Lost in my chocolate...

Rick gave me some great chocolate for Valentine’s Day yesterday. And not only that, but chocolate lip balm, as well. There are two things I’m totally addicted to in this life – chocolate and lip balm. If I was stranded on a deserted island with a pile of chocolate and a case of lip balm, I’d probably be okay for a long time. Chocolate I love just because it tastes so good, and it’s so versatile in baking recipes, and I guess it releases endorphins or something like that (but mostly, I think it just tastes good…). But lip balm is actually the one item in my possession that I can NOT be without. Ever. Just to illustrate: I currently have three tubes of lip balm in the carry-on bag I use when I travel (I could NEVER be stuck on a plane without lip balm); I have five tubes of various lip balms in my everyday bag (two with SPF, three without); I have two lip balms with SPF 20 in a drawer in the bathroom, plus a large tin of Smith’s Rosebud Salve (great stuff, by the way) which I use every night. And I happen to know that Rick is usually carrying around a tin of Carmex, which I’ve been known to borrow if I’ve stupidly left my own lip balm somewhere else. The point is, chocolate lip balm feeds both my addictions quite nicely… that stuff has REAL chocolate in it…

Anyway, like I was saying, the chocolate Rick gave me is REALLY good – it’s probably the best chocolate I’ve had since I was in Belgium about four and half years ago. We’d watched some Belgian chocolate-makers demonstrating their craft, and then had the opportunity to taste the final product and buy boxes to take home. And stupid me – I only bought ONE box. One measly box. Why didn’t I buy more?? (If I remember correctly, Faisal bought about a dozen boxes of that stuff. Which he claimed were “gifts” for people back home. Suuuuuure they were.) The thing that made that chocolate so good was the fact that it was made with fresh ingredients, and no preservatives. The difference in flavor is quite noticeable. And when you have a piece of chocolate with some kind of filling made with fresh cream, its shelf life is lessened considerably. But it’s SO worth it – a truffle made with fresh ingredients compared to a drugstore candy assortment truffle is, well, there’s actually NO comparison.

And since finishing off those amazing Belgian chocolates (which I think was about two days after I’d returned from that trip), I hadn’t found any confections in America that seemed quite that good. I mean, don’t get me wrong – chocolate in all its forms is quite acceptable to my palate. I just hadn’t found anything to rival the perfect “melt-in-your-mouth” consistency and sublime flavor of what I’d brought back from Belgium. Until yesterday, when my Valentine’s Day gift was delivered by FedEx. Rick found this candy maker in California called Richard Donnelly chocolates. (That’s http://www.donnellychocolates.com/ – go order something. You’ll thank me later.) And they, just like those Belgian chocolatiers, make their candy with fresh ingredients and a short shelf life (which is fine, because they’ll be gone by tomorrow…). And what’s more, this place experiments with different flavors in their chocolate, infusing them with spices like cardamom and saffron and chipotle. Trust me – it sounds weird, but it tastes great.

Okay, enough chocolate talk… if I keep talking about it, I’ll just want to eat all of it now. So how about that episode of Lost last night? On the one hand, I was just glad to see an episode that finally focused on the people on the “blown up hatch” island, instead of another episode about the Others’ island. But on the other hand – uh, WHAT??? That was pretty much my reaction after last night’s episode. So we have a time travel paradox going on? So Desmond turns the key, blows up the hatch, and suddenly returns to England? I have to admit, it was quite creepy when the old woman in the jewelry store told him to give the ring back because, “you don’t buy it, you have second thoughts and you leave, and you return to the island.” It was like all of a sudden, Desmond was in this weird virtual reality world. (Wait, maybe he IS in a virtual reality world – maybe they’re ALL in a virtual reality world. Maybe no one is really on that island at all – they’re all in some stark, white room, sitting in chairs and hooked up to virtual reality machines…)

But the paradox is what’s really messing with my mind right now – if Desmond turns the key and winds up back in England, only to eventually return to the island and turn the key AGAIN, what’s the point? And if he keeps returning to life in England, then how is it that life on the island keeps moving on? And if he knows that Charlie is supposed to die, then how many times have the rest of the castaways been through the exact same situations on the island? And did Desmond have to get hit in the head with a cricket bat before he’d return to the post-hatch timeframe of the island? Like if he HADN’T remembered that particular day, and told the bartender to duck, and been hit in the head with the bat, would he have just lived the same situations up to the point where he turned the key again? Did he manage to change something in the time-space continuum by finally realizing he was living his life over and over? I mean, had he ever made it to that post-hatch-naked-in-the-forest point before, or was it only when he finally realized what was going on? This is the problem with Lost – they answer one question, only to replace it with fifty more…

I think I need some chocolate…