This is my dessert.
Grocery stores are very strategic in where they place their products. You need fruit because you're a good person and want to try to be somewhat healthy, so you head to the produce. Of course, the apples and bananas are right up front screaming "you can't buy fruit without buying us!!" because of that stupid song they made you sing when you were a kid, even though I was always the frustrated one in the back of the class, holding his hand as high as possible saying "Teacher, what in the world are ooples and ba-new-new's??"
So you get your apples and bananas even though you know the bananas will go brown before you have the chance to eat them all, and you say you'll make banana bread but you never do, and then your wife eventually gets on your case because one day she'll open the fridge and get knocked unconscious from the stench of the three rotting banana-turds sitting in the very back, decaying everything around them.
But then...
...sitting right next to the apples, hidden awkwardly behind the similarly packaged grapes, there sits among the rest one single plastic container filled to the brim with the most radiant, lush strawberries you've ever seen in your entire life. You can't take your eyes of them, and you're pretty sure that just one bite will grant you the knowledge of good and evil. So you take them.
But wait!
Conveniently placed just adjacent to the succulent red morsels of heaven you now hold in your hand, lest they be stolen from your shopping cart and you go to jail for murder over an 8 ounce box of fruit, there sits a package of undressed shortcakes. Individually molded, sitting naked in their plastic prisons, begging to be lavished with strawberries and whipped cream. Thaaat's awkward.
But where's the whipped cream!?
Of course! It's right above the short cakes! Yes, there is a whole whipped cream section in the back of the store, and yes, you can probably find a better deal back there. But it just wouldn't be the same. They must have put this whipped cream here for a reason. It must have been hand-selected because the grocery store people knew that this whipped cream would be the most perfect fit for the strawberry shortcake masterpiece they know you're going to create as soon as you get home.
So you buy the strawberries. You buy the shortcakes. You buy the whipped cream. You buy a jar of maraschino cherries because you think you'll want to put a cherry on top, but when the time comes, you'll actually feel weird about mixing strawberry and cherry in the same culinary venture, even though there's no real reason to believe that it won't turn out even more delicious.
Well, turns out the cakes are dry, the strawberries are soggy and the whipped cream is frozen solid, even though you could've sworn it was in the refrigerated section and not down the frozen aisle with the ice cream treats that never look as good in reality as they do on the front of the boxes in which they're packaged.
The moral of the story: The bigger your eggs are when in Rome, the harder they fall if you keep them in the same basket, as the Romans do. But if you love them you'll let them go, because nobody puts Baby in the corner and there's no crying in baseball. See, when life gives you lemons and the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, you start smashing little kids' lemonade stands. And if you lead a gift horse to water and give it a fish, it will be fed for a day; but if you teach the horse how to fish, you still can't make it drink the water if you look it in the mouth. A penny saved for your thoughts is a penny that earns good luck all day if you find it and pick it up. If you break a mirror while swallowing gum, you'll have seven years of unlucky indigestion. Shoot for the stars; if you don't make it, you're still pretty on the inside and social acceptance is overrated anyway.
I've completely lost track of where I was going with this.
-R.
