A month ago, I literally had like two-thirds of my post already written, and then I was like, “but what if I did a Depression Meal round up instead??” Depression meals, for the record, are not weird recipes born from the Great Depression, like tomato soup cake or whatever. It's those “well I gotta eat SOMEthing” shrugs of a meal, a Girl Dinner but less cheerful.
Anyway, I talked myself out of starting from scratch five hours before bedtime. (And then I had to do it again today, because this is Bi Visibility Week so obviously I should have done a bi book round up, but it's too late! We can do it next time!) I decided there's no point wasting a post idea, especially if I can work on it gradually over weeks instead of hammering it out at ten pm on a Tuesday. So I was going to do a whole “menu” of Sad Girl Dinners, but I'm cutting the meal ideas; this is just an ode to cold cereal1.
I’ve always been a kind of…melancholy person, shall we say. In college I actually had some pretty debilitating depression, which it wasn’t until much later that I realized was almost certainly triggered by the fact that I had the worst sleep habits on earth. I’d stay up until all hours to finish my homework, I’d do the stereotypical “leave the house at ten pm” thing that young people do. There was a cereal bar in the student union when I was there, and I ate so many takeout boxes of cereal during my tenure, like even choosing and digesting a sandwich was too much work. Things got a lot better after I graduated and had a more normal life schedule, but even still I just kind of tend to the downer (perhaps explaining my penchant for Death Cab??) including some weird medication reactions that involve uncontrollable crying (one of the many reasons I’ve never done recreational drugs, lol). And of course, there’s summer.
Seasonal affective disorder (were they trying for the SAD acronym) is more common in winter, and people talk about their sun lamps and stuff, but we gotta talk about getting SAD in summer2. Lots of people struggle in the summer, and I swear it’s worse because it feels like the whole world is like, spinning in a field of wildflowers with golden sunlight in their hair while I’m over here struggling to do the bare minimum and feel at least a little bit like crying like, most of the time. At least in winter it’s gray and slushy! Summer should not be this hard!
Arizona has broken over a dozen heat-related records this year, including hottest days, warmest lows, consecutive triple digit days…it’s been a particularly bad summer. I can tell when the a/c is struggling to keep up in the late afternoon, because everyone gets so snappy, just zero patience with anything or anyone. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, my kids eat frozen pizza (cooked in the toaster oven, not the real oven) for dinner at least twice a week because I just cannot do anything else. And the adults are eating a lot of cereal. Actually, one of the kids is, too. We are close to becoming an all cereal, all summer family.
There are definitely some cereals that are more nutritious than others, but honestly I just don’t care. Trix and Froot Loops are pretty popular in our house at the moment, but I am in my Frosted Shredded Mini Wheat era (mostly because they discontinued the vastly superior honey nut shredded wheat). There is a lot of fiber in shredded wheat, it’s basically a health food! My best advice is to get the (admittedly expensive) Fairlife milk, which is both high protein and lactose free, and thus makes pretty much any cereal a balanced meal. (My kid who is not into cereal has it in a Carnation Instant Breakfast shake, which is like strawberry-flavored powdered vitamins; I love it, but also I grew up in the Slim Fast age and legit love that chalky taste, so ymmv.)
All of this talk of the superiority of cereal reminds me of possibly my favorite scene in any book I've read this year. I have yelled about a lot of baseball books on Instagram in the last year, but one I have not yet yelled about here on the ‘stack is Cat Sebastian’s You Should Be So Lucky. It’s okay, though, because we’re yelling about it now.
YSBSL was the first Cat Sebastian book I’ve read, but I have since read several more, despite the fact that I can’t even keep up with new releases, let alone make it through backlists. That’s how good it was. It’s incredibly funny—including a sick burn about being the kind of person who looks like they have an accountant—but also deeply emotional, including the scene I think about the most (and yes, I am again recycling IG content here), which involves that GOAT meal, cold cereal.
In the book, Mark’s grocery list every week for sixteen months consisted of six bananas, one box of cornflakes, a quart of milk, and seven cans of dog food. It's a grief thing. He can cook, but he won’t do it for just himself. Mark is assigned to ghostwrite a newspaper column as struggling baseball player Eddie, and they become close (and then…closer). Eddie shows up at Mark’s apartment after a game and they talk about his playing and baseball, but then this happens:
“Did you eat dinner?”
Eddie’s momentarily confused, because that’s not an interview question. “Don’t worry about that. It’s late. I should go.”
Mark puts down his notebook. “That’s not what I asked.”
Eddie follows Mark into the kitchen. He watches, his heart inexplicably in his throat, as Mark pours Eddie a bowl of cornflakes and carefully slices a banana into it.
Food as an expression of love or care is a pretty common personality trait, and Mark is no exception. And here, Mark is still so deep in his grief he can barely take care of himself—he eats out for every non-breakfast meal, he quit his job but still shows up to the office because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. And then when he finds someone he cares about, he feeds him cereal, because that’s literally the only food in the house. But it’s a start! And I just find it so precious.
I do not grant the Red Barron Classic Crust pepperoni pizza (with the pepperonis removed before cooking, because the cheese version has the dreaded “yellow cheese”) the same level of charming as Mark’s bowl of cornflakes for Eddie. And yet, am I not feeding these people? I even cook each half to a different doneness, per the diner’s preference. Sometimes I even peel an apple and make them eat a few slices. Not one person in this house has scurvy! I care!!
And I’m doing the best I can. I can tell you first hand that sometimes a parent’s best still isn’t enough, but as far as dinner goes, so far nobody has complained about the amount of frozen pizza. Food is food, you know?
Please, please click through and watch this Reel. It's so real.
And there is light at the end of the tunnel. The heat when we went to the Diamondbacks game over the weekend was tolerable, compared to how miserable it was when we went in July. Even with the roof closed, the air conditioning just can’t keep up! But on Saturday the breeze was almost pleasant (if you were in the shade) and I did eventually stop shvitzing once we got to our seats. Today the high was under 100! Last night I sat outside for a few minutes at sunset and it was (basically) pleasant!
I can feel myself starting to come to life, like a plant returning to life in the spring, which yes, is an Alanis-level of irony that I am revived as the foliage start to die off for winter. On Sunday I made the cinnamon sugar pecans I put in my oatmeal and tackled some of the condiment clutter piles in the kitchen. I’ve started walking on the treadmill when I read after dinner, instead of sitting on the couch while everyone watches some dumb show I don’t care about anyway. I could write letters again! (speaking of, holiday card season approaches, if you’d like to get in on the action.) Maybe I could find a new job! Suddenly life feels possible again!
I hope that weather is better wherever this finds you. (It is likely, statistically speaking.) I hope you’re pulling out of the summer death spiral, or you’ve got your vitamin D supplement and sun lamp waiting in the wings. I hope you have someone to take care of you, even if that is pouring your own bowl of cereal.
If you really, really want very easy meal ideas (absolutely nothing that starts with “chop an onion”), I could oblige.
I don’t know how reputable Healthline is, but they do have an article on SAD that certainly feels accurate.
Oh my glob, the VALIDATION I felt when I first read the statistic that Phoenix had more than doubled its days over 110 from what it was twenty+ years ago. I wasn't imagining it, the heat really is getting worse. And I say this as someone who LOVES summer. I just don't love "110 degrees summer." Where I grew up it was a BIG DEAL when we'd hit triple digits, and it only happened once or twice each summer.