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Immigrant Bones

Once, a very long time ago, I was eating chicken wings with a bunch of other friends. It wasn't a particularly special meal, it just involved a few people hanging out and breaking bread together. The reason I remember this meal, however, was one particular line of banter from the conversation.

I don't quite remember why, but we were eating bone-in, traditional wings. In hindsight, I'd like to believe that everyone had accepted the universal truth that bone-in wings tasted better (that's my story, and I'm sticking with it). In the process of chowing down, though, we set up a central plate where everyone discarded all of the left-over bones. It was almost an after-thought, just to make sure we all had room on our plates to keep eating. It ultimately led to hilarity.

Now, everyone has a different definition of when they've eaten all of the meat off of the wing. Some people like to eat every last scrap of meat. You can literally feel the smoothness of the bone if you pick up one of the left over bones from one of these people. Other people, on the other hand, eat whatever they can easily pull off from the bone. If it takes significant effort to pull the meat off of that bone, it's not really edible.

In our case, we had people from each of the two camps, so we had a good mix of the two. The funny part came when one of the people at the table looked over, picked up one of the smooth bones, and proclaimed, "dannng! Those right there are some immigrant bones!" It took a second for what he said to sink in, but he was commenting that people who aren't from the US tend to have a different relationship to food. Put simply, they don't waste it. It wasn't exactly a scientifically-backed proclamation, but we all figured out what he meant. And then we laughed.

I have since told the Mild Girlfriend about that story, and she finds it equally hilarious. Keeping that in mind, this was the result when she and I both had grapefruits for breakfast:

I will let you guess who ate which grapefruit (here's a hint).

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