Human anatomy, the dessert stomach and yaks. Trust me, it’ll make sense when you read it.

DINNER  n. –  the smallest amount of food that must be eaten in order to qualify for dessert.

I’m sorry, son, but dinner is a necessary evil if you want dessert. It’s like suffering through Aunt Hattie’s lipstick-kiss before you can open the gift she brought you. Or bathing. Although both of those things only happen about once a year. Dinner’s a pretty regular occurrence around our house.

Every evening it’s the same thing: you have to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing, wash your hands, set the table, sit down and suffer through a half hour of actually having a conversation with your parents. Meanwhile, you’re figuring out how much healthy food you have to eat before you can say you’re full. Then you declare yourself full and, in the same breath, ask for dessert.

On the surface, the idea that you could be both full and ready for dessert would seem to be an impossibility. After all, by definition when you’re full you’re, well, full. But as you recently explained, that assumes that we believe what all those silly doctors and teachers tell us about human anatomy. Obviously the naive and uninformed medical community is under the mistaken impression that the human child has only one stomach. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that even the significantly less evolved yak has more than one stomach. Are we, or are we not, better than a common yak? Any idiot would know that we have a second stomach reserved exclusively for dessert.

I have to admit that I thought you were full of hooey until I realized that I, too, clearly have a dessert stomach.

DESSERT STOMACH n. – the part of the body that always has room regardless of the status of the regular stomach.

I can’t actually remember the last time being “full” kept me from downing a 15 pound slab of dark chocolate cheesecake at the end of a meal. I’ve never turned down a dark chocolate anything regardless of the previously declared status of my stomach.

But that alone isn’t sufficient proof. Seeing is believing. And I believe because I can actually see my dessert stomach quite clearly. I see it in the mirror all the time. How do I know it’s my dessert stomach? Well that’s obvious: the more dessert I eat, the bigger it gets.

Thanks for helping me clear that up, son.