How Sweet It Is

(September 28, 2002)

Wow, that was one dank & dreary drizzle of a Friday night. To the core of my being I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything that required more than a snuggly sweatshirt, sneakers, and a ponytail, which meant, in effect, stay home. Mmmm, home...what a concept!

Hub called in an order to J & J's for a calzone and a big salad. He is ALL ABOUT calzones, baby. We went to pick up our food, and JUST because I didn't feel like going out at all, of COURSE when we got there, they had misplaced our order or given it to someone else or some such fuck-up, and we had like a half hour to kill. Great.

"I hate the whole idea of 'killing time,'" I moaned. "TIME is PRECIOUS!"

But what could we do. Calzones need time to bake or else the raw dough will give you the shits.

We went to Brooks because I needed some stuff anyway, and made the mistake of walking down the candy aisle. "Spiderman Cotton Candy!" I squealed. How made-for-Lexi is THAT? Spiderman? Good. Cotton Candy? Good. All good! (Haven't actually seen the new movie, though I keep buying movie-merchandise food items of questionable nutritious origin...i.e., total crap that nobody should be eating...)

The candy aisle. Hub ended up with double-fistfuls of colorful confectionary nostalgia: Swedish fish, caramels, candy corn, and butterscotch.

Then we went to Star Market (god help us) because Hub wanted dessert. "Maybe they have banana cream pie!" he said reverently. If you ever want to make friends with Hub, bring him some kind of pie.

"Yeah but," I ventured, "I guess I'm questioning why you need dessert at all, given all the candy we just bought." Like...cotton candy is one thing. Sugary, yes, but no fat, and it's just a tiny bag so it'll be gone in a day...I didn't want a WHOLE PIE in the house. Um, hello, trying to eat right, here? Can we NOT bring bakery items into my direct line of sight?

"Dessert is different," he counters. "That candy is more a keep-around-for-sugar-rush kind of thing. Like, make-a-candy-dish candy, not a dessert item, per se. Except for that candy corn, which I will quickly use to make myself really sick."

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes. Because it sneaks up on you. They're designed for eating a certain way. They have dividing lines that basically say, 'bite here, here, and here.' It's a process. So you're all caught up in the process, and before you know it, you're sick."

"Well, you could just not buy it."

"That's crazy talk. It's basically just, accept that you'll get sick once a year."

I guess I can't say anything about the relative grossness of candy corn. I did just coo and gurgle over a cellophane bag of blue and red spun sugar.

The Spiderman Cotton Candy, by the way, looked exactly like dryer lint. Mmm, dryer lintylicious.