Made in China: A Plea

Think about your childhood time spent with your cousins who are your age. Pick out the best memories. Now, select some of the worst. Okay. Now I want you to pluck out a few of the between times. You know, when it wasn't awesome or awful. When it just was and nothing happened. You weren't excited about doing something or woefully anguished. In all likelihood, it may apply only to me, but for the sake of this post, I'll say it's a universal truth that there were none of these times.

Most childhood memories follow the Principle of Extremes which states that the quality of a given person, place, or thing can only be in excess of great or lacking entirely. This happens to be the situation with every dollar store item I've encountered. I've compiled a short list of things that are either really good or really terrible:

• Cheerios: a good cheerio is dense, can last an entire cold breakfast meal without becoming soggy, and gives you some of the worst tasting burps you can have. The fake ones are full of air, dissipate when they meet milk, and come in orange bags. For some reason I want to say that if "incontinence" didn't already mean what it does, I'd apply it to knock-off cheerios.
• Fingernail Clippers: my favorite pair will cut exactly where you place them in a single snip. It's heavenly! For show, they'll even discard your clippings missile style in the direction of you unsuspecting family member's face. My dollar store clippers are pretty good pliers for shredding off my thumb nail slowly, leaving a jagged edge which will help me receive further damage to my fingernails.
• Sushi: I can't enjoy sushi.
• Jobs: talk to anyone in America, they either have the best job in the world, or they literally spend time spring-loading their chairs and planning new escape routes to get away from work more quickly each day. I stopped spring-loading my chair when a spring stabbed me in the buttocks and I had to have it surgically extracted with a staple remover.
• Pepto Bismol: the product never actually changes, but only extreme opinions are cast at the pink stuff.
• This list

 If you're planning to get me a Principle of Extremes-listed item (or a Power over Ethernet item) for Christmas this year, please make sure it falls on the awesome side.