I was shopping yesterday for birthday chocolates for Nicola’s dad. He has a passion for chocolate ginger. Nicola and I were talking the other day about how unusual it is for men to jones for chocolate the way some women do — I know it’s gendered of me, but honestly, we couldn’t think of a single guy apart from N’s dad who seriously loves chocolate. All the men I know like pie.
Anyway, as I walked from my car to the chocolate shop, I passed a Young Person’s Clothing Store, the kind of place that if I’d walked in to buy some low-rise jeans the staff would have assumed they were for my daughter. I have made Nicola promise that when I fall over the line into age-inappropriate dressing (which in our house we refer to as “Mutton Dressed As Lamb”), she will tell me even though it will be a nightmare for her.
But today is not that day (grin).
The window of the store carried a large message: “Your voice is more important than your fear.” And rather than thinking deeply about voting, which I think was the intention, I started thinking about the construction of the sentence, and the infinite possibilities of it:
Your ________ is more important than your ________.
How would you fill in the blanks?
Your heart is more important than your schedule.
Your ability to love is more important than your money.
And. . .
Your imagination is more important than your ambition.
What’s interesting to me about this is how much a statement like this says so much about character. You could easily switch the nouns and have very different meanings/
I feel like I want to try to say something meaningful, but it’s 4:30am in Japan right now and I should really be asleep!
I am a man who doesn’t like pie but loves chocolate ice cream but you probably meant pure chocolate. In which case I’m only on board if it has nuts in it. (Ginger and chocolate don’t sound like they should be on the same shelf much less in the same food item).
That doesn’t really modify your “All the guys I know” but if you ever say “guys who’ve read Solitaire”….
Jean, that’s true, but oh, what a conflict sometimes between what must be done and what must be felt, no? Sometimes the pressure of doing is so strong.
Jan, wow, I don’t know what you were thinking when you wrote about love and money, but it’s the phrase “ability to love” that is making me blink and rethink my response. Are we really in that kind of danger, do you think?
I completely agree about imagination and ambition. If only the truly ambitious among us would make space for imagination, they would find it so much easier to realize their goals. Not just imagination for new tricks or better ideas, but the imagination to understand how the people around them are affected. How those people might help if given a chance. Now there’s an act of imagination….
John, I like chocolate pie too! Haven’t had a proper one for ages. In high school we often got Boston Cream Pie (yum), and it certainly seemed to appeal across the gender spectrum!
Ginger and chocolate really do go pretty well together, it turns out. As do figs and chocolate, and caramel with chocolate and grey salt…. oh, and now I’ve sent my entire readership running for the hills (grin). Really, it’s good!
Amy, your sleep is more important than your moment of hipness of this topic, which will in fact return to you tenfold when you have had the sleep. Grin. I hope that Japan is treating you well.
And you’re right. It’s interesting to look at “your fear is more important than your voice” or “your money is more important than your ability to love.” I can’t imagine anyone flying those words like a banner across a shop window, and yet don’t so many of us live as if we do?
My, my.
Your burning pot of ? on the stove is more important whatever else you’re doing!
It’s about priorities. I’m not always good at distinguishing them. hmmm
oops forgot the word “than” in there.
Evecho, yeeps, I still haven’t learned the burning pot lesson. Poor Nicola, I really am a trial to her in that particular way (grin).
I never thought of loving chocolate as gendered. I love chocolate, I would rather it have no nuts in it. On one hand, I am a fag, so that might “explain” it for some people; on the other, being a fag frees me from considerations of gender. Or it should. So strange that people are so given to making everything masculine or feminine; it’s never made any sense to me.
Hi Duncan, nice to see you. I know, I’m embarrassed to have gender notions about anything, but it seems only right to cop to it when I find it. Mostly genderizing doesn’t make sense to me either, but People Who Know Science tell me that some things are biological/chromosomal/brain chemical-ish…. and given the many variations there are on such things, I suppose perhaps it may be true. But I do resist. I am delighted to hear you like chocolate, and I’m with you on the anti-nut front.
I missed the “chocolate” gene. I do eat it sometimes, but I never crave it. I am a vegan so there are fewer opportunities for me to eat it, but I wouldn’t be sad if I never ate it again. Even when I have the choice between vegan german chocolate cake and vegan carrot cake (which happens when we travel to SF to a favorite restaurant), I often take get the carrot cake. I like the chocolate cake, but sometimes it is too much chocolate. How’s that for a thought that makes a lot of folks cringe!
Now, if we were talking about chips (potato, corn, spicy, not spicy, blue corn, which corn, thick potato, thin potato, other vegetable flavors) that would be a whole different thing. I LOVE and crave chips!
Goodness! I couldn’t even start this post without having some chocolate.
I’m an old white guy who loves dark chocolate. And ginger! Last week we went to New York City for the day and visited the Jacques Torres store, so now we have some of his chocolate chips to munch on, in preference to the Ghiradelli chocolate we normally have around the house.
Your (velocity, speed, energy, rate of change) is more important than your (direction, accuracy, correctness), but the way I put that personally is, “When in doubt, accelerate!”.
Nadina, I love chips too. I can stop eating chocolate — I can even say no to it when other people are passing it around — but I am a total pushover for potato chips, blue corn chips with hummus, salty yellow corn chips with salsa…. Or just give me a bag of Terra chips and send me off into the corner, that works too.
It’s not even 6 AM and I’m drooling over the idea of potato chips. Ah, and we like to think of ourselves as such rational creatures!
Graeme, having just said all that about being able to say no to chocolate, your mention of the Jacques Torres store has made me remember that when I was a kid, I could eat an entire bag of Nestle’s chips (I know, but what did I know? I was a kid…) if left to my own devices. I still adore wheat and chocolate together — cookies, brownies, chocolate mousse cake…. My blood sugar is going wacky just thinking about it.
And yes to the accelerating. I am running so fast right now that I may never catch up, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.
Thanks, Kelley, it’s always a pleasure to read what’s going on here. I put in my vote for potato chips too. Particularly Mike-Sells — are those sold nationwide, or just in the Midwest? — which taste so good to me that I’ve almost stopped eating other brands.
I nibble (hah!) on semi-sweet chocolate chips to this day, though I don’t go through a bag at a time; a 6-ounce bag lasts about a week. That’s an adult thing, my mom wouldn’t have let me eat chocolate chips by themselves when I was a kid, so when I was free from the restraints of tutelage, I realized I could dispense with the middleman of cookies and go directly to the source. (Though saying that reminds me of cookies my mom used to make sometimes, cakey things with mincemeat and chocolate chips, that I reconstructed as an adult. I don’t cook much at home, since I get my meals at work, but as the weather turns cool it might be time to make some cookies…) And I like pie too; I guess I’m bisexual in my food tastes. ^^
About the gender thing, I know that men and women’s interests and tastes tend to divide up along sexual lines. I also know that those interests and tastes often change over time, so that what used to be a guy thing becomes a girl thing and vice versa. Because of that and because of what I know about scientific racism, I am sharply skeptical of any biological explanations for those differences. Besides, those differences are almost always statistical — not all men do this/all women don’t, but more women than men do this and vice versa — but most people tend to turn relative differences into absolute differences. (E.g., girls tend to have more trouble with math than boys, therefore there’s no need to teach math to girls at all — but just because boys have more trouble with reading and writing than girls, no one suggests that it’s a waste of time to teach reading or writing to boys.)
If women are fonder of chocolate than men, that’s an interesting factoid, but to me that’s all it is. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I guess I can see the pattern — I used to be a fan of Sandra Boynton’s greeting cards and I have her book on chocolate, which points out that people get the same rush from love that they get from chocolate, which she says just goes to show that people use love as a substitute for the real satisfaction of chocolate. ^_^