But I can't do that. It's the french pastry episode all over again, only this time I'm wiser. I know that I'll eventually eat the jam; it's just too delicious. We compromised by giving her a week - if it's not gone in seven days, I will most likely finish it.
The french pastry episode was the first such occasion. On a trip to Paris, my wife took me to many pastry restaurants, as she's a bit food crazy. But there was one in particular. I ordered the best chocolate desert that exists on the planet. It wasn't just better than the previous best by a little, it was exceptional. My wife asked for some and I offered her a bite, but she declined; she wanted to wait until she finished her pastry so that her final bite would be perfect. I replied that this was dangerous, then immediately forgot about the exchange, lost in a haze of chocolaty bliss, and proceeded to eat the entire cake.
And my wife got upset. After a few years the topic comes up every now and again, though the sting has waned.
So the question is, are you happier when you save the best bite for last and have hope for the future, or are you happier when you enjoy what's in front of you, when you chose to enjoy the present moment? This is precisely the question posed, quite eloquently and over many episodes, in the Japanese drama Strawberry on the Shortcake, which is, incidentally, my favorite TV drama of all time, though I can't say how well it's aged in 10 years. The happy characters in the drama eat the strawberry first, and the main character chooses to save it for the end.
My wife saves it for last. I typically eat half first and the rest at the end, or eat it all at the beginning if that's too much work. My friends notice that I exhibit the same pattern at buffets - I'll grab desert with my first run of food, then go back for more food and desert, followed by a third round of desert if I can fit it in.
In SOS, the metaphor was clear - people who eat the strawberry first are the extroverts who enjoy life; people who eat it last are the introverts who wish they had more fun. I guess I'm both. I don't have to guess - I am both. A university friend of mine confirmed this. Liv was a psych major and surreptitiously gave me a psychological test. The end result showed that I was both introverted and extroverted - not somewhere in between, mind you - I lived at both ends of the spectrum.
While SOS leans one way, the marshmallow study shows that kids who delay gratification go on to have more "successful" lives. Maybe there is no definite answer to the strawberry question, but I suspect that it's better to be somewhere in between, or live happily at both ends, with some very good raspberry jam.
