How a Sandwich Makes You Its Bitch in 11 Easy Steps

1.  At first, you are unaware of your desire for a sandwich

At this stage, you are generally unaware of any desire to eat a sandwich.  Maybe you are watching TV.  Maybe you are talking on the phone.  Whatever you are doing, you are content to be alive without a sandwich in your mouth. 

2.  Desire for sandwich registers

You become vaguely aware that something isn't right when a feeling of uneasiness engulfs you like a dark, suffocating fog.   You realize that you are going to need a sandwich.  

3.  Panic

HOLY SHIT!!!!!!  YOU NEED A SANDWICH RIGHT FUCKING NOW OR YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!! 

This stage comes on abruptly and usually before you have time to even make it to the kitchen, let alone go through all the steps of preparing a sandwich.   You feel like your body is imploding into a black hole of hunger and without a sandwich to plug that hole, you will almost certainly perish. 

4.  Melodramatic journey to kitchen

Hunger has a way of bringing drama to the surface.  The combination of hopelessness and self-pity often leads to unnecessary theatrics. 

5.  Planning

Your sandwich is going to be the best sandwich ever.  A sandwich to rule all sandwiches.  No matter how many things you put on it, it always seems like there needs to be more things.  

6. Creation of a monstrosity that even you will look back on with shame and bewilderment

Hunger has clearly clouded your judgment because your sandwich turns out to be a towering atrocity of questionable meat and condiments that are wonderful on their own, but taken together, create an oozing sludge of nearly inedible failure.  

Despite this, you feel like you are some sort of mad genius.  You should be on Iron Chef!  You are creating new flavor frontiers!

7.  Anticipation

This is probably the best stage of eating a sandwich.   In this moment, you imagine a kind of nirvana that is not attainable by mortals.  Your mind conjures up a flavor experience so powerful that it defies logic.  As you sit there staring at your glorious sandwich, nothing else matters.  

8a.  First assault

 

You seem to have neglected a few details during preparation, namely the discrepancy between the size of your mouth and the size of what you can reasonably expect to fit inside something the size of your mouth.  Your sandwich is cumbersome and unwieldy.  If you want to eat it, you are going to have to get creative. 

8b.  Second assault 

8c.  Third assault 

9. Violence

You finally resort to trying to crush the sandwich with your hands.  You stand over it like a caveman, beating it with your fists in a fit of rabid frustration.  Condiment sludge squishes out the sides in rivers.  

10.  Success (?)

The sandwich finally submits to your reshaping efforts.  You have reduced your once majestic creation to a festering shadow of its former self, but it is now possible to put it in your mouth!  YAY!!!!  You think you've won.  

11.  Resolution

Sandwiches almost always end in one of two ways.  

If you made the unfortunate mistake of underestimating your hunger, you will be unable to enjoy the final third of your sandwich because you will be too busy being afraid that there will not be enough of it.  Every wonderful bite is filled with the painful realization that it is bringing you closer to having nothing more to eat.  You begin to panic.  You try taking smaller bites and chewing longer.  You alternate taking a real bite and just sniffing the sandwich and moving your jaw to simulate eating.  But nothing can reverse the inescapable fact that you didn't make yourself enough sandwich.

Conversely, if you overestimated the amount of free space inside of you, you will be faced with a harrowing battle of man against sandwich.  And the sandwich always wins.  If you force yourself to finish the sandwich, it will defeat you from the inside.  If you give up and leave part of the sandwich uneaten, it will haunt you with guilt and feelings of inadequacy.