There are times in your life when you have a nagging feeling in your brain that won’t go away while also playing hard to get. These are the times you suspect you should be doing something but, for the life of you, can’t remember exactly what it was, or the text you copied to the clipboard but have now forgotten about (and are now worried you might copy something else in the meantime and lose it forever!) or it could be when you have a vague suspicion you started eating a biscuit, got interrupted partway and now have a half-eaten cookie lying around somewhere.
Now aside from the fact that this breaks all sorts of rules on not leaving food unattended (I come from a large family and that’s a survival rule) and the potential contamination (sorry but the 9-second rule is a complete urban myth and blowing on it will not send all those germy jims on a whirlwind ride to the land of oz) a half-eaten cookie lying around the house is a hazard and worse, it’s a waste.
The half eaten cookie hazard is truly one of the underestimated hazards of the 21st century. Unlike a complete cookie, properly housed in it shiny packaging and winking at you like the old spice guy, a half-eaten cookie is a shadow of its former self. It has lost all self-respect and now happily rubs shoulders with disease-carrying bacteria huddling in dark corners of your carpet and swapping naughty jokes around a drum fire. It lounges about, swapping notes with other food bits that have been forgotten about, like the french fries from last month’s Big Mac combo. In this state a half eaten cookie become a household terrorist, and will not resist being used by the evil underlords of your home’s nether regions to make its occupants paranoid, embarrassed and even a little unwell.
Of course the half-eaten cookie doesn’t want to be found so it now become a hidden hazard. Well that is until its been in cookie wilderness for at least 6 months after which time it will reappear, often in the strangest places, like between the cushions on your couch or circling the buttons on your TV remote. When half-eaten cookies are found there’s a mix of relief and disgust, and a small, yet persistent, sly thought about finishing that cookie to put your internal cookie symmetry to rest. Don’t do it. That will only end badly. Unlike cookies which are a sometimes food half-eaten cookies that have gone AWOL for 6 months are a never food.
While we don’t know everything about the half-eaten cookie, we do know there are plenty out there, lurking in the strangest of places, their owners perplexed and puzzled, in a quandary of ‘where did I leave my cookie’, ‘maybe i ate the whole cookie’ and ‘should I give up the search and just get another one’. It’s not surprising that the notion of the half-eaten cookie has taken on a meme of its own to represent all those unfinished ideas, half-baked projects and anything else we start on and then get bored with or find something far more interesting to busy ourselves with, like complaining about parking fines.
Maybe this is a good time to contemplate all those “half-eaten cookies” in your life and think “where are they now?” Just remember to check your shoes before putting them on.