i’m thinking about the waffle incident

I’m thinking about the waffle incident – how, in the spring of 2012, I lost control of my life as a result of a terrible, mediocre waffle.

Please tell me more

My friend J. was coming to visit me from out of town for a few days. (She’s usually a pretty daring eater; if you ever go out to eat with J., expect to order anything and everything, and also to order something very strange which J. will actually like and which will then make you feel sort of silly for ever doubting her)

That morning I told her I had a pretty big waffle for breakfast. She was going to be gone all day, so I was going to be eating a waffle all day. Why not have a waffle for breakfast? They are the breakfast of champions, after all. She could come back to a waffle-induced metabolic upheaval. She would witness the transition from my body being satiated, to it being glutted.

I decided to have waffles for every meal, over the next three days. I had waffles for dinner. I had waffles for lunch. That day, I had a waffle in the morning, but I didn’t have it right after breakfast. I had it around noon. Then I tried to make myself eat a real meal (another waffle) just in case.

As you can imagine, this has many side effects: there’s too much waffle in your system; your stomach is upset, and your colon is even more upset; your stomach feels overfull, but it’s not full of food; it feels like it just got a chug of warm syrup. You feel this way all day. You lie in bed at night unable to sleep because your stomach won’t fuck off.

Somewhere around day 2 of this process, I called J. and asked her what the fuck was I doing. J. called me an idiot. We hung up. I have had no contact with her since, which is 1) not her fault and 2) best for both of us.

It’s true that I could have just ignored the waffle and everything would have been fine. But I was not ready to do that. Not to be punished for the fact that I had made a poor choice. I wanted to learn my lesson.

The moral of the story is: don’t eat a waffle every meal for three days. Also, it’s fine to ignore your stupid mistakes without punishing yourself. You’ll come to the same conclusion eventually. But you can skip a few steps and spare yourself a lot of effort.