Milk. You might love it, you might hate it. But regardless of your own feelings, you probably know someone who's thrown it up. Whatever your acquaintance with moo juice might be, even the sworn soymilk drinker can identify that milk normally comes in whole, 2 percent and skim.
While there exists a plethora of uses for bovine broth, my primary preferences are cooking, drinking and (like all of you) adding to my daily allowance of Count Chocula.
When it comes to Hanson, everyone knows that Jordan is the cutest, but without his brothers he'd just be another toe-headed poser. When it comes to milk, everyone knows that whole is the best, but without the others it wouldn't be nearly as good.
Whole becomes the reason we put up with skim and 2 percent -- our mothers knew that if whole was all we drank we wouldn't appreciate it. To avoid the horror that is the completely harmless, no-frills skim, we often employ a gallon of 2 percent to cover all the bases.
Therefore, we are perpetually in a cereal world of not-as-good, not-as-bad as it could be.
If we apply this analogy a little further, it becomes apparent that girls are a lot like milk.
Just stick with me here.
On a completely superficial plane, there are three types of girls: the pretty ones, the average ones and, how can I put this gently ... paper-bag candidates. Before I lose all credibility -- if I had any to begin with -- I would like to point out that all women have the potential to be beautiful due to what they have inside.
Since it's not possible to build a personal relationship with each female you see while walking from sociology to fossil hominids, please suspend your open-minded good intentions and lower yourself to my level for the next few minutes.
Like whole milk, pretty girls are ideal. You want to see them all the time, even though you know they will ultimately skew your idea of reality and cause you to die an untimely and torturous death.
Not-so-pretty girls fall into the skim category; probably the best for you because they're not caught up in the trappings of being the most tasty, rather focusing on other goals like winning Sissy Spacek look-a-like contests.
Finally coming to the crux of my argument, we are left to settle for average girls, the 2 percent milk of the available date world.
As a self-proclaimed member of this 2 percent majority (if you disagree, please don't wake me from the dream) I feel like I can speak from the vantage point of the middle. And believe me, average-looking girls have perhaps the worse lot of all.
Pretty girls are pretty, and with outer beauty comes the types of perks that others will never quite understand. Girls who fell from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down really don't have much on the outside to help them, and sadly, that's just the way it is. But at least they know where they stand.
Constantly in limbo between skim and whole classifications, however, many of us average lookers worry about how we are being perceived on a daily basis.
Perhaps if our skin is clear, our outfit matches and we actually had time to do our hair before class, we have the chance of sneaking into the pretty girl category for the day. But if we were working late the night before and are forced to cover the bird's nest on our head with a bandana just to get to class on time, we are automatically relegated to the skim milk bin.
There is an inherent problem with this. Outside of the fact that this generalizes how society views women based on the shallow concept of outer beauty, it shows that I have a freaky and unhealthy fascination with milk.
But aside from that, whatever category you think you fall into, the important connection to remember is that all forms of milk have the ability to spoil.
So ladies, here's my advice to you: go sour. Forget what someone else thinks about your label and do what you want. Become the sour cream of your own onion dip.
Independent thought. It does a student body good.
Heather Hull is a communication junior who couldn't find a spot for Miller High Life. Reach her at heather.hull@asu.edu.
