I love chocolate chip cookies. 

That fact, of course, does not define me. It’s most likely true for a good sixty to seventy percent of everyone in the entire world.

Still, I really love chocolate chip cookies. I feel like my love of them is special.

The right question, of course, is, “How so?”

Well, my love of chocolate chip cookies is so special that I am baking one single cookie right now in our toaster oven. Just one. In a tiny cast iron pot. 

The cookie is exactly 24 grams, which, I calculated yesterday, is roughly one hundred kilocalories. 

I calculated this with nutritional information, not through a calorimeter, which would be the more precise way to know for sure. I used the 4 kilocalories per gram of carbs or protein and 9 kilocalories per gram of fat. 

So, it’s a rough estimate. 

One hundred calories isn’t a magic number, it’s just a quick way to control my inclination to eat thousands of calories of chocolate chip cookies at a time. Nothing about a huge tray of warm chocolate chip cookies on a chilly March day is going to turn out well for me. 

So, I made a full batch, carefully measured out 24 gram scoops of dough, and froze them on parchment paper in the freezer. I took one out ten minutes ago and put it into the tiny preheated cast iron pot and baked it for ten minutes. 

It looks amazing. 

Does this make me special? 

I think it makes me a lot of things, or at least suggests. Obsessive. Controlling. Idiosyncratic. Calculated. 

In other words, human.

The bigger question for me is why would I care about being special? What about being human makes me/us want to be special?

The simplest answer is that it makes me feel good. It mitigates any bad mood I might be in to think, “Oh! I am special!”

It isn’t enough to just be different. In so many ways I don’t want to be different. I want to be just about the same as everyone else except in just a few ways so that others might say, “Hey, that old man is just about the same as everyone else except in the way that he loves chocolate chip cookies. Boy, he’s special.”

Yep, that’s almost logical.

And noticing that logical rhymes with comical, I’ll choose to chuckle at myself and not, as I am wont to do, tsk tsk.

Oh, and I’m also going to slowly eat that warm, delicious, chocolate chip cookie.