children. Both parents often work and no longer have time to linger over a serving of Apple Jacks and the local newspaper. Many people grab something on the way to work and devour it in their cars or at their desks while checking e-mail. “For a while, breakfast cereal was convenience food,” says Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. “But convenience is relative. It's more convenient to grab a breakfast bar, yogurt, a piece of fruit, or a breakfast sandwich at some fast-food place than to eat a bowl of breakfast cereal.” People who still eat breakfast at home favor more laborintensive breakfasts, according to a recent Nielsen survey. They spend more time at the stove, preparing oatmeal (sales were up 3.5 percent in the first half of 2014) and eggs (up 7 percent last year). They're putting their toasters to work, heating up frozen waffles, French toast, and pancakes (sales of these foods were up 4.5 percent in the last five years). This last inclination should be helping Kellogg: It owns Eggo frozen waffles. But Eggo sales weren't enough to offset its slumping U.S. cereal numbers. “There has just been a massive fragmentation of the breakfast occasion,” says Julian Mellentin, director of food analysis at research firm New Nutrition Business. And Kellogg faces a more ominous trend at the table. As Americans become more healthconscious, they're shying away from the kind of processed food baked in Kellogg's four U.S. cereal factories. They tend to be averse to carbohydrates, which is a problem for a company selling cereal derived from corn, oats, and rice. “They basically have a carb-heavy portfolio,” says Robert Dickerson, senior packagedfood analyst at Consumer Edge. If such discerning shoppers still eat cereal, they prefer the gluten-free kind, sales of which are up 22 percent, according to Nielsen. There's also growing suspicion of packagedfood companies that fill their products with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). For these breakfast eaters, Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam may seem less like friendly childhood avatars and more like malevolent sugar traffickers.

Love is something to be cherished, like the toy at the bottom of a box of cereal. And just as a warning, my love is rather soggy, because I pour my milk directly into the cereal box.


You see, whatever important thing rules your heart also shapes your words and behavior. The fact of the matter is that we all lose sight of what is truly important. Winning an argument becomes too important for us. A beautiful house rises in importance beyond its true worth. Getting that next promotion becomes too important. Having a comfortable and predictable life takes on too much value. Being liked by other people becomes more important to us than the favor of God. Physical beauty and pleasure take on too much value in our hearts. A cool car, a great steak, nice clothes, or the last bowl of cereal from the box rises in value far beyond its true significance. We all need to be reminded again and again of what God has declared are the most important things in life.

The name 2600 came from the discovery in the 1960s that a plastic toy whistle found inside certain boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the United States created the exact 2,600 hertz tone that led a telephone switch to think a call was over. It was how early hackers of the 1980s, known as phone phreaks, subverted telephone systems to their desires.

Paulie slammed into them. “Okay, what the fuck are you waiting for? I want you to be in his fuckin’ cereal when he opens the box!

I'm standing by the cereal, reaching for a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, when I feel my chest clenching but not unclenching. It clenches tighter and tighter, like someone has wrapped a corset around it. My palms are wet. My head is compressing, growing and shrinking at the same time. I can hear my breathing, and it's so amplified that, to my own ears, I sound like Darth Vader. A woman at the end of the aisle is frozen as she watches me. She looks scared...My breathing is getting louder, and I cover my ears to block it out. And that's when the ceiling starts to spin and the air disappears and my lungs won't stop working and I can't breathe at all. I drop everything and run away from the cart and all that food until I'm out the door. I stand in the parking lot, bent over at the waist, breathing in the fresh night air, and then I lie flat on the ground, as if this will open my lungs wider and make them work again, only the breath won't come.

The good news was that the newspaper he had ordered was right at his door as promised. The bad news was that he had forgotten to buy milk for his breakfast. So he dumped the cereal back into the box, swept the overflow into the sink, and put second best, a bagel, into the toaster while he read the paper. He was barely past the first page when the toaster started to smoke. He pushed up the handle; the bagel stayed down. Smoke continued to curl toward the ceiling, setting off the fire alarm. Swearing broadly, he silenced it by knocking it down with the handle of the mop that had come in so handy the night before.

going to throw a tarp down in the middle of the living room floor, and tear open a few boxes of cereal. That ought to tide them over until morning, right? They’re

What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school. Who cares how many boxes of cereal can be sold via television? We need to know if television changes our conception of reality, the relationship of the rich to the poor, the idea of happiness itself. A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God? And if the politician cannot think beyond the next election, then we must wonder about what new media do to the idea of political organization and to the conception of citizenship.

I have a quick vision of myself tackling them into a large display of cereal boxes; pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars and green clovers turning into colored chalk beneath their faces as I slam them into the tiled floor. Magically delicious carnage.