Folded Chips

If you’ve ever seen me eat potato chips you may think discrimination abounds in my everyday life. I subconsciously (and consciously) separate chips into two categories: “normal” and “folded.” These folded chips are the ones that look as if the circle of the chip has been flipped in half onto itself. For some reason it’s more fun to eat the folded ones. I save them for last. They have more crunch to them, and thus are more satisfying to eat.
A friend once inquired why I did this after she noticed that I was “playing favorites” with the chips. We went on to have a philosophical debate about my chip profiling. I tried to explain that it was just a quirky eating habit. I also qualified my response with the idea that I find it weird to eat Pringles because they are all the same. They’re like what would’ve happened had Hitler had his way with the world: a master race of potato chips. On the other hand, she thought that maybe it spoke to a larger idea that I was a very biased person in other aspects of my life. I thought that this was possible, but maybe I was less conscious about larger things than various chips.
I explained to her that the folded chips were more interesting. They have more personality. At this point in time, if she didn’t know me, she would have got up from the table and told me that I was crazy. The folded chips had to get that way some how, right? The unfolded ones took the normal path to Chiphood. They were cut from the potato and deep-fried, end of story. The folded ones could have been unfolded at one point and therefore got their uniqueness during a phase of their conception. Other unfolded chips bullied them around; pressured them into changing, or just got caught at the bottom of the crate and folded under the weight of the others. I wanted to give time to the possibilities of the folded chips’ stories.
I don’t persecute others nor do I make insensitive derogatory comments. I treat people equally and with respect. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for the way I eat chips. The folded ones end up having a slightly longer life than the regular ones.