Sunday, November 06, 2005

Hostess cupcakes rock my world. IF they're packaged correctly.

When I was little kid, my mother always put a Hostess cupcake in my lunchbox. She always packed a twin-pack: two Twinkies, two Snowballs, or two chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle icing.

When my kids started school, I went to the store to buy Hostess cupcakes for their lunchboxes. There were no twinpacks. All I could find were those boxes of wrapped singles. I was really disoriented. What good is one Twinkie? You need TWO, because there is always supposed to be TWO. Who could eat one Hostess cupcake? I had no choice but to buy the box of singles, because I HAD to pack Hostess cupcakes in my children's lunchboxes because my mother always packed them in mine, and we all know that all children's lunches are the same.

Hahahahaha

I really thought every kid in the world had the same lunch that I had, in their lunchboxes. Even though I sat with kids who brought chicken legs, tuna salad, applesauce, and all manner of oddities, I sat there complacently seeing only peanut butter and jelly, a little bag of Chesty Potato Chips, a Hostess twin-pack, and either a thermos of milk or a tiny little bottle of Welch's grape juice. Or, after the third day of school, a square cardboard container of milk with a too-short straw. We removed the silver foil sealer and wore it on our teeth. Why? Because we were cool, even in second grade, and maybe the big kids would think we had braces.

My thermos bottle only lasted one, maybe two days each school year. Back then, they were lined with really fragile silver glass and one soft bump broke them. Whenever milk started running out from under the cloakroom door, everybody looked at me. Sometimes I didn't even know I'd bumped my thermos bottle. All I had to do was think about it, and it shattered. Mom always got upset with me, as though I'd done it on purpose, but I didn't.

The school cafeteria was always a room that represented trauma for me anyway. Not as much as did the playground (I HATED recess with a passion that would shock the universe), but I also hated lunchtime. I hated standing in lines for no apparent reason. I hated having to eat in fifteen or twenty minutes. I hated pawing through the trash almost daily, trying to find my retainer. I hated having to obey the noon monitor, a kid only a little bit older than me. And I hated sitting at the long tables in alphabetical order. When someone was absent, we had to leave a space. Even when I was a really little kid, I could see the idiocy of it.

But yeah, Hostess cupcakes should never be individually wrapped. Hostess cupcakes should be packaged in twinpacks.

Heck, I have to go to the gas station to get them now. When I asked about them at the grocery store, the guy just stared at me and belched chicken salad peanut butter and jelly breath in my face.

How silly am I over this issue? Whenever we go on a trip, even if I DON'T have to go to the bathroom when we stop for gas, I always run inside the building and buy a Hostess Snowball twin-pack.

Because, that's the only right way to package them. Whoever stocks the gas stations KNOWS. I wish the same guy stocked the grocery store shelves.

Oh, and here's a message to the guy who is responsible for the coconut icing on the Snowball cupcakes being dyed pink or green for holiday purposes. . . . . Can it. The icing is supposed to be WHITE. They're SNOWBALL cupcakes.

Not that the color of the icing ever kept me from snarfing them down.

"Them." Because I buy twinpacks.

There's a time and a place for creative expression. Hostess Cupcakes aren't that time or place. What's next? Creative expression with the squiggle icing? Don't even think about it.