High School can be a scary place, what with raving packs of girls filled with hormones and caffeine walking through the halls, salivating like hungry wolves looking for their next meal. In other words, it can be tough out there. Some students look for an escape from this ugly place in a variety of ways. Personally, my escape is chocolate. It used to be that a cheap Hershey’s bar would suffice, but now I have found that my tastes have gotten slightly more expensive. Fancier chocolates like Ghirrardelli bars and Lindt truffles now do me in. But, for a high school student, these tastes don’t always agree with my budget, so the annual band candy fundraiser is a welcome sight in my chocolate-starved eyes. Each year the hundred or so members of the band tote around their orange and white boxes of deliciousness containing such delicacies as caramel, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate crisp, almond, and dark almond bars. However, the same group of laws that did away with bake sales and vending machines also seemed to rid the band of its most popular fundraiser. I, at least, was concerned. Where now would I get my delicious caramel filled chocolate bar, or my chocolate crisp bar, which by the way is so much better than a Nestle’s Crunch bar? Would I be forced to hunt down members of the band outside of school, meeting them in a dark alley somewhere like an addict meets their dealer? The rules seemed to demand it. But then I began to see the beloved orange and white boxes popping up all over the halls of AHS, even during class sometimes. To an outside observer this would send a couple of messages: one, all of the administration staff has suffered from the same vision loss that prevents them from seeing orange and white boxes or, two, the band’s fundraising efforts are so much more important than other clubs’ efforts that the administration would look the other way at such an apparent breaking of the rules. The more likely version of the story: selling sweets in school is not making kids obese, or at least not the kids at Ames High, and the administration understands that the withholding of selling sweets in school is only torturing chocolate and sweet lovers everywhere, including myself. Besides, fundraising is important, and the selling of sweets through band candy and bake sales ensures that all our wonderful clubs and organizations will have the funds they need to do all the super-cool, excellent things that they do.