Comfort Food

For the past, oh, four hundred years, give or take, I’ve had a subscription to World of Puzzles magazine.  I know, my geek is showing, but every time I think that I’m allowing too many back issues to stack up unused, I hit a spot of insomnia for which the only cure – and a surefire one at that – is to attempt a three-star puzzle while lying in bed.  Instant coma.

In each issue, there’s a section with some sort of theme – a common topic, or a specific type of puzzle.  Having subscribed to this magazine since before the incorporation of America, I’ve become rather set in my ways when I decide to flip open an issue: I gravitate toward certain types of puzzles, and very rarely can be bothered to try anything that would actually require me to read a new set of directions.  But in one issue, several years ago, the theme had to do with how conventionally you thought; sort of like a single-player version of Family Feud.  (Don’t even get me started on my former addiction to game shows; between the Game Show Network and Bill Kurtis-narrated shows, I could conceivably not leave the couch for a month, were it not for vague annoyances like work and personal hygiene.  I’ve cut way down, but as with any addiction, all it takes is one bad day…)

Anyway, I can’t remember all of the conventionality-related puzzles, but the one that stayed with me was in a simple list format.  There was a heading for each, like “’80s sitcoms” or “Cars,” and you were to write down the top however-many that came to mind.  The challenge was to try to think like everybody else (which is vaguely ironic, in a magazine full of plays on words and twists of logic).  In most of the lists, I was able to come up with a reasonably common set of answers.

But there was one list that completely stumped me.

“Comfort Foods.”

The thing that really got to me was, I didn’t realize it had stumped me at the time.  I happily scribbled in my answers, flipped to the back, and gawped.  I had to double-check to make sure that I wasn’t checking the wrong set of answers.  Because, as it turns out?  My version of comfort foods is, apparently, unconventional.

Things like brownies, cold pizza, mashed turnips, baby dill pickles, tuna noodle casserole.  Anything Italian.  Fresh fruit.  Not all at once, mind you.  And not necessarily often.  But those are the sorts of foods I gravitate toward when home alone, or in emotional upheaval, or when lacking chocolate in sufficient quantities.

I can’t remember what a statistically more normal list would look like, though I do remember that I could heave a small sigh of relief that two of mine – peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (though I prefer mine on toast or, in an ideal world, a toasted English muffin with butter, too) and ice cream – did appear on the normal-person list.  I know that I don’t love soup, particularly chicken noodle, and of the other answers I remember thinking that they were foods I liked well enough, but I didn’t derive comfort from them.

So, then, what are yours?  Are you normaller than me, or do you crave mayonnaise-and-pickle sandwiches or sliced tomatoes with salt sprinkled on top (Hi, Mom!)?  Inquiring – and unconventional – minds want to know.

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