The following is an adaptation of an email I sent to co-workers to persuade them to buy my daughter’s Girl Scout Cookies. I enjoyed writing it, and I thought it was entertaining enough to bring a smile to the faces of the masses who read my blog.

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Blessed colleagues who are about to become more blessed,

I am shamelessly using work media for a matter of personal interest. My daughter, Elena, is selling Girl Scout cookies (do I need to say “Thin Mint” to consciously put you in touch with the opportunity you have here). Yes, I know you might resist, because (a) calories, and (b) cost, or stated another way, the monetary and caloric cost of buying and eating GS cookies. So, before you make that resistance a definitive “no”, let us reason together.

The Greeks have a term “eudaimonia” which in denuded form translates to the English word “happiness” but is better translated as something like “human flourishing”, which is the idea I want to capitalize upon (both monetarily and intellectually) as I reason with you regarding why you should buy some GS cookies from my daughter. Each box of cookies is, to borrow a phrasing from late night infomercials, “available for the low, low cost of only $4.00” So, even considering the rather meager compensation of college jobs, the price is doable. Regarding the calories, the benefit of the overwhelming sense of well-being and prosperity of soul that eating GS cookies will bring is worth whatever calories you pack on as a result of such partaking. The formula for this cost benefit ratio works out something like this

Benefit: 1,000,000 eudaimonia points
Cost: 160 Calories for four cookies

To help make this information more meaningful, let me state that most sane, well-adjusted people live at around 200,000 eudaimonia points. Furthermore, people with Bi-Polar disorder clock in at around 400,000 eudaimonia points in the manic phase of their disorder, and they crash at around 30,000 eudamonia points in their depressive phase. By comparison, there is no depressive phase in eating GS cookies, there is only a fond remembrance of what it was like to eat such cookies and thereby exist in such a potent state of eudamonia, the mere remembrance of which is able to provide an additional 50,000 points of eudamonia to the norm of 200,000. Did you get that!? 50,000 for the mere remembrance of eating these cookies!

Regarding the calories, 160 divided by 4 is 40, which goes into 3000 calories roughly 70 times!! This means that you can eat 70 cookies at the mere cost of only adding one pound of body weight. Keep in mind, once you exceed eating only 20 cookies you are approaching the intense feeling of euphoria that heroine users experience, but without the nasty physiological and psychological addiction that ensues from such use.

So, all in all, on all levels, the money it will cost you is nothing compared to the benefit you will receive in buying some cookies from my daughter.

I thank you for your consideration.

See you soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.