Donald.

Without any particular reason, please let me share with you three Donald Duck related episodes from my life.

1. Change

When I was 10, my mother surprised me with a colourful notebook. Its cover featured Donald Duck dressed as the stereotype of a Parisian artist, lingering merrily on Montmartre, with Sacré Coeur in the background. For a long time, I couldn't find an appropriate purpose for the book, and I found it way too exclusive to just use it for school assignments or other ordinary tasks. I was keeping it empty for years, and even when I eventually started to write something in it, I immediately tore out the used pages because I thought it deserves something fancier.

By the time the book finally lost its charm and I really needed empty pages to make notes, it would have already been way too embarrassing to carry around a notebook with Donald, le canard parisien on the cover.

2. Date

When I was 15, I walked home a really cute girl from drama class and even dared to hold her hand for a while before saying goodbye. Two days later I got a letter from her, written on a red paper ornamented with hearts and a sticker where Donald's female counterpart kisses the duck who reacts as if being electrocuted (very pleasantly, of course). I remember that I found the paper (and thus the sweet contents of the letter) infinitely childish and embarrassing. After communicating this to her in a way I found it appropriate at that age, she wrote me another letter (on plain white paper), this time in an offended and freezingly furious tone.

Our affair had come to an end at that point, and 7 years later, when I met her blossoming self again, I seriously regretted my own adolescent stupidity from 7 years earlier.

3. Fish

In the one and only Donald Duck cartoon book I ever had, the first story was titled "The Odd Fish". In this tale, the nephews of Donald catch a really strange fish and decide to show it to their uncle. Naturally, Donald sees financial opportunities in the peculiar creature and tries to take advantage of it in every possible way, despite the fervent oppposition of the ducklings. Obviously, all Donald's attempts go wrong and they repeatedly end up bruised, humiliated, or both. After each of these failures, one of the nephews sighs: "If only we hadn't showed our fish to Uncle Donald."

Seriously: ever since, I haven't found a saying that would fit as many situations as this one does.