Cinna-licious

You know how if you're with a group of people, there's always one idiot who will accept any dare just to prove his manliness, or something? I'm proud to say that I am that idiot, and I feel compelled to share a story from this Labor Day, in case anyone else is ever dared to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon in the future.

We went to a party at my brother's house, and one of the guys got a nasty case of hiccups. Someone -- I think it was actually Mrs. Smoot -- suggested that if he would eat a spoonful of sugar, it would cure the hiccups. And oddly enough, it worked.

This led to a conversation about how it's allegedly impossible to eat a spoonful of cinnamon. This sounded pretty stupid to me; it's just cinnamon, right? Quick as a flash, my brother lovingly rushed into his house and emerged with a nice, heaping spoonful of cinnamon for me so that I could disprove this theory.

Well, let me share with you exactly what happens if you attempt to eat cinnamon by the spoonful. As you're putting the spoon into your mouth, before any cinnamon even hits your tongue, some of the cinnamon molecules get sucked up into the nose, causing a sudden, alarming burning sensation. By this time, it's already too late to abort the whole thing because you have already sucked the whole load of cinnamon off the spoon and into your mouth, all to the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd.

Then things get really terrible. Some of the cinnamon sticks to the roof of the mouth and onto the tongue, and the rest just sits there like a bunch of sand in the mouth. And you can't really inhale, because the cinnamon gets sucked into your lungs and burns like a mother. And if you laugh or breathe out, you wind up coughing a huge cloud of cinnamon into the air, looking like Puff the Magic Cinnamon Dragon or something.

Of course at this point everyone is laughing to the point of peeing themselves, while I'm trying to determine whether this is going to cause permanent respiratory damage, or perhaps merely be fatal. And all the while, I'm shooting these big puffs of cinnamon into the air to the delight of the crowd.

Then, long after everyone else has gone home and forgotten about the whole thing, I am learning that everything now smells like cinnamon, and this continues to be the case for several days.

On the plus side, I was reading that cinnamon has numerous health benefits, including enhancing memory skills. Hopefully my brain will use this ability to remember that eating cinnamon by the spoonful is just a pretty bad idea.