On Time

I'm sitting here eating a box of Girl Scout Samoa cookies and it occurs to me that the little girl on the packaging is only moderately adorable.

She's got a mouth full of baby teeth and eyes that have yet to be completely crushed under the weight of the world's expectations. I mean she's being crushed under the weight of the world's expectations, but it's an ongoing process. She's only recently accepted that "boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls." She doesn't really understand why, but she knows it by rote. Still, she feels something like elation she can't quite understand when they ask her to wear a burned-out helmet and pretend she's a firefighter.

Then it occurs to me that this picture is probably really old. Based on the girl's little turtleneck and the look of everyone giggling and crowding around a gushing fire hose on the package's reverse, I'm guessing it's at least five years old, perhaps as much as ten.

Which is really weird, because it means that cute little girl could be a sexy, entirely legal coed by now. (Though, as a girl scout and judging by bone structure she's more likely reasonably attractive with an okay face.) This is a disturbing possibility. She's probably pretty cute, with a wildly narrow-minded Type A personality, resulting from her yuppie parents pushing her into overly structured, backwards social interactions at an early age.

Anyway, Samoas are delicious and this will not ruin a good cookie for me. It's the same as I've been saying for years about Dave Thomas' adopted daughter Wendy: somewhere out there there's a seventy-five year old man who, every time his children drive him past the fast food franchise, says, "Wendy? Yeah, I hit that."