Why We Have So Many Girl Scout Cookies

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems

(I Know How This Looks)

I should explain. It looks like I went to the store and came back with twelve-ish boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

The truth is that I went to the grocery store in late winter, which is when America’s youth runs a live experiment on adult decision-making. Every year, I fail. Yes, I am weak. Yes, I love cookies. Also, I keep underestimating a group of children who have mastered capitalism.

What appears to be a folding table and a few boxes of treats outside Kroger is in fact a highly optimized retail environment built on decades of behavioral data. I am not equipped for that.

At no point did I intend to purchase eighteen or so boxes. I would like that on the record.

And yes, I see you pointing at the kitchen counters like you’re presenting evidence at a war crimes tribunal.

Let me walk you through what happened:

TERRAIN CONTROL

Tables were placed in the high-conversion retail corridor, that narrow stretch between the parking lot and the grocery entrance.

In that Pre-Cart Vulnerability Window, I was trying to remember whether we needed milk (YES), whether cilantro is the one that tastes like soap (MAYBE), why winter is still happening (SCIENCE), whether I brought my reusable bags (OOPS!), and if I should eat more kale (ABSOLUTELY NOT).

Because my brain was buffering like airport Wi-Fi, I was in no condition to handle an enthusiastic greeting from an enthusiastic child with an enthusiastic clipboard (or their sales pitch) in the Ambush Zone.

EYE CONTACT

If you learn just one thing from my experience: NEVER. MAKE. EYE CONTACT. because once there is eye contact, you have only two options.

  1. Purchase.
  2. Lie.

If you don’t purchase, you’re a monster. If you lie? You’re a monster.

You know it. They know it. Everyone within fifteen feet knows it.

I tried several defensive maneuvers, including studying my nailbeds, powerwalking towards the automatic door, looking at the sky for divine intervention, and a sudden interest in the grocery carts.

Alas, I looked up and locked eyes with several adorable Girl Scouts.

It had begun.

THE FRIENDLY GREETING

They asked with all sincerity, “Would you like to buy some cookies?”

And like an idiot, I responded to this conversational tractor beam with “Sure, what do you have?”

PRODUCT DISPLAY PSYCHOLOGY

Having now lowered the drawbridge like a fool, immediately I received a graceful little arm sweep. “Right this way.”

And there they were. Thin Mints, front and center.

Thin Mints are strategically placed because they are unassailable. No one is morally opposed to Thin Mints. (And if you are, keep that to yourself. This is not your moment.)

I thought I was being smart and said, “Okay, I’ll just get one box of Thin Mints.”

WRONG.

Immediately, one of the girls pointed to a stack of boxes. “A lot of people also like the Samoas.” Yeah, of course they do! They’re delicious!

I tried to hold the line. “Oh, I can’t eat that many,” WHICH IS A LIE. Not only can I eat that many, I have eaten that many..

FREEZER RATIONALIZATION

“That’s okay,” the be-sashed scout said, still holding the eye contact from the beginning of our interaction. “They freeze really well.”

Uh oh.

Now I’m reframing the purchase as a responsible long-term investment. If two boxes freeze well, then four boxes freeze exceptionally well…and now stockpiling 23 boxes feels prudent.

THE AUDIENCE EFFECT

A crowd assembled, waiting to see if I’d also like Do-Si-Dos, Tagalongs, and the ones that look like they taste like particleboard. (Dip those in lemon curd or Nutella. Delicious.)

I start doing fast, bad math. How many boxes say I’m a good person and supportive of children? (The answer, by the way, is six, minimum. I went with 31 because I am a very good person.)

THE FINAL ESCALATION

Now, maybe you’re strong and can hold the line. Maybe you’re a one-box person. Great.

How would you handle an end-of-transaction “Would you like to purchase some for the troops?”

Whatcha gonna say now, friend? “Nope. The troops are on their own”?

No. You’d do what I did. You’d grab your wallet, and get those 43 boxes of cookies, you patriot.

EXIT?

Transaction complete. I walked back to my car, pushing a shopping cart full of so many cookies it looked like I should asked about bulk pricing.

The whole way to the car I’m talking to myself. It’s fine. Good people buy 58 boxes of cookies.

I loaded the cookies into the trunk. And the back seat. And up front with me where they could ride shotgun.

Then I realized I forgot to actually go grocery shopping. This meant I had to go back past the same Scouts who have already correctly identified me as an easy mark. So now I’m scanning the building like I’m planning a heist. Is there a back entrance? A side door? A loading dock? A tunnel system? ANYTHING, because what I cannot and will not do is walk past that table again. I know what happens. “Would you like to buy some cookies?”

So I did what any grown adult would do. I went home and got my groceries delivered.

And I forgot the milk.

If you’d like to support an excellent troop, you can order cookies directly from them here.

Spines, NyQuil, and Staring At the Ceiling

Book Review, Books, Fiction, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio, Writing

What I Read February 2026

For a few days in February, my God-installed, non-award-winning back and intercostal muscles decided to spasm up and shut down operations. I was horizontal against my will, which is the least fun way to be horizontal. I did not enjoy this real-world lesson in what intercostals are, but I did get to spend a not-insignificant amount of time staring at the ceiling like it’s a limited series.

Just as my spine stopped trying to yeet my head down the hallway like a bowling ball, I got sick. Just like the rest of the family, only they all got it before I did.

So now I have this painful, unproductive cough, which my back is like NO, DO NOT. (You may insert your own “your writing is also painful and unproductive…NO, DO NOT” joke here. First prize is one underwhelmed “Good One, Mild Heckler” from me. Don’t spend it all in one place.)

Because of all that, this intro section is clearly going to be a bit of a wild ride, plus or minus one Mr. Toad. Whatever. It’s fine. If the intro licks a doorknob, just pretend you didn’t see it.

ANYWAY. A couple fingers of NyQuil in, and after my fourth attempt to roll over without sounding like a two-pack-a-day rusty door hinge, I started thinking about whether there might be some clever thread tying together the books I read this month. At the same time I was bellyaching about my back — *insert celestial music*

This month’s reading stack is about spines. Spines let us move through the world without collapsing into a soupy mess.

Look, I’m sticking with this premise, even if I have to force it a bit (consider it artistic chiropractic).

A man tries to stand upright in a world determined not to see him. A woman wonders what remains when cultural and personal scaffolding falls away. In another story, women hold lineage like vertebrae across generations. And in a craft book, writers are reminded that stories need structural, thematic, and other spines, and are shown how to build them.

These books also address questions of dislocation, power structures, self-determination, appearance versus reality, and the social codes that buoy and bruise us.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

  • Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays by Megan Stielstra
  • Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  • The Song of the Blue Bird by Esther Goldenberg
  • The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer by Will Dunne

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays by Megan Stielstra

Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays

Cool is elusive and requires a certain indifference to what other people think. That’s extremely difficult to achieve for people like me who spend a certain amount of time thinking about what other people think. (Perils of the job.)

Which is to say: I am not cool. And, unlike Megan Stielstra, I may never have been.

Once I Was Cool lives in that gap between who we thought we were and who we are now…

(continued here)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man (Edition 2) by Ellison, Ralph [Paperback(1995£©]

We tell ourselves stories about who we are. We tell ourselves that effort will be seen, that talent will be recognized, that identity is something we build and then present to the world.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison dismantles that.

The novel follows an unnamed young Black man trying to find his place in a society determined not to see him as an individual…

(continued here)

The Song of the Blue Bird by Esther Goldenberg

The Song of the Blue Bird: The Desert Songs Trilogy, Book 3

History is usually sung in the key of men: their journeys, their covenants, their departures and returns. The women, if they appear at all, are often relegated to the margins, tending the hearth.

The Song of the Blue Bird by Esther Goldenberg shifts the lens and begins where the women have always been: at the heart of survival and the center of the story. These women are far too busy living, enduring, scheming, loving, and adapting to remain marginalia in someone else’s story…

(continued here)

The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer by Will Dunne

The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

I picked up Will Dunne’s The Architecture of Story while working on my novel and trying very hard to ignore the inner voice that had begun scream-whispering, “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

I was stuck. I had reached Chapter Twelve with the creeping suspicion that Chapters One through Eleven were not only slightly disconnected from Twelve, they might also be slightly disconnected from each other and possibly from any version of “good…”

(continued here)

And there be the February reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?

In Attendance

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Parenting, ,

Also, a Coat

The coat is brown, puffy, and goes to my ankles. Add a messy bun and I look like the poo emoji.

I needed the coat a few weeks ago because it was freezing and my daughter had a regional middle school choir concert at a high school gym.

Middle school choir concerts are my favorite form of civic optimism. Kids collaborate to make something beautiful despite puberty actively sabotaging their vocal cords, all so an audience can briefly believe we belong to one another. This is where hope lives, even if the venue smells like feet.

Parental love has historically forced humanity into far worse circumstances than this, even on a cold Thursday evening.

So into the coat I went, looking and feeling like a baked potato.

My husband, daughter, and I arrived at the high school to find the gym entrance guarded by a teenage usher who held back the restless audience with all the authority of a traffic cone. The kids went to warm up while families packed the lobby. Everyone talked about how busy and tired they were. The tiredest people who have ever busied. As if to illustrate the point, an exhausted toddler lay starfished on the floor, wailing in the Hall of Interminable Waiting.

Five minutes before the show, the poor usher stepped aside and the crowd surged. Someone behind me decided I was an obstacle to their getting exactly as bad a seat as everyone else, and they shoved me. Mercifully my enormous coat absorbed the blow.

Anyway, we easily found seats, as did literally everyone else. My coat’s protective puffiness had been deployed for naught.

A few parents from our kid’s school came over to chat (“Hi! How are you?” “Tired and busy.” “Same.”) and then disappeared into bleachers on one of the three designated walls.

I folded my coat behind me, exhaled, and assumed that for the rest of the evening, the worst thing that could happen was that 50-100% of my butt cheeks might fall asleep.

Along the fourth wall were the rows of choir kids in school shirts and venue-appropriate shoes, clutching folders and ready to be taken seriously while delighting us.

The program started. The choirs took us on a world tour: “Tottoyo” from the Caribbean. The Russian folk song “Kalinka.” An arrangement of “Dies Irae” to liven up the joint.

When not singing, the kids sat attentive and appreciative of the other groups.

And for three glorious minutes, I thought maybe humanity has a chance.

However, another performance unfolded behind us, where a delegation of moms and dads sat. No idea who they were, but they clearly knew each other well enough to narrate the entire concert. Before, after, and during the songs. They declared “winners,” opined on which song “lost them,” and critiqued soloists. They laughed out of delight, but sometimes they laughed in that other way, too. One mom casually sang along to the songs she knew, and she knew quite a few of them. Then she complained about the audience’s bad etiquette when they clapped for soloists in the middle of a piece.

(Reminder: the universe will always choose to deploy irony in a high school gym.)

The singers were too far away to hear the chatter. My husband and I were too close not to.

But no one else seemed bothered – except possibly the person on the other side of my husband, who sat up straighter and straighter as the evening wore on, like her sense of decency was trying to escape through the top of her head before she did something regrettable.

Maybe the talking was the kind of thing you’re supposed to let slide. I reminded myself that no one had crowned me Queen of the Gym Bleachers, Sovereign of Decorum.

My shoulders crept toward my ears with familiar fury. Oh, hello, lifelong training to quell my irritation rather than risk being socially punished for noticing poor behavior.

I tried to listen to the kids, but the conversations behind me kept pulling my focus.

And then, my notably easygoing and also deaf in one ear husband shushed them.

He shushed them. Again and again.

I mean, they ignored him, BUT STILL.

After the final song, my husband and I performed a traditional Midwestern Passive Aggressive Two-Step.

1. Stare down Sing-Along Mom and her friends and say, “These kids deserved a better audience.”

2. Flee.

We found our daughter near the doors, eager to tell us all the behind-the-scenes details.

I nodded along, overheating in my coat, listening to her version of the night where everyone made space for one another.

We told her we were glad we were there.