Cheetos with Chopsticks

It took me a long time to master chopsticks. Don’t ask me why. For years I could never get those sleek, slightly tapered implements to connect at their ends to grab a morsel of anything, let alone get it to my mouth. Pieces of food would twist and flip away, making my dinner look like remnants of a food fight.

            Yet at some point of maturity my eye-hand coordination finessed itself and then, well let’s just say anytime I could use a chopstick rather than a fork …

            But the day I realized chopsticks could be used as a metaphor for life was when I realized that these simple, millenia-old utensils could be used to give a guilty pleasure a new respect.

            And what day was that? The day I decided that I could avoid orange, powder-caked fingers after a rendezvous with a bag of Cheetos.

            Cheetos are by far my favorite chip. I proceed with caution whenever I pass them in the grocery store. Usually after a guilt-ridden, midnight “snaccident”, I try to tell myself that I didn’t overdo it, but the evidence of my indulgence is caked on my fingers with that irresistible, cheesy powder Frito-Lay dusts these little snack teasers with.

            But then I realized that I could eat Cheetos with chopsticks and never, ever have to look at my fingers with guilt again. What a game changer. No more fistfuls of orange, dusty delight shoved into my mouth as I watched TV, but a deliberate choosing, almost a ritual that elevated the whole experience from snacking to dainty dining.

            An odd marriage of food and implement you might say. But to get to a goal, don’t we often have to make new uses out of old skills, take what we know and re-purpose it towards learning something new? Maybe it’s time to look at what you have and not see what has always been done, but what new things could be accomplished if old things were used in a new way. Like Cheetos with chopsticks. I’ll never eat them with my fingers again.