The Cookie

Never before had I experienced a snack food that truly reveled in its mediocrity. The cookie was a Pepperidge Farm Soft Baked Captiva. Although I believe Pepperidge Farm intended the cookie to captivate me in a whirl of dark chocolate brownie bliss, the only thing that captivated me was its mediocrity. When I took the first bite I was a little surprised that it didn't taste as good as the other Pepperidge Farm cookies, but it didn't taste bad either. I couldn't describe any more and so I took another bite. Now at this point if it had been a bad cookie, anyone with any sense of taste or smell would have thrown the cookie away (yes I do have an excellent palate). But it wasn't a bad cookie. It certainly wasn't any good though. I'm not sure what it was, but the cookie began to grow on me. It's possible that deep down I actually liked the cookie, but I think it's more likely that it was such a curious feeling that I wanted to experience it some more. And so, I downed the cookie, relishing the mediocre flavor.

Now, I should probably give a little more background to this story. The cookies had actually been sitting in the back of my friend's Volvo for quite a while. Maybe it was the magic of the leather, early springtime sun and Swedish engineering, but I doubt Pepperidge Farm is capable of making the quintessential mediocre cookie. I mean, they're good, but they're not that good.

More about the blog

While I already gave a bit of a background on how I came with the title, I should probably describe a little bit better what's going to go into the blog, that is, before I actually write. I have had several experiences, mainly with food, that have left me feeling, well, mediocre. But you can't feel mediocre, can you? "Mediocre" is used to describe something else. Well, that's what I'm blogging about: that feeling, or at least that's my starting subject. Hopefully, after I get this started I will come up with some other things to include in the blog as well and the title will come to serve partly as an identity.

Introductions

Have you ever experienced something that gave you a feeling nearly perfectly in-between dissatisfaction and pleasure, but with a slight sway negative? I'm referring to something profoundly intermediate, something that you cannot say has quality and yet that you cannot say is significantly inferior? This, I call mediocrity. While these first few words might seem rather moving, I have no intention of pursuing mediocrity; I try to set my standards slightly higher than that. However, this blog now exists because I have truly experienced mediocrity and thus desire to write about it. You would not expect something that we would consider just OK, to have a strong feeling associated with it, and yet, I will occasionally have such experiences, ones that leave with you neither a sense of discontent nor gratification. Mediocrity can be a difficult word to define, because it refers to quality that is in-between or so-so, but maybe pitched slightly to the lower end, which makes it such a difficult feeling to pinpoint. It comes to this, then, that I decide to describe a couple of these experiences by example: quintessential examples, at that, of mediocrity.