When Do We Eat?

Things were simpler back when I was in school for many reasons. Success then was predicated on passing spelling tests and sitting for lessons. It was also simpler due to the arrangement of meals. I then ate breakfast at perhaps 7 or 7:30- somewhere around then. Off to school I would go, absorbing knowledge for the next several hours. Lunch was at noon and lasted an hour. That was chiseled in stone. There would be a few more hours of classes, and then I would return home in mid-afternoon. There might or might not be some nature of snack at that time. Dinner would invariably be later in the evening, with the whole family assembled at the table (and later before the TV. Even we succumbed to that). Perhaps something like 8 in the evening would be a typical dinner. I was fine with all of that, for the reason that I didn't have to expend energy deciding it myself.

Today I am an adult, if the government and my creditors are to be believed. I certainly live with a modicum of independence these days, and so now I must be the one to determine my meal times. Naturally I would just go with what I always have, except that circumstances don't allow that on a consistent basis. I don't get up at the same hour I did then. Often it's an hour or so later, and sometimes several hours earlier. That throws a wrench into things from the start. It seems to me that the meal times should be at those fixed times, but failing that, they should be spaced out by that amount of time which they are at those times. Thus lunch probably ought to be some five hours after breakfast, with dinner then coming around eight hours after that.

In practice that does not seem to work out so well. I have breakfast immediately after I shower. If I get up at 9 o'clock, then that means that I should have lunch at 2:30. That feels awfully late for lunch, although it would seem just right if I avoided clocks. Would that be the case also for dinner? If lunch is at 2:30, then dinner ought to be at 10:30. Actually, that doesn't sound all bad. I just might be able to accept all that, except that even that scheduling of things cannot weather the constant changes to my schedule. As I said, sometimes I'm up late in the morning, and sometimes I'm up before the newspapers are delivered. That leaves me off-balance most days. I'd like to keep a consistent schedule, but how am I to do some when I have to be somewhere at 7:30 in the morning some days and am only heading home at midnight others?

I wonder if the solution isn't to see whether I'm already too old for the space program. I understand that the effects of life out there make our conventional arrangement of three big meals unworkable. That being the case, they break them up into a larger number of smaller meals, which I understand largely consist of powdered, pressurized ice cream and cheese in tubes. Better still, time as we know it would have little actual meaning away from the Earth's surface. For the sake of Ground Control in Houston we would acknowledge it, but it would play no role in determining when we would eat. Only we could do that, for we would be in charge out there. I will let you know if this pans out for me, in which case I'm sure you'll be glad that I am finally at peace about when to eat.