While some people have a go-to friend, hobby or workout for when they feel stressed or anxious, I have a go-to word: cheese. Unfortunately, I’ve recently realized, after deep contemplation, that my go-to word might be secretly plotting to take over my mind. 

I’ve had a long history with cheese. Just look at my Facebook profile bio, which hasn’t changed since I created it in the summer of 8th grade. Among the list of “My favorite words so far” in my profile’s Intro, cheese is smack dab on the top of the list. Even words like floof, rawr, squeee and hello with a silent “h,” which inhabit the later slots in the list, don’t compare with the slick satisfaction of saying the “ee” in “cheese.”

In fact, my history with cheese traces even further back. In seventh grade during dodgeball, rather than actually participating in the game with flimsy arms and non-existent dodging skills, I made it my duty to stay in the back and name each of the dodgeballs different types of cheese.

The bright green dodgeballs were neon cheese, obviously. The yellow dodgeballs were sun cheese and the dark green ones were moon cheese. Sometimes, I’d be hit with blue cheese and moldy cheese, or be forced to pick up pink, artificial cheese by my P.E. teacher and actually participate in the dodgeball game. (Yes, I blame my low P.E. participation grades on pink cheese).

There was also an odd period of time when chubby unicorns, llamacorns and pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows were all the hype. Rather than fall prey to inferior unicorns, I stuck with the best unicorn of all: cheesycorn.

Have people tried to challenge my love for cheese? 

Absolutely.

Have any of them succeeded?

None of them even came close.

Nevertheless, after all these years defending and supporting my friend cheese, you would think that cheese is on my side. Yet it seems like our relationship is one-sided; cheese’s niceness might just be a flawless facade aimed to mask its true manipulative intentions. 

The first evidence of this stems from the cafeteria food. Since we’ve come back from the pandemic, I seem unable to escape cheese. When I order pizza, every slice has some kind of cheese on it, even if it’s a veggie pizza that doesn’t require it. If I head to the grab-and-go line, the sandwiches contain neatly sliced pieces of cheddar and mozzarella. Despite the perceived variety of the specialty line, baked potatoes, pasta and burrito bowls all come with a side of cheese. There is no other explanation for this overwhelming cheese takeover, other than the fact that it wants to take over my mind.

To make it worse, everything I see connects with cheese now. The yellow Ticonderoga pencil is cheese-colored. The sun is just a huge ball of cheese. The Chipotle sauce distributed during deadline night in newspaper, which I initially assumed was mayo, turned out to be cream cheese. Even when I try to take an innocent picture, the default word I have to yell out is none other than “Cheese!”

Despite my awareness of this unrelenting takeover, am I still going to idolize cheese as the best word in the world? 

Yes. 

Otherwise, who knows what inferior word may attempt to strip cheese from its greatness?