surviving skittles

after two months of shopping and eating in the US, mia (aka 'younger sister') is back. to appease the sister she left behind (aka 'me'), she brought back tons of unhealth.

one of the more attractive packets inside the huge goody bag was that of sour skittles. it was shiny neon (shiny neon?) green, maybe because it was a promotional thing for shrek 2 (which, incidentally, i have finally seen). if you open a bag with all green skittles, you win ... something. i forget.

the thing is i've always liked sour candy. i like those cry babies (multicolored balls of sourness), sour gummi worms, sour gummi beans. ironically, i do not like sour 'real' food, like green mangoes or tamarind or ... ok, this is getting boring.

SO, you can imagine why i was excited to discover that skittles had a sour version (mia says it's been around for a while now but even if i knew that, i would have probably been just as excited to get free food). i should've known i was in trouble though as soon as i took the first candy.

apparently, sour skittles were designed to make salivary glands shoot out a liter of saliva straight down your bronchi (a tube leading to the lungs -- not exactly where you want your food to go), causing a coughing spell of pneumonic proportions. and this happened after every 5 skittles. i coughed so many times and so violently that i saw snippets of my life flash before my eyes (or maybe those were just the family pictures framed on the shelf). did that stop me? eventually yes, after the 4th pack. (i didn't finish 4 packs in one sitting, silly, although it's not entirely beyond me.) i figured i should probably stop eating it anyway before my throat bled from all the coughing or i gained 20 pounds from excess sugar, whichever came first.

today, the green packs are still very accessible and visible from the couch-potato couch i spend most of my home hours in. am still reconsidering eating more. partly because i want to find the winning pack, and partly because my throat has healed quite nicely.