Nothing less sweet than having a sweet tooth

I’ll never deny that my faults are many and especially egregious. My voice is too loud. I’m abrasive and sarcastic. The hair atop my head does that weird thing.

However, I can honestly say that for all my deficiencies, I am not, for the most part, an envious person. Sure, I see a fellow human bragging on Facebook about his family’s eighth trip to Disney World this year because his job cuddling red pandas is going so well, I might feel a tinge of jealousy. But just a drop. Honestly, I want people to be happy, and their joy does nothing to diminish my own.

This support does not apply to those who lack a sweet tooth.

Look, I get it. Different strokes for different folks, right? We all enjoy a variety of things, and what you love, I may not, and what I love … well, you’d most certainly despise most of it. But my own personal love for sugary foods is so pronounced — and arguably debilitating should I submit to my cravings — that I can’t help but struggle to comprehend, and envy, someone who doesn’t care for them at all.

“I don’t know,” some hypothetical person might say to me as I scarf down my second scoop of birthday-cake-flavored ice cream. “I just don’t care all that much for sweets. I guess I’m lucky.”

Undoubtedly, this person I’ve just invented will then pat his washboard stomach before clicking his heels together and flying away using the powers granted to those capable of abstaining from eating fistfuls of chocolate chips at one time.

These sugar self-deprivers have no idea how lucky they truly are. I’m no doctor, but I reckon having a sweet tooth ranks right up there with some of the world’s most feared birth defects, falling somewhere between Proteus syndrome and having the ability to see the future, but only the moment in which you die.

Depending on the severity of your tooth’s malformation, you may find no foods outside the most sugary truly satisfy. Sure, that Poulet au Vinaigre may be divine, but does it fill your body with the same effervescent joy as a big bowl of raw Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix? Absolutely not.

Unfortunately, life is mostly just a series of increasingly cruel, unamusing jokes … one of them being that the most delicious foods are also the worst for you. No matter how desperately my body may crave having a box of liquified Milky Way bars injected directly into its tongue, I know the sudden influx of that many calories is likely to cause me to pop like a water balloon when its skydiving trip comes to an end.

So, Mr. and Mrs. Hypothetical, the next time you brag to me about how you find a handful of baby carrots to be just as satisfying as my pile of syrup-drenched pancakes, you’ll forgive me if I seem a little less sweet than usual.