A Terrible Mistake

Christmas being the second most popular occasion for sale-priced boxes of chocolate (behind Easter and just ahead of St. Valentine's Day, sales figures pulled from the ether surrounding my transcendent consciousness), I'm sitting here now with no less than a kilogram of chocolatey confections.
Is there any such thing as a sugar hang-over? I'll be going well into the night (Mass Effect and Halo 3 with my younger brother FTW) and I dread what tomorrow will bring. Thankfully, there'll be more chocolate in the morning. And coffee. And more Star Trek DVDs to watch with my brother. And more Halo 3 to play. (Brothers FTW.) And then to shed some of that excessive energy, I can go trudge around in the snow for a few hours, come back in, and play more video games (with chocolate.)

That's not what I sat down to write, though...
What was it again?
Oh, right, chocolate.

I just tried some Lindt "Excellence," the stuff specially marketed to pretentious connoisseur types with the country of bean-origin an the box, and it was very good. I compared Madagascar with Ecuador, and found that one of them was slightly smokey and the other more earthy. You have to consume 75% dark in small nibbles and let it melt in your mouth. Chewing a mouthful of dark chocolate is a bit like chugging red wine--not a good idea. Unlike wine-tasting, though, there's no downside to swallowing.

Anyway, after consuming this heavenly bitter chocolate of tropical origin, I went to a box of Hershey's "Pot of Gold: Excellence--Fine Chocolates and Truffles." (That's the gold box.)
Hershey's milk chocolate is vile, in my opinion, but the refined version in Pot of Gold boxes is usually quite good. Not so after tasting the real, dark, sophisticated stuff. All I could taste of this fabled "Pot of Gold" was sugar, maybe with a hint of "milk ingredients" (whatever those are...)

Thankfully, after half a box of the Hershey's stuff I've mostly forgotten what real chocolate tastes like. I've also discovered that I was wrong in my earlier assumption about not feeling any side-effects from swallowing all the chocolate I'm "tasting."