What Kind of Battle? A Cookie Battle

It was the aroma that I noticed first.  The smell of something baking is…well …let’s see… would “scrumptiously wonderful” be an appropriate phrase?

I had determined after a fairly early supper that I was not going to eat anything else for the rest of the night.  “That’s it!  I’m done eating for today!” I declared with a tenacious willpower and confidence that would, frankly, frighten the average man.

But, I was sitting innocently in the living room, reading one of my books and minding my own business when the aforementioned “smell of something baking” came and hit me on the side of the head.  I wasn’t hurting anyone.  I wasn’t looking for trouble.  The aroma came pushing and shoving and talking-trash, and started it up with me.

I stood and walked into the kitchen to see Nadia placing freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on a cooling rack.  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“Nothing.  No occasion, I’m just baking some cookies,” Nadia said.

Well, here I was, faced with a challenge.  My earlier comment—that I was not going to eat anything else for the rest of the night—was being tested.  It’s one thing to decide not to eat any thing else for the evening when all the food has been put away and the entrance to the kitchen has been sealed off with large plastic sheets and duct tape.  (That’s what we typically do after supper, like most normal families.)

But it’s something else—boy, is it something else—to resist eating when fresh chocolate chip cookies are being taken out of the oven.

Fortunately, I have an ability—cultivated earlier in my life during my martial arts training—to focus my mind powerfully on endeavors, like the passages within a book that I’m reading, and exclude other thoughts from my mind.  It’s a form of strict mental discipline that has served me well.  And I promptly put this concentrated focus to work in order to resist the impulse toward the chocolate cookies.

This discipline lasted…oh…approximately 1 minute and 28 seconds…which is pretty close to being a record if you consider the fact that my olfactory senses were being ruthlessly assaulted by fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie aroma.

You say, “Ha, ha, ha!  Dan, you caved in and ate a chocolate chip cookie, didn’t you?”

No, I can honestly say that I did not cave in and eat a chocolate chip cookie.  Really.  I did not eat “A” chocolate chip cookie.

Has anyone seen my bottle of TUMS, lately?