New Years Resolutions and Grilled Cheese

So I think that somewhere there is a date where "they" say that most people stop with their New Year's Resolutions.  I googled it and didn't see anything on the first page, so I gave up and all I can tell you is that the average was about halfway into February, I think.  I think that sounds about generous for most of my past resolutions.  Most of mine make it to about January 12th before I forget I made them.
I do much better in Lent.  In high school, for example, I gave up boys for 40 days.  That's hard for a teenage girl!  Many times I've given up meat, that one tends to be sort of fun, you can act superior to people and it's a great excuse to eat two large servings of fries and a frosty instead of a spicy chicken sandwich combo.  I know I've given up alcohol before, that's another good one for acting smug.  But anyway, back to New Years.
My New Years Resolution this year was to eat more cheese and then keep up with a blog about it.  I did three posts then I forgot about it for a week.  I think, actually, that there's also a statistic somewhere about how long people generally remember to keep up with their blogs.  It's longer than two weeks though, I can tell you that much.  Anyway, I'm trying really hard not to permanently forget about this blog, and I've been paying more attention to the cheese  in my life but the truth is that I just haven't had any cheese for a couple of days!  Today at Lizard's Thicket, my friend's kid had a grilled cheese and it looked so good, but I had a BLT instead because I made a bad choice.  Not that there was anything wrong with the BLT, it just wasn't cheesy.  I felt like I missed a serious opportunity to write about grilled cheese.
On the other hand, how many grilled cheese memories do I have stored away in my taste memory bank?  I know what a grilled cheese tastes like.  It tastes like lunch, it tastes greasy and salty and creamy and crumbly.  I can look at a grilled cheese and know almost exactly what it will taste like.  Predictable but never unwelcome.
I remember grilled cheeses that my mom used to make, on 9 grain bread, slathered in real butter with real cheddar, which almost never melted all the way.  I used to love it as a kid, of course, and would ask for "girl cheese," (which only girls ate while boys ate "boy cheese.")
Then there were the grilled cheeses we ate in Estonia, when I studied abroad.  We got semi-dense white bread from the corner store, and butter, and these processed cheese slices that weren't really "American cheese" but weren't any sort of real cheese either.  We ate them by the dozen, dipped in Heinz ketchup because it was the only thing in Estonia that tasted exactly as it did in the States.  Even tomatoes tasted European.
One game night in our little jewel box apartment in Raleigh, Steve made grilled cheese to order for a dozen people with muenster, swiss, cheddar, or mozzarella, (plus tomato and onion, if you wanted it) on bread from a delicious French bakery in Cary.  He made tomato soup, too, with heavy cream and butter, and had a toppings bar with roasted garlic and grated cheeses and sour cream.  It was incredible.
In college, I ate grilled cheese all the time in the cafeteria, it was the only thing on the grill that didn't look dreadful, and it was predictable and perfect every time.  Enough grease to feel like I was being irresponsible in eating it but not enough to make me stop.  I could dip it in soup or mustard or just eat it by itself whilst sitting in the side room off the cafeteria where all the dorky music kids ate together.

The grilled cheese that was eaten today by my friend's 12 year old was on Texas Toast.  The cheese was two slices of American and the bread was soaked in butter.  It was sliced diagonally and when he separated the halves, some of the bread wasn't cut all the way through so it tore, showed even more of the slick yellow-orange expanse of cheese at the center of the sandwich.  He ate it all and I know what every bite tasted like but I was still so jealous of that grilled cheese.