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January started innocently enough. The eating - er, holiday - season passed and I had a vague plan to get back into last year's fairly successful effort to get myself to a more comfortable weight and back to a sanity-saving exercise routine that tanked in September.
I don't want to talk about it.
Anyway, just after my new year's snack of bacon with a side of black-eyed peas and greens, (that I made myself so I know just how much that ratio is true), I went back to work with my almonds and tuna, my newly re-upped membership in the water club and the spring wellness schedule bookmarked on my desktop.
That first morning back I fired up my computer. And checked Facebook, because that is important to do before proceeding with any other important tasks. And there was my friend Karma, all up in my newsfeed.
(These names are not real. I will not call my friends bad names. Draw your own conclusions.)
"Hi everyone! Happy New Year! As you may know, Beautiful is a Girl Scout now and she is eager to meet your cookie needs.
This post included an image of a Thin Mint, and a link to a site entitled "MEET THE COOKIES" that not only included graphic depictions of each variety but also gave me a link to "FIND COOKIES NOW," which indicated that if I keyed in my zip code a nearby Girl Scout would arrive at my office door bearing Samoas and a glass of milk.
Not really, but you know, it was sort of implied. And all of a sudden the spring wellness schedule icon shriveled and died on my desktop like the Wicked Witch of the West under water.
Damn.
I mean really, this has to happen in January? Where are my gift wrap and mixed nut children? I can't eat gift wrap and I have to actually think about taking the lid off of a can of nuts. Do the chocolate bars and pre-fab pizza dough come out from their hiding places now too?
Is anyone selling wine?
It should be noted just for kicks that I was not a blazingly successful Girl Scout. I never went camping beyond a day trip to a nature preserve or two, and mostly stuck to badge-worthy yet reasonably sedentary activities like cooking and chess.
Yes they give badges for chess. Shut up.
My final straw was the inability to evenly sew the seam on a fake suede skirt - a fuede skirt, if you will. And I honestly wasn't kicked out, it just didn't work out for me. And there may have been other reasons, other small badge infractions maybe because I've just never been much into those sorts of systems, but for me that was the deal-breaker.
Also there may have been some crying before meetings because I wanted to stay home and watch repeats of Laverne & Shirley rather than build bird houses. That may have been the real problem, but my mother gave turning me into a responsible scouting citizen her best shot.
Yes, my mom, the faithful team player who remembers her days in sash and uniform fondly, was still the cookie mom for one year out of the two I lasted. All I can remember is a dining room full of boxes, the neon Do-Si-Do orange and Thin Mint green, and the stress of thinking how many I had to sell to meet who knows what benchmark of cookie stardom.
Anyway, now that that pressure is long gone, I cannot tell you in acceptable language in this forum what I can do to a box of Samoas. I mean, I can, but I have issues with sharing that kind of information publicly. I could maybe share with you how I can picture in my mind what a Trefoil looks like as it disintegrates in a glass of milk in the dim light of a kitchen at midnight, and how my hand trembles and my brain negotiates with itself while it chooses a number to write in the box next to the Do-Si-Do picture on the very colorful order form.
"Six...NO! What is wrong with you?!? That is approximately one quatrillion peanut butter cookies that you do not need in your life! Three...Ehhh. Still no. Two. Blah, okay. Two."
Yes. And that is not even taking into account the mental gymnastics required to calculate how many boxes of Trefoils are required for those days of simple milk-and- shortbread comfort cookie
