Bad chocolate

Last Christmas, my dad (who's a music teacher) received a lot of chocolates due to a combination "Merry Christmas, here have a present" and "thank you for teaching me music this year". Some of the chocolate was good, and some of it was not-so-good. Needless to say, we all ate the good ones first, and last night, when my sister and I were home, he broached the subject of some of the not-so-good ones.

When my dad got them out, my sister asked if they were "like Easter Egg chocolates". His response was, "Eh, they're probably not as bad as Easter Egg chocolates," to which she responded, "Like Christmas chocolates?"

"Yeah, somewhere along those lines," my dad said. (I made some remark about how this judgment was the obvious one, given that these were in fact chocolates given us for Christmas.)

Imagine a bunch of pecans indiscriminately crammed into a ball of caramel, and then imagine that caramel being coated in chocolate. Now imagine a box of, what, twelve of these, and you'll have our box of chocolates. It wasn't even a typical Box Of Chocolates, where they're all different flavors and you have to consult the guide at the back of the box (or, in the absence of such a guide, either cut them all in half or else choose one and hope for the best).

The weird thing is, they were kind of good. They weren't good good, naturally, but they were okay. I have consumed things - overly-hot peppers, cheap pie, whiskey - where my response to putting them in my mouth was, "I immediately regret this decision". This was not one of those things. My response to putting this in my mouth was something more like, "Huh, I don't immediately regret this decision. That's interesting. If I were to eat another of these, I wouldn't immediately regret that decision, either."

My dad asked if we wanted another, and I said yes. Just as I'd suspected, I had no regrets about eating it.

There was this kind of sense of amazement afterwards. I had eaten bad chocolate, and I had enjoyed it. And this amazement was something I'd never get from eating good chocolate. With good chocolate, you expect it to be good, and it is. You don't go, "wow, I actually enjoyed this", because you expect to enjoy it. With bad chocolate, it's another story. If you enjoy it, then not only do you enjoy it, you enjoy the fact that you enjoyed it. There's two layers of enjoyment going on there.

In other words, I may have discovered that bad chocolate makes you happier than good chocolate. Good chocolate is better quality, obviously - I mean, it's in the description (good vs. bad) - but does good chocolate make you have not one but two positive reactions to it? Most of the time, no. There was that time I had good chocolate that was shaped in different-colored spheres and they kind of looked like planets to me, but with the exception of chocolates that look like celestial bodies, good chocolate makes you have one and only one reaction: "hey, this is good!" Bad chocolate, when it is at least passable, makes you have two: "hey, this is kind of okay!" and "I'm amazed that I was able to enjoy this!"

The good things in life are just uncomplicatedly good but the bad things, when they're still kind of good, have that goodness on numerous levels and that's kind of incredible.