Well, it's Sunday afternoon. When I'm home,
I sometimes get breakfast with my fami-
-ly after Church at a diner (because
it is New Jersey, the diner capital
of the U.S. pretty much), and today
I was realizing how much I real-
-ly wanted an omelet. If not an omelet,
then pizza. If not pizza, then cheesecake.

Ok, I'm just really hungry and am thinking of the first thing that sounds good, though I've been craving the pizza or the omelet for a few days now.

So I head to the café nearby af-
-ter Mass to try to get my desires ful-
-filled. I know exactly what I want and
exactly how I want it. I order
my food – a cheese omelet with bacon and
white toast. The sign on the wall says I get
a hash brown, too. I get some coffee. Yay.
No college student can live without it,
especially not during finals week.
Or so is the justification.

Then I wait for my order. When I get my order, it looks kind of
skimpy.
There was
no
hash brown,
and
the bacon was
nowhere
to be
seen
- just some egg and unbuttered toast.

You know what they did?

They put the bacon in my omelet.
Bacon in my omelet!

And not a hash brown to
be seen for miles.
Being an English major, maybe, I should have known that
My wording had been ambiguous.
I assumed the people at the café would have understood me.

How disappointing.
Really.

Alas. So I, grumpy, go to get some ketchup…
but the ketchup dispenser
doesn't work. It just sort of squelches at me and sputters,
"Where's your
bacon?
Ain't you got no
hash brown
to put me on? Ha!
Fool!"

Ok, so my ketchup
wasn't
that animated.
But I get
a minimal amount of
ket-
-chup
anyway since it's not cooperating.

The bacon-cheese omelet is alright,
I grouse.
Not what I wanted in the way I expected it.
It just sort of happened that way.
They put the bacon in my omelet
– I don't understand why they would do that.
I eat it, and am not satisfied, and yet I don't know
What could satisfy.
That bacon was supposed to be at the side.
It's just that I wanted a
cheese
omelet, with
a side of toast, a hash brown, and bacon,
with this cup of coffee,
and I looked
forward
to it since
yesterday
when I saw someone else having it. Maybe
it was a nostalgia thing.
Either way,
I thought I knew what I wanted,
and when I got it,
it wasn't what I wanted… or maybe I just don't know
what do I want after all.
Where is this all headed? Is the rest of my life a failure because I lost sight of my vision? Or I tasted
something I never thought I'd taste,
or I tasted something
thinking
it was something and
it turns
out
to be
something else, and therefore
I don't know what's what anymore?
If I can't make heads
or tails
out
of my breakfast,
how am I supposed to figure everything else out?

Someone's been studying a little too much.