ir-ration-al.

My freshman year of college, I lived in an oversized dorm room with three other girls, Ashley, Krystal, and Anna. We had a communal system in the kitchen, meaning everyone bought food to stock it and then everyone could eat what they wanted. It was imperfect, but for the most part everyone contributed and consumed evenly.

Anna was kinda anal-retentive. And though I am kinda anal-retentive, she was anal-retentive about things which I was not, and so I saw her as uptight. She got very upset about things like having bread crumbs in the butter. Some days I want to just sneak into her house and stuff a whole loaf of bread into her butter.

But anyway.

At some point, Anna got fed up with the way we as a group were going through breakfast foods, mainly cereal. With four girls eating every day and considering that cereal is a viable dinner food in college, it really was no surprise that the fiber-filled food didn't last long. But apparently Anna was buying a lot of cereal and then not getting to eat much of it herself. So she decided to ration our breakfast foods. She went to the grocery store and bought several boxes of cereal and a bag of bagels. Then she put the bagels in the kitchen and hid the cereal in a box under her bed. She explained that she would get out the cereal after we had first finished the bagels. To her, this was a great idea.

This great idea was colossally stupid in a few ways. First of all, I didn't like bagels. Secondly, even if we are all eating the same breakfast food, the rate of breakfast food consumption does not change (except for me, since I didn't like the bagels). Thirdly, we knew where the hidden cereal was, so the less privacy minded (meaning Krystal) just ate the cereal anyway and put the box back under Anna's bed when she was done.

Seeing that Anna's food ration idea was colossally stupid, I said "Screw it," and went out and bought several boxes of cereal and put them in the kitchen for everyone to eat. Fine, Anna could do what she wanted, but I was going to have cereal when I wanted it. I wasn't going to steal from under her bed, but I wasn't going to eat by her rules either. The next morning, Anna went into the kitchen and poured herself a big bowl of one of my cereals. I really tried to be nice to her, but this was too much. I raised an eyebrow at her and asked, "Shouldn't you be having a bagel?" She only gave me a very defeated look, and I let it go. It was the last we heard of rations.