Speak the words on your lips

This afternoon, over a rousing game of Monopoly (which I never win, but love to yell play) I tried to explain the plot line of one of my new favorite romance books of all time. My summary went something like this:

Me: It starts in a medieval convent where they train women to become wives. Knights would then come down and choose their brides and the convent would be paid a finders fee. Well, in this particular book (it's a series) the convent's head chef is sold to a knight who--
At this point, I started to laugh histerically--has a particularly keen sense of smell. He wears a nose guard so he doesn't smell anything and therefore doesn't taste anything. He's not able to find a chef who can cook for him and his home is really really clean because he can smell dirt. Of course, they fall in love, which is scandelous, and he saves the realm and gets to eat and it's quite wonderful.
Friend: Wait, how does he save the realm?
Me: Laughing so hard I can barely breathe. Well, he was supposed to marry the daughter of his enemy, but he married a nun instead, so war ensued. Oh, and they called him "the Beast" because if he removed his nose gaurd the smells of battle would overwhlem him and he would do the fighting of 20 men.
Friend: Really? The Beast?
Me: Yes. The chef and him fought alot in the begining of the book because he wouldn't compliment her cooking and she would annoy him on purpose. And when he was younger he had a chef who taught him to concentrate on one smell at a time, and the best smell for this was truffles. And there was a treasure in the South Forest that the two enemies were fighting over and they didn't know it, but the treasure was truffles. One side used pigs and and other used dogs and they fought all the time about which was better.

The thing is, I didn't see the hilarity of "The Marriage Test" until I said all of this out loud and tried to explain it to someone else. Up until this afternoon it seemed perfectly reasonable to imagine that a man with a super keen shnoz and a nun-chef would be thrown together by circumstance and fall in love. Why not? Stranger couplings have happened (and I know a few of them personally).
Something happens when we are asked/forced to put thoughts into words. Sometimes we are granted a clarity we couldn't find inside our minds; we can fully grasp what we've been confusedly thinking. Other times, we are shown how ridiculous our thoughts have been--things that seemed reasonable turn out to be absolutely ludicrous.

**Quick Note: The kindergarten/James Joycean quality of my narrative should be excused. I did a marathon interview (8 hours) today; it's hard to be intrigued by a question the forth time you've heard it... but I think I succeeded. Now I have NO brain cells left.