TBOTCP

Are you or have you ever been in college? Or, really, have you ever just moved out of your childhood home to return occasionally as a nascent adult? If so, you will probably understand the strange phenomenon known to me and Shannon as the Two Bags Of Tortilla Chip Phenomenon, or TBOTCP for short.

TBOTCP is the result of living on your own for a while, doing normal but not quite grown-up-ish things like contemplating actually making your bed and forgetting to grocery shop with your parents’ money. You spend weeks living off of one carton of eggs and somewhat lackluster loaf of homemade spelt-and-herb bread (ugh, it was going to be SO GOOD too) and then you come home for some reason and abundance is EVERYWHERE. It’s positively eerie. There are half-eaten boxes of cereal that may never get thrown out! There are magazines that may never even get read before they are recycled! There’s a lone head of lettuce in the crisper, awaiting a salad that was long ago nixed in favor of (gasp) take out pizza!

And your parents, if they are like ours, buy not only one, but TWO kinds of tortilla chips. Two whole bags. Probably even party size. And you struggle to wrap your brain around the kind of luxury and carefree attitude that would allow one to indulge in the hedonistic excess of blue corn and hint of lime at the same time. If left to your own devices, you might buy a bag of chips, but it certainly wouldn’t last long enough to get chip-clipped and stuck on top of the fridge.

And two? From a detached point of view (ha!) it seems like so very little, but when you’ve had your perceptions warped by studying and not being too on top of things, the mundane food purchases of middle class empty-nesters flat-out boggle the mind.

In conclusion, I may or may not have eaten half a BJ’s bag of sweet potato corn chips on Thursday night. So sue me.

About these ads