promises, promises

It was one of those work days where chocolate was necessary, and so around lunchtime, someone ran over to Target and came back with Dove Dark Chocolate Promises.

Now, I have a complicated history with Dove Dark Chocolate Promises {it involves a pug, Dr. Zhivago, Christmas chocolates, and a lesson that chocolate really is toxic to dogs—and it's quite obviously a sad story}, but I am never one to turn away chocolate.

Nor am I one to just have a piece or two, and so I found myself with a handful of Promises back at my desk.

{As a sidenote, "handful of promises" sounds like something that could be cross-stitched with a Bible verse and then hung above the mantel. It also sounds like the potential title of a book, one that's most likely about hard times in a marriage. Oh my, I think I need more chocolate.}

Having now sampled quite an array of these Promises, I can safely say: Dove, you make terrible Promises. I mean, the chocolate is great—just right, in fact.

And I know it's great because did you know that I have this random condition called geographic tongue that causes my tongue to react to certain triggers? {Trust me, this is related. Also, trust me, I'm not just making this condition up. Here, read this thing from PubMed about it.}

One of my triggers is good dark chocolate, so I can always tell the quality of chocolate based on the reaction of my tongue {it just gets a little inflamed and discolored}. My tongue is akin to the creaky knee that tells you when it's going to rain, only knowing it's going to rain isn't nearly as deliciously useful as being able to tell the quality of chocolate.

So, Dove, your chocolate is good, but your Promises are...well, first of all, most of them aren't even promises.

They're more like thought-provoking conglomerations of hmmm.

Here's a sampling of what Dove promised me today:

• Don't settle for a spark...light a fire instead. This is what, I imagine, everyone who's ever set a forest fire has thought. Also, people who burn books like in Farenheit 451. Encouraging pyromania does not make a good promise.
• Feel free to be yourself. Okay, piece of chocolate, I will. But this sounds more like something Oprah would devote a whole show to, back when she still had a show.
• Chocolate brings good things to life. I'm guessing this was actually supposed to be in your marketing campaign for the fourth quarter, and it somehow ended up in the file that was sent to the printer who does all your foil wrappers.
• Satisfy your sense of surprise. I assume you're encouraging me to hide behind trees and jump out at passers-by while yelling, "GOTCHA!" I don't know if that will bring me satisfaction, but you did tell me earlier to feel free to be myself, so if this is what the real me wants to do, I am free to do it.
• There's a time to compromise. It's called "later." Wait, are you saying we should never compromise? That we should procrastinate on compromise? That we should be stubborn?
  
  This is right up there with that famous line from Love Story: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." If we all followed that advice and this "Promise," we'd have a stubborn, unrepentant, demanding society on our hands. In other words, we'd all be like Kim Jong-il, and I don't think that's what anyone—least of all Dove—wants.

In conclusion, I will not be quitting my day job to write Promises for Dove—partly because at this day job, I can eat all the Promises I want and make fun of them. If I worked there, I probably wouldn't be able to eat the moneymaker {who else is having visions of Lucy and Ethel in I Love Lucy shoving bon bons in their mouths?}.

Or, on the flip side, I would be allowed to eat all the chocolate I want, and my geographic tongue would be all I would talk about.

In any event, Dove, if you believed in compromises, I would offer this to you: I will eat your Promises, and I will only laugh at one per chocolate-eating session. But since you believe compromises are for later, I offer that our deal start tomorrow.