I'd make him a sammich

I said that about someone the other day. Can't remember whether it was Richard Armitage or Tom Hiddleston.

Might have been Cumberbatch.

I'm missing UK land pretty bad right now. It's been a year since our adventures and I'm tripping down memory lane line a newborn deer, giraffe, hybrid-creature in hotsuace... my thoughts are getting away from me.

They're not all winners, but they all make me smile because they're part of a whole that was legitimately amazing.

Like the following impromptu lesson in Cognitive Dissonance, specifically the whole ability to minimize the discomfort associated with regret, or whatever the hell it's called, I'm not getting my old textbook out.

See, everyone makes mistakes. Big and small, it's an unavoidable part of being a person. That's not nearly as much in our control as we pretend it is. However, the way that we deal with those mistakes, varies from person to person, and I at least, think a lot of that has to do with our choices rather than our brain chemistry.

So, I'm going to illustrate this with a story from one of our trips to London. It's really not the best story, not gonna lie, but it's made me laugh until I cry the couple of times that someone has brought it up again.

It's probably a 'you had to be there' thing.

Anyway, this is the story of some disappointing sandwiches.

We were running all over the place, being obnoxious touristy Americans and generally just being happy to be alive and we kept forgetting about eating. By the time we remembered everyone was feeling quite faint and so we basically ran into the first little Tesco type place that we could find and grabbed some of those boxed sandwiches, because it's food! We wanted food. That's all.

So, Angela and Guinness both ended up with very disappointing sandwiches. Angela complained about her's through three bites, then tried taking it apart and eating the pieces separately, as if that would help. When this didn't work, she ended up throwing most of the sandwich out, but now she was starving and didn't want to spend any more money (and wouldn't let anyone spot her, too much pride, that Angela). She dealt with this the way that I suspect she deals with everything and she complained about it...

You don't understand though, because I haven't finished. She complained about it FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK.

No joke. She found every opportunity she possibly could to talk about how horrible this sandwich had been.

It got so ridiculous that at one point she started to talk about the damn sammich again and I burst into maniacal laughter and she still doesn't know what that was about. She pretty much drove me mad with her talk of soggy Tesco sandwich.

Meanwhile, Guinness also had a disappointing sandwich. She bit into it, frowned at me and said "Ugh, that is terrible," then proceeded to eat the whole thing, because she was hungry. She made a face, washed her mouth out with Coke and then lived her life like nothing had happened. (Because, let's be honest, nothing had happened).

She didn't think about it or bring it up. In fact, she forgot about it completely, which we realized the next time we went to Tesco for a quick meal and she purchased the same sandwich for a second time, bit into it and then said "Oh yeah... I didn't like this one."

And then she ate it.

So, while Angela is the extreme example of maximizing cognitive dissonance, Guinness is the extreme example of minimizing cognitive dissonance.

There's got to be a happy medium in there. Someone who would eat the sandwich out of necessity but remember not to buy it again...

I'd like to think that's me, but according to Guinness I slid along the scale depending on what has displeased me and whether or not I'm writing.