where godiva and skippy collide

(this is literally the view from the back door of Eszter's office at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, except normally that view doesn't include me sitting in the tree.)

So, one of my pet phrases is "This is where the chocolate hits the peanut butter." I use it when I'm explaining something that requires me to first explain two seemingly unrelated things. I insert it as a preface immediately before explaining how the two things fit together, as apparently I believe this is a good moment to introduce an obscure distracting metaphor.

Anyway, it's a reference to these commercials from when I was a child where a man would be walking around with a chocolate bar and a woman would be doing the same with an open jar of peanut butter and through some collisional hijink the chocolate bar would end up inside the peanut butter, and the two would discover that in fact the combination tasted great and the voice-over for Reese's Peanut Butter cups would begin. (Being a child, the brazen sexual innuendo of this ad campaign was completely lost on me.)

I like Reese's Peanut Butter cups. They are traditionally my second favorite candy, in fact, with the first being chocolate-covered malted milk balls. So this past weekend Eszter and I were in Trader Joe's and what do I see: chocolate-covered peanut butter malted milk balls. I had never even imagined my two favorite candies could be combined before. And so I proclaimed, "This is where the chocolate hits the peanut butter!" I scarfed down something like a dozen between the checkout counter and Eszter's car alone.

The weekend was, I might add, the first time I'd ever been inside a Trader Joe's. I had heard it was a place full of strangely addictive curiosities. Even so, I had no idea.