Active Voice Obsessions

I am obsessed with popcorn. To obsess: to haunt or trouble the mind; harass; preoccupy; usually in the passive voice.... My obsession has an active voice. A loud voice.

My teeth bare in defense of my own private bowl and before I ever make my own batch of popcorn, I carefully question the crowd to ascertain if there is somebody else who wants popcorn. Because if so, I'll make their batches first - all in premeditated protection of my own buttered and salted bowl of ambrosia. You see my motives. They are to be sated with their own popcorn so that by the time I have my own, they'll not come near me with grubby groping fists.

And I'm not talking about a cereal bowl, but a mixing bowl sized batch and I eat the whole thing. Myself.

Prior to owning an air popper we indulged in microwave popcorn. Awhile back in my up and down weight history, I decided to kick the popcorn habit. I threw into the garbage can my remaining three bags of microwave popcorn. You might ask, what is wrong with low-fat, low calorie popcorn? Nothing. Except that I add fat and calories by pouring on the butter. Otherwise, I ask you, what is the point?

By mid-afternoon of that same day, my resolve crashed and burned, enduring under as I had, the clarion call of my precious popcorn bags from the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I sneaked back and surreptitiously fingered through the detritus remains of various kitchen activities, like a bag lady plowing through a dumpster, but I could not find my three precious plastic wrapped bags of microwave popcorn!

"GIRLS!!" Looking at them with narrowed eyes as they sat eating lunch together in the dining room. Hands on my hips, I interrogated, "WHAT have you done with my popcorn?!" My eldest spoke up and assured me with mischievously snapping eyes, that she'd HIDDEN them and that I'd never find them.

Bent on imbibing in a bowl of buttered popcorn, I charged upstairs to begin the search. Her confidence that I'd never find them told me that it had to be someplace special. In hindsight, I believe that the three packages of plastic wrapped microwave popcorn wanted me just as much as I wanted them, because they subliminally drew me right to them.

I pulled out one drawer in her captain's bed to explore the space behind - something I'd never remembered was there in all the years we'd owned the beds - and there they were. I snatched them up, hugged them tightly to my chest, and triumphantly descended upon the girls with a "HA! I found them!"

With grim satisfaction I plopped one into the microwave, melted several teaspoons of butter and salted the life out of my precious white kernels. Never again would I so blithely abandon this obsession of mine. This irresistible impulse. This bewitchment. I fully intend to regularly indulge myself in the future and the one concession I may make for health's sake is that I will sometimes use olive oil in place of butter. Sometimes. But I am making no foolish rash promises as such.