As I walked out of my building today, handbag in one hand, umbrella in the other, the caretaker, who held the door open for me, said “you must have been a girl guide.” “Sorry?” Pointing to my umbrella, he said again, “you must have been a girl guide – be prepared.” I smiled at him, frowned at the rain and headed on out. And just as the coldness of reason began to creep upwards from the wet soles of my shoes, I clicked. Oh! Girl Guide! Be prepared! I get it! Yes! Actually, I was! Wow. And for some reason, before today, I had completely blocked out that memory. How could I ever forget the priceless afternoons I spent clad in awful shapeless dresses and sashes doing silly things like shoveling earth all for the sake of a little badge with a sickle embroidered on it! Erm, call the gardener. Get him to shovel. And then give me a badge for management, damnit.
One would think, in a private school for relatively privileged kids, they could have offered a more constructive extracurricular activity. In a developing country where there are countless numbers of people starving and suffering and dying daily, surely we could have done something slightly more beneficial or humanitarian than dig up the lawns that lined the neatly manicured playgrounds of our private school (only for the gardeners to have to fix them later)…no? We were rather like Marie Antoinette—who built entire dairies for herself and her friends to play at “milking” in. Of course they were built from only the finest ceramics and porcelain, and I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that the girls spent more time admiring the interior than actually getting anywhere near a teat.
According to their website, the mission statement of the Girl Guides Association is to enable girls to make a difference to the world, and I’m certain that someone, somewhere along the way to my girl guide experience rather misinterpreted the word “difference.” But then again, the website also boasts Kate Moss as a celebrity former girl guide, so perhaps they are misguided all the way to the core. Be prepared, snort coke. What would the badge for that look like, I wonder. Maybe you wouldn’t get a badge for that—you’d just get a gram. Or a mirror. Or a rolled up hundred dollar bill—so that you’re always prepared! Snifff!
The caretaker was right though. I was prepared. Call me a genius, I knew it would rain. It rained yesterday, it rained the day before, and the day before that. But I think I used something along the lines of mathematics (probability?), or uhh, common sense to figure that out. No, wait! i just remembered. I looked out the window! (Give me a badge with a window on it. Or an umbrella. Ooh! That would be quite cute, actually). I hardly doubt girl-guiding did anything towards teaching me to be prepared, or teaching me anything really, other than how to be ridiculously bored and stylistically indistinguishable. What mathematics didn’t teach me, my mother did—to carry (besides the umbrella), a plastic bag for the wet umbrella afterwards, tissues, wet wipes, hand sanitizer, hand cream, tampons, headache pills, a pen, mints, gum, sunglasses, sunglass case, lip-ice, lip balm, lipstick, hair band, hair clip, hair pins, and then there's all the gadgets...And I do, I carry this all. Plus a toothbrush complete with mini toothpaste, in case of, you know, an unplanned “sleepover” (but mommy doesn’t know that). Hell I even found a button in my wallet today. A button! In a teeny-tiny Ziploc bag! So I am even half-prepared (sans sewing kit) to sew a button onto something, somewhere, sometime. If that’s not making a difference I don’t know what is.
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