I am a Consumer Whore #2

Today was a big day for the Big Ten conference in football. It also turned out to be a terrible day, but I didn't know that when I woke up this morning. I only knew how great it would be if the conference won four games and proved that its teams deserved consideration among the country's frontrunners.

To get ready for the logjam of Big Ten games around noon, I wanted to do something that would show my unequivocal support for the conference, but I wasn't sure what I could do. For inspiration, I turned to my memory of the conference's own Big Ten Network and the way in which they covered games this season. It didn't take me long to realize that there was only one thing that I really could do, one thing that the Big Ten Network had endorsed above all else.

I made RO*TEL-and-Velveeta queso dip.

RO*TEL, Velveeta, and, to celebrate the BCS, Tostitos: according to my TV, possibly the most perfect gametime snack in existence. It seemed so perfect, in fact, that I was concerned that I might be literally blown backward into one of my walls.

I consulted my inner actuarial and determined that the risk was acceptable. I'd been thinking about moving to an apartment closer to work anyway. I carefully read the directions on the can of RO*TEL and opened the package of Velveeta to get started.

I have something of a confession to make as a Big Ten fan: prior to today, I had never worked with Velveeta before. I think I may have eaten things that had Velveeta in them, but I'd neither seen nor touched the raw product myself. Seeing it in front of me then, in its vegetable shortening wrapper, I couldn't help feeling that something wasn't quite right.

After adding the Velveeta to a pot with the RO*TEL, it still didn't look quite right.

It didn't look right when the queso was done, either. I guess that's how queso had always looked when I'd seen it in the past — including in the RO*TEL commercial — but I wasn't used to producing something like that in my kitchen. I was more used to cooking... food.

Still, though, the TV had told me that this queso dip would blow me away. Perhaps it would look better with a chip.

Somehow, the chip made it look worse.

Eating the chip with the queso dip was also a disappointment. I didn't fly backward. I stayed remarkably stationary. There was nothing particularly impressive about the dip. It tasted exactly like the nacho cheese topping that I would expect to get from a Taco Bell or a high school cafeteria.

It was then that I realized that I had just made a bowl of fake-cheese queso dip that I would have to consume by myself despite not really liking fake-cheese queso dip. I only had the principle of professing some "ironic" support for the Big Ten by which to justify my actions. What I had done was even worse than paying fifty dollars for brand-new, pre-ripped jeans. I was a mess.

I sat down at my kitchen table and got started on using it up, but even after ten minutes of continuous eating, it didn't look like I had visibly reduced the amount of queso in the bowl. The only thing that I accomplished was cutting my gum with a tortilla chip. Realizing that there was no way to interpret this other than as another defeat at the hands of my TV, I put the queso in the fridge and slinked off to watch the beginning of the TicketCity Bowl.

Again, a terrible day for the Big Ten.