Chocolate is both a Vegetable and a Dessert.

(Pre-Script: This post will satisfy your appetite for that which you hunger if you read it as the song, "Going the Distance," by Cake, #53 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. * I'll wait...) (...still waiting...)

Like so many of you, I live in a state of perpetual frustration. Don't everyone break out in gigantic sobs at once. It's just that I would love to be invited over to someone's house for dinner, arrive, and have them say, "Guess what, we're having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner." But no one would ever does that. No one would ever do that. Instead, they decide it would be better to wear themselves out cooking some variation of a meat next to a vegetable medley on a plate. I married Derek, the King of Vegetable Medley Eaters, (0r, DtKVME) so at least he's got the whole "if someone invites us over for dinner" thing going for him. They neglected to take into account the fact that I hate the vegetable medley with a fierce passion, so I have to sit there and figure out creative ways to shift my vegetables around so no one notices my shunning of the dish... Or, better yet, a way to push my portion onto Derek's plate, and hope that he scarfed his down fast enough that the host will not notice, but will only think, by Derek's lack of knowing how to take bite sized bites, and my slight of hand and deft speediness at vegetable plate transfer, that I was in fact the one who scarfed down my vegetable medley with all the grace and agility of a speed skater on oiled ice with a slightly downward slope.

Blink

Blink

"Don't blink or you'll miss it."

blink

"Wanna see it again?"

Then the host might look at me, famished as I am from only eating the smallish portion of meat that I was able to chew and gnaw to swallowable size and consistency, see my emaciated facial features and say,

"You must have really loved those vegetables. Would you like some more?"

To which I will swooningly say in an understated manner,

"No thank you; I am saving room for dessert."

At this point, Derek usually looks at me with an expression of,

"How can you be thinking about dessert at a time like this?!? I am still contemplating a third helping of the vegetable medley, but first I must tell a really long, drawn out, detailed story about the inner workings of a gizmo which you have heard in painful detail already every other 79 times someone invited us over for dinner."

sigh.

When at last the gracious host brings out dessert, it will be served on a tiny dish. In tiny portions. Microscopic, even. It might even just be a sorbet with fresh berries on top. I don't know who decided to move the fruit from the main meal course to the dessert course, but let's be clear: I was never fooled.

Blink

Blink

It doesn't really matter if the host serves warm brownies, soft chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, fudge. Just give me chocolate. Give me ice cream. Give me cakedy cakness, and frosting, frosting, frosting! For I do a lot of exercising, and run a lot of miles, just to be able to indulge in dessert. But after the initial microscopic dessert plate, including the metal rim, (just in case a taste of sweetness got stuck there, and was missed by my teeny tiny spoon) has been licked clean, I find that 99.7% of hosts do not offer seconds.

Blink.

Now stop right there, go back and recall with me, if you will, the reaction the host has to my hasty excavation of the vegetables, namely the part where he or she assumes I want more, and offers it to me, hardly taking my repeated "no's" without things turning to almost physical blows...Almost.

Yes, there is an inconsistency here, some plot to destroy me. Derek does nothing to further my cause, for two bites into his dessert, he pushes his dish away and says "Oh, man, I'm so full." Blink.
"MAN, that broccoli was PERFECT! Michelle, you should get that recipe."

Blink.

*no comment on if I got that recipe or not.*

Blink.

"Um, Excuse me, Michelle,"

my Dear Imaginary Reader is thinking,

"...but aren't you being a bit ungrateful? You sound like such a *045#$*%)!!!! right now!"

Dear Imaginary Reader, I can see why you would think this, but I'm afraid you have mistaken my one tone of voice for my OTHER tone of voice. I am not ungrateful, I am merely suggesting that the people inviting us over need not go to so much work.

"Oh, now I understand. Carry on."

Thank you.

Ahem.

So in short, Darlings, it's just what I told my Imaginary Reader just now. Don't wear yourselves out so much. Just break out the P.B and J's already.

In the meantime, Derek thinks he died and went to Vegetable Medley Heaven.

You see what I go through?

-XOXO,

*All claims made in the Pre-Script are purely hypothetical, 64% of the time.