March 1: Saint Albinus

Let me tell you about my food intake today. It started out fairly normal. I am a creature of habit. Actually, I'm more of a Frankenstein's monster of habit (picture Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein). Every morning, I have the exact same breakfast: a runny egg cooked in the microwave and a pork sausage patty. If I cook the egg too long and the yolk comes out hard as baked sand, it will ruin the rest of my day. I need snot with my egg the way my 16-month-old son needs to watch Happy Holidays Elmo immediately after waking up in the morning. If the DVD isn't playing, he stands before the TV, points a tiny finger at the dark screen, and says "da-ah?" over and over to indicate something is not quite right with the world. (If my egg isn't right, I sit at the breakfast table at work and become Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, muttering, "Egg's not right, definitely not right. Needs to be runnier, definitely runnier."

But I had my normal, perfect runny egg this morning. I thoroughly enjoyed my spoons of liquid yolk and slightly congealed egg white. It sounds disgusting, I know, but I'm not a big coffee fan yet put up with the burn of freshly brewed Maxwell House or Folgers in my nostrils every day. So the day got off to a good start. I had also exercised before breakfast, walking the equivalent of about 30 flights of stairs in about 45 minutes. That might not seem like a whole lot to people who run ten or eleven miles before eating their lettuce leaf and cottage cheese curd for breakfast. However, I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where it's not unusual to pack on an extra ten or fifteen pounds of blubber for the cold, snowy months. If I can emerge from my cave in Spring with some muscle tone left and not looking like one of the Baldwin brothers in relapse, I've had a good winter.

After breakfast, I sat down to work and write. Then I realized I needed to reward myself for the extra flights of stairs I'd done, and I made a trip to the chocolate drawer. In my experience, every place of work has a chocolate drawer, those secret stashes of candy employees hit when they're stressed, angry, bored, happy, tired, complacent, pre-menstrual, post-menstrual, depressed, manic, pre-menopausal, menopausal, post-menopausal, or, if you're like me, proud of yourself for burning some extra calories.

Currently, the drawer houses two kinds of chocolate Easter eggs--Nestle Crunch and Hershey's milk chocolate. We are nearing the end of peak chocolate season, which begins in September when the Halloween candy begins to materialize in the stores and ends with the 50% off after-Easter sales. After April, you approach the summer candy season, which means three or four months of Tootsie Rolls. By August, I'm dreaming of fun-size Milky Ways.

This morning, I treated myself to a handful of Nestle Crunch eggs. After this reward, I got to work. I wrote. I filed. I went to the chocolate drawer. I answered phones. I picked up the mail. I went to the chocolate drawer. I realized I hadn't had lunch. I realized I forgot my lunch. I went to the chocolate drawer. You get the idea. Despite it being Lent, by the end of the day, I'd made approximately 57 trips to the drawer and consumed 102 various chocolate eggs.

When I got home, I ate three pigs in a blanket for supper and decided to forgo my daily run. It had been an unusually warm day, and the sidewalks and streets were the consistency of cold macaroni soup. When I run in conditions like that, my shoes and socks take on so much icy water Gordon Lightfoot could write a song about them. So instead, I grabbed some Dove Promises from the dish on our front porch. (If you haven't guessed, I surround myself with chocolate.)

The rest of the night was taken up with children's baths and falling asleep on the couch watching The Antiques Roadshow. (Whenever I watch that show, I start greedily eying the clutter of my house for some priceless heirloom that I'm currently using as a garbage can or M&M dispenser. But I'm realistic enough to know that most of my crap is crap.)

Not very inspiring, I know. Today's saint, Albinus, would probably look at this account of my day in abject horror. From childhood, it seems, he had monastic discipline. My book doesn't go into detail, but I imagine little, five-year-old Albinus with a Friar Tuck haircut chastising his parents for eating brie between meals and having Chardonnay with their escargot. As a monk and bishop, he must have been the life of the party. My books says he was "a perfect model of virtue, especially of prayer, mortification of the senses, and obedience."

I may be a Frankenstein of habit, but I still wouldn't pass the Albinus litmus test. Just because I had an off day doesn't mean I'm condemned to the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno (that's the one reserved for fathers who eat their children and people who consume chocolate during Lent). I give my Albinus word that I'll do better tomorrow. I promise.

Just as long as I don't fuck up my egg.