Twinkie Math

Have you ever noticed that in every shopping center with a Weight Watchers store front there's also a bakery? When I was growing up we didn't have a bakery exactly, we had a Hostess factory outlet next to a Jenny Craig. The Hostess outlet was next to the corner store and was a three minute walk from my house. So was the Jenny Craig, not that that ever made a difference to anyone in my family. My brother Matthew had a serious Hostess addiction when we were growing up. Even though the outlet is gone now junkfood is still the one thing he gets for Christmas from my dad, a box of something dipped in wax chocolate and wrapped in plastic. My dad would say it's the only thing Matthew really likes and he's not exactly wrong.

Back in the day when Matthew announced a Twinkie run someone else would cough up for a Snowball or something. This is where I go off on a tangent but does anyone remember Steve Martin's scene in Father of the Bride where he's tearing open bags of hot dog rolls to remove the superfluous buns? Placing a Twinkie order with Matthew was a little like that. If you asked for a Twinkie and you gave him a dollar, he'd open the pack of two Twinkies and give you one. The other was for shipping, I guess. In order to get your dollar's worth of Twinkie you had to play his game, we called it Matthew math. If you wanted a package of Twinkies, you had to ask for two. When Hostess had some anniversary in the early nineties every pack had three snacks, that really complicated the system....one equals two except for when one equals three. I sometimes forget how much junk we ate when my mom was at work.

The Matthew math thing keeps popping into my head randomly due to my scale. I thought I would want to kill the old scale when I got the new one and now I'm using both of them and it's really not healthy. If scale a is this and scale b is that...how much does the self-loathing weigh? There's this thing in the back of my head that if I never got the new scale I would think I weighed 165 right now. That wouldn't be so bad. That would be damn awesome. And exactly now in real time a customer just told me I'm wasting away to nothing and all I could say was "not really". Not really, I could make a graph and a power point presentation and a musical with a cast of hundreds for all the data I have to the contrary of not really. "Not really", that was just lame.