I Have Fallen

Well it didn't take long. Although, if anything could do it to me, it would be Girl Scout Cookies. When a little neighbor and her mom come knocking at your door with 3 boxes of cookies that you didn't know your father had ordered, you kind of stop thinking. 2 innocent Peanut Butter Patties (or Tagalongs, as they are officially called now) were all it took, and I didn't even realize my sin until my mom can home with 4 more boxes she had bought separately, with a box of peanut butter ones to send to my brother because I couldn't eat them. I literally fell onto the cold kitchen tile and rolled around in distress, cursing my mortality and entreating forgiveness. Wait, isn't this a secular blog?

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I think for Catholics, the important part of Lent is not the strict self-denial regimen, but the reflection and charity aspects of these days. I mean, they don't even give up stuff for a full week. But since Sundays aren't that special to me and since I answer to no God, it becomes more of a personal challenge for me, like a fitness routine. Being good at it makes me feel closer to Yoda or Chuck Norris than to God.

That said, part of the strangeness is that one of the first thoughts that entered my head when I realized my failure was of the garden of Eden, and the Temptation of Eve. I felt as if, by unknowingly giving in to this temptation, I had singlehandedly set back all the work of feminists worldwide, reenforcing the womanly weakness stereotype set by Eve, Pandora and the like. Even more frustrating was that I was tempted by Girl Scout Cookies, a symbol of female empowerment, making me feel that my own sex was sabotaging me, further nullifying all of the progress both they and I have supposedly been striving for all these years. How could the Girl Scouts do this to me??

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But alas, I am no Eve, and the source of my downfall far more ordinary and less healthy than the ambiguous Forbidden Fruit of legend. I'm just a girl who was driven to a moment of forgetfulness by the prospect of a delicious and nostalgic snack.

This error is made all the more painful by the fact that just yesterday I spent considerable time on the stoic refusal of the Peanut Butter Sandwiches my forensics coach had bought for us at the tournament. I had been doing so well.

The further irony of the whole situation is that right after I had consumed the treacherous wafer, I read the chapter of Invisible Man in which the narrator is seduced by a mysterious rich white woman that he definitely should not have slept with, and is racked with nervous guilt for weeks about his misdeed.

I mean, I thought that kind of parallel between fiction and reality only happened in, well, fiction. The book was obviously trying to tell me about my crime and warn me not to sin again. I still didn't get it.