As I’ve mentioned about a million times, we’re selling our house. (See it on Zillow here, but don’t be put off by the gazillion pictures. Our realtor just added pictures instead of replacing them.) One little thing you can do to make your visitors feel welcome is to put out a dish of candy. (A dish of poison, in other words.) So there I was last Friday at Office Depot buying some more signs to put up for our open houses, plural, over the weekend, and decided to buy a bag of individually-wrapped candies to put out. Now, let’s see—there were those beautiful Hershey’s mini chocolate bars, really good stuff in classy gold and silver wrappers. I considered those. And then I saw a bag of those little Reese’s peanut-butter cups.Not the regular-size ones. The little ones, the ones that have exactly the right ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.. The same exact ones that used to cost two cents apiece back when I was in college, so a dozen of them came out to exactly a quarter since there was a penny tax. Yes, those. (They cost a lot more than two cents now, let me tell you.) I used to buy a dozen and eat them all at once. The only thing better than a mini peanut-butter cup is something called a Peanut Butter Smoothie, which a company called Boyer’s still makes and which is indescribably delicious. Wonderful as chocolate and peanut butter is, butterscotch and peanut butter is even more so. They didn’t have the smoothies very often, but when they did, boy, did I take advantage of them! (If I wanted them today I’d have to order them online, so that’s at least somewhat of a safeguard. The picture is from a candy company website.)
You know where this is going, don’t you? Because I did the same thing back at the March reception for the Chorale when the woman in charge asked, “Do you want to take this candy home with you?” and there were lots of p-b cups in the mix, and I said “yes.” (Did I tell that story already?) I always think,’Oh, I’ll just eat a few here and there as a special treat.’ Ha. As I stood there in Office Depot I knew perfectly well what was going to happen to those darling little things. And I bought them anyway. A very, very few made their way into the mouths of open house visitors, but a great many of them made their way into my mouth. I would tell myself that I wasn’t going to eat any, right up until the moment when I did, thus sabotaging both my weight-loss goal and my stay-off-the-sugar goal, I’d feel terrible afterwards, but the next day I’d give in to the temptation once again. Jim and Gideon aren’t all that interested in them; they’re more into ice cream, which I don’t have much of a problem resisting. So today I did what I considered doing yesterday, which was to throw the rest of the bag away. I had tried putting them in the freezer, but of course they’re very good frozen! Even I’m not so addicted, though, that I’m going to go dig them out of the smelly trash can out in the garage.
What’s the point of all this self-flagellation? Just a recognition of how we humans put ourselves in harm’s way by making what has been called the “apparently irrelevant decision,” a phrase that’s used in studies of addictive behavior. The addict (in this case, me—although I’m not making light of addictions to the really bad stuff) rationalizes the behavior that he or she knows is risky. We’re very, very good at fooling ourselves. And of course we know perfectly well what we’re doing—we’re choosing to ignore the little voice at the back of our minds that’s telling us the truth.
While I was writing this post I thought about the waves of utter contempt that Vice President Mike Pence has brought down on himself recently by his public iteration of the rules he and his wife have set up for themselves in order to safeguard their marriage. He doesn’t eat a meal alone with another woman and he doesn’t attend events where alcohol is served unless she’s with him. Perfectly reasonable, it seems to me. And that memory brought up another one, this time about David and Nancy French and the rules they set for the time that David was deployed in Iraq. (I’ve quoted a number of articles by David French over on my Facebook page; he’s an excellent conservative writer.) Nancy stayed off social media and didn’t have any deep conversations with other men. Neither drank. They both recognized that human nature is frail. It’s not a matter of trust so much as it is a matter of realism. This is how affairs start, so we’ll avoid those situations and thus never give infidelity a chance.
Which brings me back to the peanut butter cups. They’re a small reminder of a great truth: You can’t succumb to temptation if it’s not available. I can’t eat the treats if they’re not around. I can’t conjure them out of thin air. If (as I’ve said many times before) I exercise three seconds of restraint at the store and don’t buy the candy, then I can’t eat it because I don’t have it. (“Walk on By,” as Dionne Warwick would say, or sing.)
Well! This started out as a short, lighthearted post about my Reese’s peanut-butter cup addiction and seems to have morphed into something deeper. How about you? What apparently irrelevant decisions have you made recently that have gotten you into trouble, whether it be large or small?