Pass the Couverture

Chocolates. Everybody likes that melting velvetiness of it on their tongues. Chocolates are the best inventions since the ice cream. When it’s masterfully processed, crunchy or smooth, with cream or without, chocs are a winner any day- especially with the younger generation. It’s simply delightful when you can share this simple joy with someone else. There are few better memory makers, especially if shared over a few stories, laughter and love…there’s something about laughter…
To the more health conscious folks, this is not a funny matter. Chocolates are a no-no. The hazards it constitutes are not justified by the pleasure there derived. No sire. And if you’ve seen a clogged heart, a weight loss junkie or an obese person struggling against by-pass surgery, you just may change your mind, if not your tastes.

Couvertures are not just chocolates, and although my parole needs expansion (as I have not yet seen the world and tasted all the chocolate types there are), I daresay, chocolates with cocoa butter ain’t such a bummer. It looks good and it tastes better. So also is information. A juicy bit of news (true or untrue) is quite like chocolate, everybody wants some.

I have heard it called information transaction, but that is simply prettying up the ugliness of the word ‘gossip’. Glossed up right, the most uninteresting story can become a sensation in the flare of a nostril.

This social-network generation of ours is worse hit, as everybody is up on everybody else’ business. The ‘say it now’,‘what’s on your mind;’- twitter, facebook, MySpace, hi5, blogs, YouTube…pages have gotten us hyperactive in the virtual world. So much that we have been tagged the ‘twitter generation’.
When you exhaust thoughts on your personal life and opinions on general topics, you are pressured to keep on the flow, and you tend to turn on the faucets of gossip about other people’s lives or share outright lies. you share thoughts and information without thinking them through.

Many have been victims of the gravepine, homes have been broken by it, reputations have been tattered by it and in extreme cases, lives have been lost to it. Imagine, the raging inferno in someone else’s life started by an uncouth mouth; probably yours, in a bid to be the first to break or share an (unconfirmed) sensational piece of news.

Even if it was confirmed true, airing others’ dirty laundry doesn’t get rid of yours. Besides, the singular action says more about you, the sharer, than it does the subject of discourse. It tells everybody you are not to be trusted, and trust me, someday, you will wish that wasn’t so.

The short lived pleasure of breaking the news on someone else’ private affairs are accompanied by other painful backlashes that are better imagined.

As do most consequences, they hardly rear their ugly heads immediately, but rather wait it out until you think you are home dry. You cause someone pain, expect it back- in it’s mulitiplied, glorified form. It’s a simple principle. Call it Poetic Justice or Karma, I simply call it harvest. So watch what you sow as you will definitely come back areaping.

Save the world some misery: Next time you are tempted to pass on the ‘couverture’ on someone else, take a deep breathe and…DON’T!