Would You Like To Buy Some Girl Scout Cookies?

It’s Girl Scout cookie season.

I know I’m officially a Grown-Up™ when I’m on the buying side of Girl Scout cookie season, rather than the selling side. Last week my boss circulated the order form (they’ve gotten even more expensive!) throughout the office, a gimmick my mum and dad used to do in order to boost my sales. Now I’m contributing toward some little girl’s 300+ Boxes Sold patch and it feels weird.

I am getting too old for this.

Weekend after weekend, night after night, an interminable obligato of drinking! I can’t do it anymore. No more. End. Finis. Please.

Also, my wallet can’t afford it either. People really need to stop having sex during the winter months because I know far too many people with birthdays in the latter half of April. Naturally this means there is yet another surprise party to attend, complete with the requisite buying of drinks and subsequent chugging. I’ve seriously overtaxed my bank account this month and it’s all alcohol’s fault. Not to mention I wake up the next morning trying very hard to remember whether or not I spent the entire evening recounting my idea for a short story involving a retelling of Jane Eyre with werewolves to Columbia student. It’s gothic! And…goth! AT THE SAME TIME! Byronic werewolves! Lycanthropy as a sexually transmitted disease! It sounded fabulous and made absolute sense when I was two cups of sangria into the evening. I’m still trying to figure out whether or not it still sounds good during the full, sober light of day.

I’ve always been drawn to gothic themes, even as a child when I would smuggle home National Geographic books about haunted mansions in New Orleans in the third grade. Haunted mansions, hereditary curses, secrets in the attic, ghosts, these were all up my alley. Sort of. I would hardly peg gothic fiction as my favourite type of literature, but they were titillatingly forbidden in a way that I still can’t quite articulate. And I wasn’t ever really the kid with her nose buried in H.P. Lovecraft (I didn’t even know who Lovecraft was until I academically started researching fantasy) although I did love me some Poe. Most people expected me to be reading high fiction, even at a young age, so I was usually seen carrying around a tome bigger than my eight-year-old body. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but within the “canon” of classic literature, it was usually stories with a fantastic, grotesque, or gothic flavour that were my favourite.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre would be one. And in the same vein, Rebecca du Maurier’s Rebecca. Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Anything by Edgar Allan Poe, really. I loved them all for the same reason I love roller coasters; I like being scared a little. Just a little. I used to love reading the Goosebumps series under my bedclothes at night (because my parents didn’t approve of anything serialised, meaning no Babysitter’s Club and no Boxcar Children either) and psyching myself out and sleeping in the dead center of my bed with all the covers drawn over my head and my stuffed animals barricading the sides. I KNEW that a ghost wasn’t going to walk through my window, but still, it was the tantalising question of “what if” that kept me buried under four down comforters on a sweltering southern Californian summer night.

I’m not a fan of horror the way Teddy Bear is; I’m squeamish. Blood, guts, gore, and glory on a battlefield are one thing; torture implements in a seedy Eastern European hostel are another. I do love ghost stories though. Haunted houses. Ancient curses. Suddenly this list is starting to look similar what I love about gothic fiction. Gothic fiction is sensationalist and often deals with themes that I wouldn’t exactly admit to liking in the full light of day. Incest is a large one. Insanity. Isolation. Imprisonment. Etc. And creepy houses. I love creepy houses and castles and mansions with secret staircases and moving walls and eyes that follow you down the corridor from behind portraits. Thornfield, Wuthering Heights, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Paris Opera House, Disney’s Haunted Mansion. (I especially adore southern Gothic.) Sometimes I wonder if I had attended public school instead of private school, would I have been goth? My mother was convinced I was when I came from my freshman year of college because I had a penchant for top hats. Now really. A goth kid would look at me and laugh his/her ass off because in comparison, I’m Preppy McPrepperson.

I think I missed out on a lot of pre-teen and teenage existential angst. I read a lot of young adult fiction nowadays that deals with these cliques and I find that I’m unable to categorise my fifteen-year-old self into any of them. I was your standard overachieving geek who loved theatre and wrote bad poetry on Saturdays while spending summers in the art studio after which I’d go home and veg out with Sailor Moon and the X-Files before being invited to a party. Sofa once said that on the social hierarchy of high school, she was “upper-middle popular.” I was generally well-liked by most but only really had a few very close friends who all occupied somewhat dissimilar “cliques” and weren’t necessarily close friends with each other. Sometimes it drives me insane that the fictional teens in these novels would care about what was said about whom and by whom and what about. Who cares? They do, of course, but perhaps I was a few years ahead of my time because I felt as though these distinctions didn’t matter in the long run.

Still doesn’t stop me from enjoying TV shows like Lizzie Mcguire or books like Maureen Johnson’s Devilish.