I can’t imagine anyone thinking oatmeal isn’t a hot cereal. I like it, but don’t generally make it for myself. The last time i had it was… Actually, maybe it was less than a month ago, and i should go change my vote. But i don’t have it very often because I’m to lazy to cook before I’ve had my breakfast. When someone else is cooking my breakfast i often have oatmeal, though.
I like chopsticks. I own several sets, and i routinely use them at home with Chinese-style food, (which we often make) and with Chinese and Japanese takeout. I like the precision of chopsticks. I like the way they feel, and the way they encourage me to interact with my food. They obviously work better with chunks of chicken in ginger& scallion sauce than they do with a steak, or a stew, or an egg over easy on toast. So i don’t use them every day. But i use them whenever the food is suitable for them.
(Yes, I’m of European descent. But my father liked Chinese food and started encouraging me to use chopsticks when i was about 7. So I grew up with them.)
I guess chopsticks are like an extension of my hands, but my hands are rubbish.
If chopsticks are what’s on the table, I’ll do my best, and I’ll probably manage OK, though awkwardly. If they’re actively offered as an option, I’ll probably eat at least part of the meal with them, mostly to get the practice. Voted not great, but I’ll use them.
I like oatmeal, especially slow cooked overnight steel cut oats, but I haven’t had it in roughly a year.
Because it’s a bit of a pain to clean up, and I normally end up making enough that by the end of the batch, I’m tired of it.
I used to eat a lot of instant oatmeal, because it was fast, and… okay, and tasty enough, but had so much sugar that I eventually wrote it out of my diet. Sure they’re other, less sugar heavy options, but they’re harder to get, more expensive, and without the sugar and other flavors to cover it up, you start getting into the weakness of flavor that tends to be intrinsic to rolled oats, especially if par-cooked to add to the ‘instant’ descriptor.
So yeah, it’s just seriously infrequent, especially when I’m not really big into eating breakfast most of the time, which is, on average only a couple of times a month.
I will use chopsticks on anything but soup, and sometimes that (if you consider ramen “soup.”) It freaks the students who eat lunch in my room when they see me eat a salad with them. Amazingly useful, they are. They also force you to eat slower and to eat smaller bites, both of which not only enhance the dining experience but get you to eat less as well. Want to make major strides against obesity in this country? Ban forks!
Never use chopsticks. I don’t see the point. The fork has been invented.
I can use chopsticks with big stuff, like sushi, but not well. It’s embarrassing for me to try using them for noodles or precise maneuvering. I suspect that a ban on forks would cause me to learn faster than I have until now.
For cereal poll, I tend to alternate muesli, oatmeal, and an egg breakfast depending on what is coming up during the day. Sometimes, the oatmeal can also be the egg breakfast as I eat oatmeal hot, cold, sweet or savory depending on what other ingredients I have available.
For the transcriber service, I voted that I would probably just finish the work myself, but that depends on the value of my time versus how quickly the person I hired is getting it done and whether or not I need this to happen soon, if at all.
Just for kicks, I decided to try eating the mango I just cut up with chopsticks, rather than with a fork. Mango is slippery, and it took me a couple minutes to get the hang of it. But after that it went smoothly, as smoothly as it would have gone with a fork. It did force me to actually look at each piece as I snagged it. I think that enhances my enjoyment of the food, though.
I recall seeing a thing where a particular gastrophile (of whom we no longer speak) was talking to a Chinese chef, who said that, yes, they have knives and forks, which, in a civilized culture, belong in the kitchen.
I’ve received Pell grants and Medicaid. After I legally emancipated at age 17 I was on my own to pay for the majority of my expenses and I required Medicaid. I got Pell grants for undergraduate school but they didn’t go all that far, it was a very expensive college (fortunately I had scholarships.) I remember Medicaid bumping me off the rolls a lot and always having to reapply. I can’t remember how I transitioned off Medicaid but I got married at age 23 and I’ve had my husband’s insurance ever since. So I was either insured with Medicaid or not insured at all back then.
Well put - there’s something very personal & tactile about using chopsticks. We have several sets as well.
If it’s warmer than room temperature, it’s a hot cereal 
I have met a whole lot of people who don’t like oatmeal
Every meal growing up was about 50/50 “Chinese” or “American,” which determined how to set the table. Bowls and chopsticks, or plates and forks, respectively. I’m confident I’ve mastered chopsticks. I can definitely pick up wet Jell-O.
(Although the way most “real” Chinese people eat rice and other such things that seem troublesome for chopsticks is to just bring the bowl up to your mouth and scoop it in; that’s a perfectly acceptable and even the expected technique if you’re among other Chinese. I may or may not do it in front of non-Asians, even though, ironically, I’m most likely to be judged for it by other Asians.)
I think I will make some oatmeal tomorrow and eat it with chopsticks.
I was thinking maybe people felt cereal is stuff like Cheerios and Cap’ Crunch and were figuring that hot cereal meant heating a bowl of that in the microwave.
I’m lazy too. For me, oatmeal means instant oatmeal. Add water and heat in the microwave.
You know, like a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
That should keep you busy right through lunchtime.
Not only do I have an internal monologue, but I remember clearly the night it permanently took over my head.
I was a very small child. I was lying in bed thinking about something or other, and I decided that I wanted to go to sleep. So I tried to shut off the words in my head, in order to go to sleep; something I must have been able to do, and have been in the habit of doing for some time, because it utterly freaked me out when the words. would. not. stop.
I could change what the words were, but my mind wouldn’t stop producing some words or other; the best I could do was to start counting instead of thinking about something more specific. I was trying so hard to shut off the stream that I was holding my breath. I woke up my older sister, who was sleeping in the same room, crying ‘I can’t breathe unless I think one two! I can’t breathe unless I think one two!’
At this utterly incoherent attempt to explain the problem my sister said ‘Well think one two then, and let me go back to sleep!’ and did so. (Not surprisingly, when I asked her about this years later she didn’t remember it.)
I got to sleep eventually. But I haven’t been able to shut the words off since; except I think while actually sleeping, though it’s hard to tell.
I don’t, however, have vivid mental imagery, at least if that means what I think it does. I apparently don’t have any at all. I thought until recently that seeing something in the “mind’s eye” was a metaphor; and I still don’t understand how, if people are actually seeing something when they imagine it, they tell that from seeing something with their actual eyes.
ETA: My life is being narrated by me! (not surprisingly, I’m not on the suggested list. “Somebody else” is, though.)
I studied a foreign language many years ago and my internal dialog became bilingual for a while. More recently, I learned some Cantonese, because there were a lot of Chinese people at work (who spoke that dialect), and it happened again.