Dear Reader,

If you hate this blog, please know that it is mandatory for my poetry class. If you like it, please send me words of affirmation so that I feel less insecure about it.

My name is Allie Rubenstein. I grew up in a small suburb in Westchester, New York, where I attended public school with mostly Jews who fell short in both height and athletics.

Now a senior in college, I have been assigned by my professor the daunting task to blog about my daily observations. And so it begins with the only noteworthy observation of today: bacon in my bagel.

This morning, I woke up excited—giddy, even—to dive into the day with a winning, optimistic attitude and a newfound faith in humanity. I brushed my teeth with purposeful vigor and embraced the sting of Listerine on my tired tongue. I believed in the world. It believed in me.

Or so I thought. How naive we twenty-somethings can be, scrubbing and gargling without a care in the world, blinded by the dimness of our poorly lit apartments to the harsh truths of reality.

I wiped my mouth with my forearm and smiled at my reflection in the mirror like a doofus. I drew a thick black line along each of my inner eyelids and marched out the door to breakfast to the beat of “Bad Blood” (the part when Zendaya chucks a knife at a teddy bear in order to pin it to the wall).

I’ll skip ahead to the punchline that I’ve already told you and named this blog after. I should, however, preface by saying that I am an avid bagel consumer. I eat an abnormal amount of bagels. I wake up craving their doughy goodness, and this morning was no exception. So after ordering my usual egg and cheese on an everything bagel, I was dismayed to unwrap my sandwich and find, peeking through the center hole, the late Wilbur himself.

Kosher as I am, I couldn’t eat the pork. And Jewish as I am, I had to say something about it. I walked hesitantly back to the counter, this time to the beat of Buckcherry’s “Sorry”, and explained the bacon mishap. The chef was apologetic and whipped me up a new bagel. It was not great, to be honest. The egg was chewy and the bagel wasn’t.

So there you have it. An anticlimactic story with a mediocre ending, also known as real life.

Stay with me for more random observations and anything else I feel like saying to no one in particular.

Yours truly,

A girl who will never bring home the bacon.