Love In the Time of Chocolate

There’s a candy shop in the skyway that sells edible underwear. Chocolate to be precise. It sits in the window day after day. It was still sitting there on Valentine’s Day. It’s still sitting there today. Which got me to wondering—does anyone make a habit out of chocolate underwear?

In an unscientific poll I conducted at work on Valentine’s Day, not a single one of my randy colleagues, most in their romantic prime, would cop to having been involved in a dessert (or main course) of a chocolate thong. No one had even considered it, they said, preferring flowers, Jane Austen DVDs, and jewelry. No one could even tell me how chocolate underwear functioned.

I mean, how is the chocolate held together—mesh, string, carrageenan? At room temperature, chocolate lacks tactile flexibility, and at body temperature, it lacks rigidity. I thought about buying a pair to investigate further, but after checking with accounting, only certain key executives here are authorized to expense “romantic gifts” (expense code 0270/617).

Now, I’m not as squeamish as some, not as open-minded as others, but chocolate underwear befuddles me. I mean, you have to really want to eat a lot of chocolate to do a pair of chocolate boxers. And if you’re only concerned about certain strategic components, that means there’s a bunch of half-melted chocolate on the bed. (What about the office guys/gals who wear it to work in hopes of a lunch-hour encounter? What do you say to the dry cleaner the next day?)

So I say to you: Share your chocolate-underwear stories, advice, neurotic fiction with us. Chime in under an assumed name, like you do on all the other websites you comment to. Discretion is assured.

And after you share your chocolate underwear story with us, if it was from Valentine’s Day 2008, keep in mind that though you and your chocoholic partner might not mind a bed that smells like Hershey, Pennsylvania, the remains of your romp could be curtains for Fido. So change the sheets.

My Compact: Denial Is Not Virtue

We are a nation of fanatics. How can one conclude anything else? We have to turn everything into a religion. Osama would be proud.

Consider the acolytes of the Compact, an anti-materialist venture that requires its adherents to buy nothing new for a year. (Does Internet porn count? A friend was wondering.)

One of the Compacters the Strib quoted yesterday said the $1 bins at Target she once loved now “repulsed” her. That bin filled my kids’ stockings last month I’d have her know. And she’s still buying diapers (our kids used cloth; think of the water we wasted).

It takes goofy ventures such as the Compact (or this silly young family in NYC that is going without petroleum or its offshoots for a year—no deodorant) to illustrate why liberals seem so feckless to the rest of the country.

I mean, isn’t it enough to recycle, take public transit now and then, trade in your SUV, compost, recycle your feces into handy tools and implements . . .? Sorry, got carried away—I have liberal leanings.

And I’m in the media, who are fellow travelers. The press, by and large, hates consumerism—though it’s what pays its bills. The Strib is going to follow these Compactors for a year, mind you. So it can revel in their self-denial and sense of righteousness. So it can feel righteous, too!

Throughout the years, I’ve tried to divine the contempt that so many of my peers in the local media feel for the magazine I work for. We don’t hurt anyone, we don’t take cheap shots, tear anything down. We build up, we tell stories, we recommend.

I used to think it was because earnest journalists believed that the only form of professional legitimacy was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. (Which we don’t do all that much of here.) But most journalists aren’t that stupid.

What most of them are, though, is addled with contempt for those who don’t share their values. And journalists are offended by the consumerism that lifestyle magazines are rooted in. There’s a kind of proud asceticism in writers and academics though I generally regard it as snobbery rooted in false virtue.

I wish I could go to the other side, but they’re worse albeit less smug. I mean, I’m pissed off that all these greedy bastards in banking and investing created this lending bubble that has got our economy in the tank. Canada’s economy is fine, you’ll note. So is Australia’s. Greed isn’t validated in those societies, and there are more checks and limits on it. And I have no sympathy for the rubes who took out mortgages they didn’t understand either. Own up to your own greed, I say.

There is something about people preoccupied with consumerism to the exclusion of everything else that is chilling. Perhaps it’s the abdication of a sense of responsibility for anything but yourself that nags at me. Whatever. It’s just a different kind of fanaticism. I mean, would it hurt you to read a paper or think about something besides when the next issue of Lucky arrives?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a seat in business class, a 42-inch plasma TV, a trip to New Zealand, an iPhone, and some granite countertops that I have my eyes on. But I am not so distracted by all of it that I’m paying no attention to the world around me.

There is more to life than gratifying yourself and earning more money so you can gratify some more. But why is it that so many of the people who understand that are not people you’d want to have a beer with?

You Are Worth It

I was standing in line to check out at Whole Foods on Saturday and the customer in front of me, a sixty-ish woman, pulled out her pocketbook and remarked to the young dude at the register, “Do those hurt?” She was referring to his dreadlocks.

“Because it hurts me to look at them.”

The guy kept his cool and said something innocuous. She came back with, “They must itch. I wonder what’s in them?” Lice, maggots, Satan?

Now this guy is one of the few Whole Foods register staff who isn’t wearing a “Team Member In Training” button, so I seek his lane out. He’s friendly and does a fine job. And he’s a lot easier to look at than the guy at the Y with the half-dozen rings and studs affixed to his face. (We all draw the line somewhere.)

My three-year-old daughter is what I once heard referred to as a “primary processor”—she says everything she is thinking. But she is three. She will eventually learn that it doesn’t get you anywhere to tell your dad that his breath is bad at 4 a.m. after you roused him from sleep screaming “I NEED HELP” to announce, “I’m hungry.”

Eventually people get the message. For Mrs. Dreadlocks it will be when she finds herself on Block E after seeing Cats at the Pantages, and inquires of the brothers if their asses get cold when their pants hang that low.

Further evidence of the vast American narcissism appeared in Friday’s Wall Street Journal (requires paid subscription). The article described the growing problem at resorts: Boomers insisting on wearing robes well beyond the realm of their bedrooms, the pool, or spa.

It quoted the freakish Lisa Peterson, forty-six, communications director for the American Kennel Club. She said that walking through a resort restaurant in a robe “alerts the world that I am pampering myself because I believe I’m worth it.”

OK, maybe the terrorists do hate us for our freedom.

But I’m no Taliban. I enjoy a bikini or thong as much as the next guy. But anyone who feels the need to “tell the world” anything via their attire needs to spend a little less time thinking about themselves and a little more time trying to make the world a better place. Perspective sometimes needs to come as a slap upside the head.

A couple hours of babysitting at our house would be a good way to start. We pay $10 an hour, because you’re worth it.