Today I’m going to talk about soup and hopefully give you a break from all those coming-of-age posts. I’m so sorry I put you through all of them, dear reader, please forgive me.

So, soup.

I’m writing about this because I promised several people I would so that I could break away from what was slowly becoming a series of duplicate columns.

Let me start off by saying something here: I hate soup. There are only 3 types of soup that I will consume: Miso, chicken noodle, and…. hmm well I guess there are only two.

I don’t understand why people enjoy soup. It seems like one of those things you only eat if you’re old and have no teeth (this from a 17-year-old who has all her teeth).

The ones I despise the most though, are the thick soups. Thick soup is soup that’s trying too hard to be a meal. It’s almost there where you might mistake it as some soft food, but then just as you’re about to swallow, you come to the realization that this is, in fact, really thick soup.

I had a terrible experience with thick soup once.

My family and I were at a hotel with some company friend’s of my dad. It was an early Christmas dinner party. That morning, it had been drilled into us that we were to eat everything that was served and not to make any comments or faces.

I’m not necessarily a picky eater, so I figured that everything would be all right, but after a couple dinner rolls, lo and behold, the waiter arrived with trays of soup.

It was some sort of reddish pink concoction, the ingredients of which I still don’t know. It was so thick, I could scoop it up with a fork. Eww… I was planning on just moving it around my plate and prentending to enjoy the mystery liquid.

All was going according to plan until one of the company wives started commenting on the soup. I didn’t really want to engage in the conversation because I hadn’t actually tasted the soup. I was evading eye contact, looking down, trying to seem as engrossed in my soup as possible.

Then she looked right at me, gave me a smile and asked me to try some of the soup. I naturally lied and told her it was oh so very delicious, except she must have known I hadn’t eaten anything and asked me take a bite of soup (can you take a ‘bite’ of soup?)

Looking back, I could have lied some more, tried to find some sort of escape, maybe even fallen off my chair and pretended to have gracefully fainted.

Sadly though, none of those ideas came to mind, and all I could think was “everyone is waiting for me to taste this soup.”

So I did.

It tasted disgusting.

I told her it was good, and downed an entire glass of iced tea to try to get the taste out of my mouth.

From then on, I vowed to never eat soup…unless it’s miso…or chicken noodle. As I said, I like two types of soup, so I’m not that bad…right?