Decapitation

On Monday night, I cracked.

The end of the semester is a time for candy, and not just for students. When you’re a student, all the projects and exams and studying and deadlines wear your willpower down so much that the only proper thins to do is to buy great big pounds of peanut butter M&Ms and subsist on them solely as days slip into nights and back again without you really noticing.

I’ve been a student three times, and this has happened every time; what I wasn’t expecting when I went into academia was it would happen again. Every semester I get a little better at resisting. But I’m weak, very weak, when it comes to the things I like, and by the last week of classes I have no willpower at all.

So, on the penultimate day of classes, I went to Staples to pick up six rolls of packing tape for my husband and on the way out, I was confronted with It. Them.

A bag of gummy bears. None of those wussy little ones either: a full pound.

Gummy bears are an important thing to eat at the end of the semester, because they are in the shape of small, cuddly animals who smile at you, and they’re in a rainbow of colors, and they’re chewy and delicious. They taste like congealed juice, which is something primal, something we loved even before we had teeth.

More importantly, you can do what I do: get a bagful, bring them to an endless work meeting of some kind, and methodically bite the heads off them, lining up the bodies in neat rows on your desk. If you do this, nobody will mess with you.

I looked around for a smaller bag, because surely I did not need a pound of gummy bears, I am a grown woman, but I knew how this was going to end before it had even begun.

Reader, I bought it.

It’s already gone.