There's this god-awful commerical on television these days with this kid hanging out on the street with his head tilted back, gargling what turns out to be a mixture of chocolate syrup and milk. It's an advertisment for chocolate milk--I think the slogan is something like "When you just can't wait!"--as if this commercial is going to pique your appetite for anything, let alone chocolate milk.

You know, as opposed to throwing you into spasms of retching, as it did to me.

I was telling my mother about it tonight, and she agreed it was awful, saying "As if anyone is going to drink chocolate syrup and..."

"No," I interjected. "Of course I've drunk chocolate syrup. It's the gargling that I find so offensive."

"Yet you used to eat butter pats," she pointed out.

So yeah, I guess different strokes for different folks. In my defense, it's not as if I made commercials for the National Butter Council or recommended that anyone else smuggle wax-papered butter pats from restaurants to suck on secretly in the car on the way home. And as much as I fantasized when younger about being older and having my own apartment where I could sit around eating sticks of butter all the time, I don't actually do that these days.

As for the chocolate syrup thing, that was when I was baby-sitting and the peeps had absolutely no food in the house except chocolate syrup and some bananas. And I didn't want to get a dish dirty. So I was interspersing bites of banana in with the squirts of syrup. It's not like I was putting my mouth on the bottle, either.

I used to make butter sandwiches when I baby-sat too. Just butter and bread. Good times. Good times.