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In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson spends over 11,000 words describing the special cereal-eating ritutal of Randy, the hacker protagonist of the modern thread of the story. It aptly captures the extreme degree of thought a true geek can apply to any situation. An couple of excerpts:

The gold nuggets of Cap’n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds.

And:

Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor-sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap’n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets’ most deadly features against each other.

It’s a nearly stream-of-concious peak inside Randy’s head; a summary of the analysis and energy possible when fixating. When I read the book (and when I re-read it), I identified immediately with the mindset being portrayed, although I had no cereal ritual of my own.

Lately however, I’ve developed a minor cereal fixation, a morning jumpstart as well as a power snack late in the afternoon. While I have yet to apply the fanatical levels of analysis exhibited by Randy, I’ve started drawing some mental parallels to this chapter of the book.

Then I considered the fact that while Randy is obsessed with Cap’n Crunch, my cereal of choice is Frosted Shredded Wheat. Yes, Shredded Wheat. How old am I suddenly feeling?

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