We call them horseshoes, literally translated from Chinese, even if they don't look anything at all like horseshoes, and they have been something of a staple in my family since the age of Betamax. It's a dry, almost hollow pastry (hopia, really) with the layered texture of light piaya, thicker but smaller than the average palm (i.e. the body part that palmists like to look at). Until recently, it's always been filled with a sticky peanut and sesame paste derived from molasses although not as sweet as it may sound. My family doesn't like the new butter filling as much, although my aunt loves them. There is, by the way, no means of telling apart the different hopia from their appearances (this is where the plot thickens... like molasses).

Yesterday, my mom called the hopia factory that makes them horseshoes to place an order and was informed that if she ordered in batches of 50, they could ensure that each of those batches would be special ('special' in what way, they never specified). My mom duly ordered a special hundred of the classic peanut and another special hundred of the new butter horseshoes for my aunt, which wasn't a staggering number since the pastries keep rather long in their individual packets and they should just be enough to sustain the family for a few weeks.

Receiving the hopia today, we found out that the factory lovingly labeled each of the boxes. It should be a good thing if not for the fact that whoever labeled them, labeled them all with 'butter.' Of course, having been labeled that way, all four boxes were effectively as good as being unlabeled. Luckily, the stacking order wasn't disturbed at all during transit, so our secretary called up the factory, just in case they remembered how they stacked the boxes.

After explaining the scenario (which took several minutes), the lady on the other end of the line simply had one foolproof piece of helpful advice for us, and that was that we should open up one packet each from the boxes and sort the whole thing out by eating them hopia.

As an aside, I ate a late breakfast of unflavored oatmeal and a banana, which I followed thirty-two seconds later by an early lunch. Following a strange and unexplainable urge, I also took a glass of fiber supplement to cap off the meal(s).

That meal was an hour ago at most, and taste testing packets of hopia wasn't the best situation to be in when one had stomach contents fortified by fiber and unflavored oatmeal.

I figured that at the most, I would only have to eat three hopia (and two at the least). The first round (yes, there will be a second round) yielded the following order: peanut, butter, peanut. It should be safe to deduce that the fourth box was butter but my brother saw a cracked hopia among its contents with what looked very much like peanut filling showing. He opened up another packet from that box and sure enough, it was peanut. Thus: peanut, butter, peanut, peanut... wrong! Finding no more suspicious cracks, we went to round two to settle the disparity.

Luckily, round two was finished after I tasted one more hopia from the first box that I categorically labeled 'peanut,' and found it to be butter. There we were - two and two finally. We could have tested the other boxes further but I feared that the boxes could have been packed at random. That would no doubt complicate the situation by a factor of x, with x being an unpronounceable number used only by hopia factory workers and drug addicts in formulating cosmological hypotheses. I also feared finding a hopia with neither peanut nor butter (or even peanut butter) filling. In my mind, I pictured a disgruntled hopia sorter wreaking vengeance on unsuspecting customers after learning that he would be replaced by a more efficient sorter in the form of a sorting hat.

The moral of the story is that life will always throw us an assortment of unsorted hopia: some will have peanut filling and others will invariably have butter, and even some with essences of digruntled vengeance. We really can't do nothing much about that. Life is really a mixed bag, and it's all up to us to sort things out with the fiber instilled in us. At the end of the day, we will look at all the hopia that we have sorted and think to ourselves: "I quit my job for this?"

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