You Only Live Once, And Then You're Dead

     

      I just ate 490 calories worth of pudding. It wasn’t even that good. I should have been writing my final paper for 18^th Century Wit, but instead I decided to buy pudding because, as I told myself, “I deserved a treat.” To be clear, I did not deserve a treat.

      A draft of my paper is due tomorrow and I have no idea what to write about. To make matters worse, I haven’t read the book I’m supposed to be writing about. Nevertheless, I put my books away after 15 minutes and made my way outside to purchase some pudding. I saw the large cup of pudding in the refrigerated container and knew it was a lot. I knew it would be better not to buy it, there were some perfectly nice bananas close by. But, guess what. I bought it and ate it. Then I made the mistake of looking at the label. 490 calories, 16 grams of fat, 580mg of sodium.

     This entire weekend had been incredibly self-indulgent as evident by my laundry hamper, which smelled like an episode of Mad Men. I had made some questionable choices, but no regrets, just love. After all, you only live once. The pudding, however, was a whole other animal. Suddenly, it seemed wrong to have eaten so much pudding. Why had I made such a bad choice? Suddenly, it seemed like I had been making a lot of bad choices lately. I haven’t been reading or writing as much, I don’t get enough sleep, I’m behind on all my work, I go on Twitter when I’m at my job. I shouldn’t even be typing this right now because I need to go to my professor’s office hours to talk about the paper I haven’t started yet. Where’s my initiative? Why don’t I care? Where is my life headed? Should I get some more pudding?

      YOLO, or for the unhip “you only live once,” is a good motto to live by. It means taking risks and throwing convention to the side. You have nothing to lose, so you might as well go for it, right? Well, maybe. But, dear readers, I can say without a doubt that YOLO is best not applied to pudding. If you buy pudding and eat too much of it, you’ll be forced to question where your life is headed and become even more self-indulgent by writing about it. Yes, it’s true, you only live once, but after eating 490 calories of a shitty dessert the romanticism of the motto wears off and you realize after life comes death. And after too much pudding comes a really bad tummy ache.