cake chute
Not unlike making the realization that you've totally misunderstood the lyrics to a song is the discovery that you've been saying a word or phrase wrong for years without realizing it. In recent years, I've learned that jibe (not jive) refers to things that are in accord, the saying is "for all intents and purposes" (not "all intensive purposes"), and, most recently, that it's crapshoot (not crap chute):
crapshoot |ˈkrapˌ sh oōt|
noun
a crap game.• informal a risky or uncertain matter : predicting any extreme weather event is a scientific crapshoot.
Despite being thankful that I'm no longer referring to "a lively style of dance popular esp. in the 1940s and 1950s" in the context of non-organic pork not agreeing with me due to migraines, I was attached to the mental imagery that accompanied crap chute. The dice and green felt alternative will take some getting used to.
That said, the idea of life being equated to a chute that could potentially end in a pile of manure seemed unreasonably harsh, especially given my tendency towards optimism. When I was recently talking to someone about all the uncertainty inherent in making big decisions, the crap chute metaphor (before the correct term was brought to my attention) was employed to describe life. I suggested thinking about it as a cake chute as a more positive conceptualization. If well thought through, life-altering decisions rarely end utterly horribly, in a pile of figurative crap. The various potential outcomes may be different, but none are necessarily bad. Like chocolate and vanilla in my cake chute imaginings. Or angel food. Or carrot. All different, but all good. Maybe the carrot cake has cream cheese icing, which makes it slightly better.
