My Milk Manifesto

I love milk. There is perhaps no truer fact in all of the world than this. I drink it almost exclusively every day. I can drink a gallon in a day if I am thirsty enough and so inclined as to drink it. Milk is the first thing I drink every morning and the last thing I drink before bed. There is little comfort in any drink other than milk.


And, for me, there is only one kind of milk: whole. Whole milk is delicious. Drinking whole milk is like lapping at a pool of heavenly dessert in liquid form. I never tire of milk's opaque goodness. Though, in these desperate times, I've relented and bought other milks because they were on sale.

My love for milk is so true, I've decided to pen a poem in its honor:

Oh milk, your snowy gaze does catch my eye
You rest above where my eggs do lie
A Day apart, I fear, brings dismal days
An eternal milk pool for which I pray
Will keep my milk monster at bay

Milk, aside from being delicious on its own, is rather versatile to boot. When added to cereal, one can sometimes hear the cereal speak to you. Added to coffee it takes is from an awful abyss of blackness to a cool brown in addition to making the coffee taste better. Milk is vital in baking, and I pretty much substitute is for anything anytime a recipe calls for water. (Except in bread and recipes where it matters.) Meatballs have a creamy texture with milk instead of water. Hot cocoa without milk is a travesty and shouldn't even be considered cocoa when made with water.

You can even get milk from animals other than cattle:

Milk can be flavored with chocolate, strawberry, and maybe lots of other flavors. Maybe hazelnut, or chocolate hazelnut would be yummy. Maybe someone could make a berry milk, too.

Milk goes into ice cream (though cream is the majority), sherbet, and gelato. Milk helps create a milkshake by lending more than just its name.

Some people bathe with it, though I can't imagine wasting that much milk for non-drinking purposes.

Annie Leibovitz took a pretty famous photo of Whoopi Goldberg in a milk-filled tub for the cover of Rolling Stone.

If I could, I think I'd like to drink milk this way, can upon can into milk cans. Though, I think that is even too much milk for me, not that I wouldn't mind trying to drink it all. =)

There is much more to be said about my love of milk and other dairy products, but for now this is where I leave you.

An Old Poem I Wrote

A Breath of Spring

Whereby you’re gone, a summer’s sigh;

When will this break become undone.

This day, so soon, I hope to come;

Another time to see you nigh.

A star struck visit here or there,

Could never satiate this burdened heart.

You’ll be my center, my twilight mare;

This awkward path—no longer dark.

This waking love had never shone;

A parenthesis ne’er stands alone.

—Dennis Maksymiw

I wrote this while I was in college for some random required class. Well, it wasn't a class per se. It was this weird required mini class they had all freshman do. We'd get into groups, talk, get to know each other, and have these mini assignments. For the life of me I can't remember anything from it except the room it was in and that one person wanted to be an astronomy major, but wasn't. (I went to an engineering school).

I remember that this poem got entered into a poetry book. I don't think it's special though because I feel like they invited a lot of poems in. They tried to get me to go to Florida and get some award or trophy thing, too. It seemed scammy, though, like the Who's Who of American College Students thing where you pay $60 and they send you a book with your picture, and the pictures of 5,000 other kids in it. Needless to say I didn't go, but I did let them use my poem. It was fun, though.

For a long time my poem was viewable on the internet on poetry.com, or something. Unfortunately, the website was bought out by some big company and it's no longer there. But I found it in my e-mail and I thought it'd be fun to post and share it. I like it, it's kind of funny, but sweet. If I recall, I wrote it fairly quickly, and I was quite pleased that I was able to use the word parenthesis.

In high school, my freshman year, I had a project for English class. I remember I wrote a bunch of poems (I wrote a lot back in the day), and I remember designing the whole thing in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. I really would like to find that one day because I have a feeling it was atrociously designed. I didn't know what I was doing, and it would be really funny to see. More importantly though I'd like to see the poems. If I were to find them in my mom's house, it would be like finding a treasure. I think I may know where they are, but I don't know where anything is anymore because my mom moved.

It would just be fun to see them, though.

Oh, and I got an A.