January 25, 2012

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like your responses to a thought experiment.

Imagine yourself in a large group of people.  An official-looking person asks the group to separate into twenty-six smaller groups, organized according to the first letter of members' first names.

Then another official-looking person comes into the room wheeling a cart of cupcakes in three different flavors:  chocolate, say, lemon, and red velvet.  (The you in this thought experiment both loves cupcakes and loves chocolate, lemon, and red velvet cupcakes equally.)  As the official-looking person walks around the room, she offers each person his or her choice of cupcakes (this is apparently a bottomless cart).  Some people choose chocolate, some lemon, and some red velvet.

Then, when the official-looking person gets to your group, the people who share the first letter of your first name, she says, "Oh, sorry, the lemon cupcakes aren't for you.  You may have your pick of the chocolate and the red velvet."  You take a cupcake, perhaps chocolate, perhaps red velvet.

Then she continues on, offering members of the rest of the groups their choice of all three kinds of cupcakes.

So here's the question:  Are you angry that you weren't given the choices the other groups were given?  If so, how angry?  (I will reveal that, in the piece I'm working on that includes this thought experiment, the title of the section is Fuck You and Your Goddamn Cupcake, which ought to make my answer clear, but you have no obligation to agree with me.) 

Note, please, that the question I'm asking isn't about practicality—a cupcake is a cupcake, I still like red velvet, if that's the way it worked out then whatever—but about the visceral emotional reaction you do or don't have to the thought.