And herein lay the problem. You put a child who doesn’t want to be at a party at a party and surround him with people he doesn’t want to talk to, and he does the only thing that ten-year-olds know how to do with any sort of confidence: he eats. He eats whatever you put in front of him. Anything at all that keeps him from having to speak, or emote, or interact socially with any human besides someone who may be standing in the way of food.

Now, we never really had appetizers at parties. We were more of a chip-and-dip family. If you came to a party hungry, well, that was your own damn fault, ’cause all that we promised in the invitation was cake and maybe a single box of wine. The day of any party was usually rife with cleaning and dusting and screaming, and my parents rarely had time to do all three of those things, let alone time to prepare pigs in a blanket.

But today was a special occasion (i.e., my mother had made it to Sam’s Club with enough time to buy a cake and a few boxes of frozen finger foods), and we had a hopping spread of sliders, barbecue chicken wings, and taquitos. And my tubby self couldn’t get enough of it.

First of all, it was food, and food meant I didn’t have to talk to anybody. But more important, it was appetizers, which are inarguably, categorically better than regular-sized food. It’s like Jesus said, “Take the same amount of flavor as a full-sized adult food, but put it into the body of this tiny baby food, and also roll it into a stick, because everything is obviously better in phallic form, and BAM, you got yourself the greatest foodstuff in the world.” I mean, I was only a kid, and I couldn’t know this at the time, but I would make the argument now that fried mac ’n’ cheese balls fresh from the oven, no matter how sloppily they are made, are greater than the best sex you can possibly imagine in your entire life. (The thought of combining these two things is too much for my brain to even comprehend.)

So let’s recap. I was an awkward, chubby kid, standing at a party I didn’t want to be at, with a mouth full of metal that tasted like a handful of quarters, next to a plate of the greatest food created by Jesus himself, a food we did not get to eat but once every five to ten years. My brain said, “You know this isn’t going to end well. Just wait for your ice cream cake, and everything will be fine.” But my stomach said, “Eat the taquitos, tubby. We’re not gonna live forever.” And you sure as hell know which one I listened to.