The other day at work one of the sales ladies gave me a fun-sized bag of Skittles. You know, Skittles, the chewy, bite-sized fruit candy with the crunchy shell. Actually, she gave me two fun-sized bags of Skittles, but I'm only going to write about one of them.

I put it in my bag. It's just a paper bag with a handle on it that the hotel uses as gift bags, but I need it to carry my stuff around in. I carry around a lot of stuff. Like this journal that I take everywhere to jot down my random thoughts. Newspaper clippings that I save. Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant and mouthwash because you never know when you might need it. Pens and rubber bands and spare change, because I always have to have at least one black pen, one blue pen, and one red pen. People have told me it's like a purse, but I disagree. First of all, it looks nothing like a purse. Second of all, carrying around a purse would seem to indicate that I have gender issues which I so totally do not. So I prefer to think of it more as a homeless person's shopping bag that they carry around all their posessions in. I would rather be a toothless schizophrenic than be thought of as sexually ambiguous.

Anyway, I put the two fun-sized bags of Skittles in my homeless person-style shopping bag (which, by the way, is just white with the hotel logo on it, and not flowery or frilly so shut up) and forgot about them. I'm not a real big candy-eater anyway. So as I left work I ate one of the fun-sized bags of Skittles before I got to my car.

Here's how I eat Skittles. I put a bunch of them in my hand and I eat the red ones first. To me, any red candy is good, cherry, strawberry, raspberry, it doesn't matter. It so happens that red Skittles are cherry, which is my favorite. Now, I should say that I love all red candy except that gross cranberry candy they got out, which I had once and hated as much as I hate regular cranberries. And if anyone ever made Rhubarb candy that would be gross too.

Now, some people will eat them in order of their favorites, like cherry, lemon, orange, grape, lime, or whatever. This is efficient and will certainly ensure that the consumer will derive maximum candy-eating pleasure from his or her bag of Skittles. Others will eat two or three at a time regardless of what flavor they are. These are the undisciplined people who kind of take things one day at a time and live on the wild side.

Skittles say more about your personality than, say, M&Ms do. Because M&Ms all taste the same, and if someone has to eat all the red ones first, they're just anal retentive. But Skittles are all different flavors and people develop their own systems for eating them. As for me, like I said, I eat the red ones first, but then I just go crazy. I mean, sometimes I eat two together, sometimes three, but they're always mixed up together in wild and unusual ways. I might get a grape one and an orange one together. Hell, I might get a grape one and an orange one AND a lemon one all at the same time! It's just me, it's a part of who I am. It's like I never know what to expect and everything gets all crazy. Well, except for the cherry ones. That would just be wrong.

So that's how I ate my first fun-sized bag of Skittles. And before I go any further, let me clarify something for those of you who aren't familiar with how these big candy companies work. OK, the "fun-sized" candy are like the little tiny bags or bite-sized candy bars that you get on Halloween. Like you buy this huge bag at the grocery store and there are like a bajillion little fun-sized bags in it.

This has always seemed kind of ironic to me. I mean, I hear "fun" and I'm thinking like a swimming pool full of Skittles or a truckload of Milk Duds, you know? Fun is jet-skis and volleyball and girls in bikinis. It's just odd that to the people who make candy, "fun" is three sticky Milk Duds in the smallest box they can make, or 20 Skittles in a little bag. To them, fun is the SMALLEST size.

Anyway, ok, so I'm starting my car and pulling out of the driveway and I take out my second fun-sized bag of Skittles. I mean, Milk Duds or M&Ms you can eat while you drive because you don't need to see them or have a system to eat them (and if you do, then you are so mentally ill that you shouldn't be allowed to drive anyway, in my opinion). So then I had this great idea. I would just eat them one at a time.

So I take out one and it's orange, which is ok. Orange is better than grape or lime, at least. I'm not really thrilled or anything, although I always remember this one kid from when I went to boarding school and orange was his favorite, which I always thought was odd. I mean, whose favorite flavor Skittle is orange? And then I remembered that it was Starbursts that that kid was eating at the time, and I wonder, does the same principle apply? It probably does. Except that Starburst doesn't have grape or lime, but it does have strawberry which Skittles does not have, so that's cool.

Anyway, the next on is orange too, which is ok, because I still have the taste of the first orange one. A lemon would have been good at this point, because lemon and orange kind of tastes like tangerine, which I love. Not as much as cherry, but still. But then the third one I took out was orange, and then the fourth one was too.

Now I'm starting to panic. What are the odds of this happening? What if I got a mutant bag of Skittles that was all orange? It wouldn't be so bad, I guess, except I would really miss the cherry ones. But on the other hand, that would mean that there were no lime ones, either.

I hate lime Skittles. Who eats limes? Why do they bother even making lime ones? Whose idea was that?

OK, so the next one I take out is a grape one. Grape is ok. It's not my favorite but at least it's not lime. I suspect that the grape ones are heavier than the rest and I don't know why. I try not to think about it too much. At least, I'm trying not to right now.

So I had four oranges in a row and then a grape. But that's not the weird part. The next one was grape, and the next one after that was grape, too. Now this is weird. So as I was driving down the highway, I got out my pen and paper to write it all down and keep a tally of my Skittles.

I was kind of pissed that I had gotten three grapes in a row, so the next time I took out two at once. And guess what? Both of them were grape! I was freaking out now. Have I gotten God pissed at me for something, and this was His judgement? Was the Devil in my fun-sized bag of Skittles? But, no. If it was the Devil, they would have all been lime.

So here is the order of the Skittles I removed from the bag:

Orange
Orange
Orange
Orange
Grape
Grape
Grape
Grape
Grape-Grape
Cherry
Orange
Cherry
Grape
Lemon
Cherry
Grape
Grape
Cherry

I started to wonder about the laws of statistics and probability. And so I made this table:

Anyway, finally, it dawned on me how fortunate I was. There were no limes!

I wondered if this would make a good "word problem" like you used to get in grade school in math class. I'm too tired to word it right now, but it occured to me then that the whole world is a math class, and my life is just a word problem in the grand scheme of things. I'm going to call some bumber sticker people. After I get some sleep, that is.

Which you can see for yourself by clicking here...

This is ongoing research wherein I continue to obsessively count and tabulate the contents of the Fun-Sized Bags of Skittles.