On chocolate and my latest male obsession

How YOU doin'?

I’m having trouble staying awake because I just ate half a pan of Ghirardelli brownies, dark chocolate with chocolate chips. There. I did it. I put it out there.

I admit it. I am a brownie addict. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it either. It’s not like my addiction interferes with my job or my social life or my family. I just can’t keep pastries, like brownies, in the house, because once I start eating them, I can’t stop until they are gone. 

But I can go days, weeks, months, okay maybe a week and a half, before my craving for cocoa, sugar, and flour overtakes me. I can and do live for days at a time on an ascetic diet of egg whites, fruit, the occasional almond. But then I’ll see an ad for cupcakes, or I’ll get a whiff of something dark and sensuous when I’m out and about.  The taste buds waken, the mouth starts watering, and suddenly, I’m standing in the bakery aisle at Shaw’s, trying to decide between the pedestrian Duncan Hines stuff on sale, or my gloriously decadent Ghirardelli. 

I know what happened today. I misjudged my willpower. 

I had a decent breakfast – a homemade fruit salad of cantaloupe, strawberries and red grapes, and two pieces of weight watchers whole wheat toast topped with just a smidgen of peanut butter. Then I went to hang with my mother while she received her weekly dose of gemcitabine. We’re both sitting in her little curtained nook, quietly reading our books, minding our own business. The intravenous pump is doing its sainted job, shooting poison into my mother’s veins – Die cancer die is what I keep thinking --  – and the kind nursing staff keeps stopping in to ask us if we’d like a snack. 

Well, I am only human.  Plus, my book is boring. I start thinking about what this snack could be, and my brain calls up chocolate in all its nefariously delightful forms: cookies, brownies, cakes. And that’s when I realize I hadn’t eaten enough that morning to get me safely to mid-afternoon.

  

I shrug it off because I’ll be home by three and I have plenty of fruit salad in the fridge. I make a plan to head right to the fruit salad when I get home. Though I do need to stop at the store for milk. That could be dangerous. I wonder if I have enough willpower to ride out this hunger storm.

I head into Shaw’s and my brain tells me to head left to the dairy aisle but my body drags me, a woman possessed,  in the other direction, past the crackers, the coffee, the on-sale cereal, to my destiny my downfall, the bakery aisle.  Next thing I know, I’m in my kitchen, pouring the mix into a bowl.  

I could tell you how I started scooping up the little balls of powdery yumminess as they fell from the box, and plopped them into my mouth with much abandon, or how I kept sampling the wet mix, tablespoon at a time,  just in case it needed more oil. I could detail how sloppily I scraped the mix into the pan to ensure there’d be a generous amount left in the bowl for me to feast on while I waited for the delectable mess to bake.  No. Some things are sacrosanct. The bond between me and my chocolate needs to stay intimate and inviolable and mysterious.

    

Now I would really love a nap, but unfortunately I’ve had another lapse so to speak, and I need to go and bake more brownies, metaphorically I mean.  Last week I renegotiated my cable/phone/internet contract and now I have a bazillion new stations and much to explore. 

Here’s how that all went, sort of:

Me: Are you people trying to kill me? Why did my bill double?  

Charter person: Oh. We can fix that. It’s just that your contract is up for renewal.  We can give you a new contract, and save you ten bucks a month.  Oh. I see you don’t have HBO or hardly any other neato channels like normal people. Would you like to upgrade to this century? It will only cost ten bucks more a month. 

Me: Huh. I rarely watch television because instead I’m usually too busy making fun of people who watch television. But this seems like a good deal and Weeds the best show ever is ending in a few weeks and then I’ll need something to fill the gap besides chocolate.  So, um yeah. Okay.

Long story short: I’ve discovered Game of Thrones and am only halfway through season one. I have a lot of catching up to do.  No napping for me. Peter Dinklage is waiting. Yum.