Life is not at all like a box of chocolates

"Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
Forrest Gump

Bollocks.

First of all, you do know what you're gonna get in the box, if you just look at the damn chocolate chart. No one looks at the chocolate charts. They prefer to smell the chocolate, lick it, bite into it, x-ray it, perform surgery on it, and then put it back in the box if it's not to their liking.

For example, I've never known a person who eats the chocolate with the maraschino cherry in it. There must be a huge pile of these cherries rotting away somewhere. What the hell is a maraschino cherry anyway? Maybe they can't rot. I know they can do amazing things with plastics these days, but inside a chocolate? Why a cherry? Why not a maraschino paint ball?

Here's a product idea. These chocolate boxes should come with another, smaller box to hold the destroyed chocolates that are waiting for eager mouths.

Plus, there are lots of times in life when you know what you're gonna get. And with a little learnin' you avoid certain things. When I lie in the sun with cooking oil on my skin my body will later be served at Red Lobster. This will happen 100% of the time. That's a pretty good prediction rate.

When you're in Amsterdam and a pretty girl in a short skirt with a bow in her hair beckons you into a storefront, it's fairly certain she doesn't work for Disney. I'm not saying to avoid her. Just know that it will be a bumpier ride than Space Mountain.

These chocolates come in convenient bite-sized portions. I wish life's problems came like this. And what about those chocolate charts? Does your life come with a convenient chart every time problems crop up? Eeek, my daughter is getting high on foam insulation, her boyfriend has a swastika tattooed on his tongue and she wonders why the police haven't busted the school math lab. Boy, I think I'll pop the caramel/hazelnut chocolate in my mouth and watch my problems melt away.

Life is actually a rubik's cube.

It's a rubik's cube because solving life's problems is never a straight, predictable line. When you solve the rubik's cube, you have to tolerate some temporary disorganization in order to get to the final destination. You deliberately mix things up to get to the solution. Or at least you can't avoid the mix ups. If you get 3 blue squares in a row, sometimes you have to temporarily forego that row in order to solve the puzzle.

This is so much like life. It's incredibly frustrating. The rubik's cube has one correct solution and 43 billion billion wrong solutions. This is a good approximation of life, and completely describes my dating years.

When I try to solve a rubik's cube I want to take the contraption, put it in the microwave and melt it down, pour the hot plastic in my eyes and scream bloody murder.

So forget the chocolates and get a rubik's cube if you want to prepare yourself properly for life's journey. And don't count on any quick solutions.