Polyphonic Scrannel

You just gotta take stuff from your real life and imagine how it would be told by someone more awesome than you:

I know that I talk about food a lot but this food story is an important food story. In fact, let it be known that this is officially IMPORTANT FOOD STORY NUMBER ONE!

It's about how I got emotional about a sandwich today.

To begin, I was having a weird day. You know those days where you just feel kinda dead to the world. The day is slowly smacking you across the face in super slo-motion like in those hi-speed camera videos. And you're like, "Stop slapping meeeeeeee" and by the time you finish saying "me" you're already in bed and about to go to sleep. It was one of those days. Something was missing, I guess.

Anyway, dinner time rolls around and I schlep on over to the dining hall and near the end of my dinner I go up and get two slices of bread and...don't put anything on them. I just go sit back down at my table. And I'm just looking at the bread like, "I should be put something on this bread." And my friend goes, "Nah, just put the bread on the bread and it's an open face bread sandwich." Which was very clever. He's a clever friend. But I had to put something on the bread so I get up and try to put yogurt on the bread, but they were almost out of yogurt so I just got a couple blobs. Then I added some peanut butter even though I'd already eaten peanut butter three times already, then some bran flakes, coconut shavings, honey, and then more cereal, rice krispies. I was wandering around the dining hall just limply smacking things on to these two slices of bread.

And I sat back down and looked at what I had created. And I closed the sandwich, and I took a bite, and I started to do this hysteric, laugh-cry whimper, like if a clown had been punching me repeatedly in the butt and it hurts but you're laughing and crying and he's just honking his nose and honking the little horn he has in is other hand with a big smile on his face while he just keeps punching you in the butt.

But I kept eating the sandwich, and after a couple bites I needed to calm down.

What I think happened, if I can try to justify this, is I had a hole somewhere, you know, when you feel like you have a hole, let's say it was in my craw. I had a hole in my craw. And filling that sandwich was a metaphor for filling the hole in my craw. And instead of thinking about constructive ways to fill my craw, I just grabbed stuff at random and put it on my craw and was like, "This is my life now and this is how I'm going to live it! I'm a success and these coconut shavings bear witness to my infamous deeds!"

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My roommate does this thing late at night--he makes these weird noises. They're kind of like grunts or halted laughs. And he does this at his desk which is right at the foot of my bed when I'm trying to sleep. And it took me a while but I figured out what he's doing. He breathes in, and then instead of breathing out like...you know...a normal person, he holds it in, and then releases it in this sudden burst. And my theory is that he's reading or whatever and he breathes in and then forgets to breathe and then all of a sudden he remembers and exhales with this weird grunt. And that's not his fault. I don't think he's doing it on purpose. It's not my fault that he wasn't raised right and his family wasn't there to mock it out of him. But it's not my place to tell him to stop.

So what I'm going to start doing, as a subtle hint, is after I breathe in, I'm going to breathe out and go, "SHUT UP!"

And I'll just keep breathing like that until he figures it out.