How you eat bagels

You walk into your kitchen and grab a bag of bagels. You uncurl a folded paper lunch bag that you were too lazy to properly seal and grab a hard-shelled bagel with your un-moisturized morning hands. Shifting your callused bagel to a chopping board nearby, you think to yourself, “man, next time I really will seal this bag.” You won’t.

You grip the hard bagel conservatively, hoping a knife slip won’t send you on a bagel-induced trip to the ER. You hack away with your bread knife, a hint of superiority edging into your brain because you’re using a bread knife for bread. Look at you.

You lock on to your toaster: a cesspool kitchen appliance housing years of nuked crumbs. If you’re reading this you’re probably not exceedingly wealthy, so your toaster has 2 slots instead of the Bezos 4.

Your sliced bagels make a metallic chickchick sound as they’re plopped in. By now, you don’t even play with the toaster settings. You set them a fortnight ago and whatever your toaster shits out now is good enough.

Once you start the toaster, you linger for a few moments. Maybe you’ll stand still — unstimulated — waiting for the toaster to finish. Nah. Years of TikTok have melted your brain, so you can’t. You go to your living room and turn on the TV. It’s 6am and it’s cold, but watching Youtube on your Smart TV takes priority because being bored is not an option.

The toaster *pops*.

You walk back with a tinge of optimism. Maybe your bagel has the perfect toast. It’s slightly burnt. The edges are black and you know it’s carcinogenic but it tastes too good. Let’s talk in 30 years.

You grab the cream cheese out of the fridge in a quick swoop, because that’s the one item you can always find blindfolded. I don’t make the rules.

With cream cheese in hand, you realize there’s no butter knife. Fumbling to grab one, the actual cream cheese application is an afterthought. It’s sloppily applied, but after the first couple massive dollops you ask yourself, “what about the calories?” Excess cream cheese on knife, you angle it up and swipe sideways to leave all the extra cheese helplessly latched to the upper lip of the plastic cheese tub. The leftover cheese has black burnt specks, so everyone knows what you did.

Bagel masterpiece in hand, you delicately walk over to your couch.

Did you put the cream cheese back in the fridge? FU—