I wear as badges of pride most of the ways I am deviant from general society.  It probably all goes back to Sesame Street:

One of these things is not like the other
One of these things just doesn’t belong
One of these guys is doing his own thing
And now it’s time for the end of our song

Or something to that effect.  The point is that I have a high level of awareness of ways that I am different.  (Although I suppose if I am mistaken about my level of self-awareness, by definition I would be incapable of realizing it).

I bring this up because I have learned that lo and behold, I am in the minority on yet a new issue.  One on which I previously believed without doubt that I sided with the majority.

I speak of my disdain for mint chocolate.

I know there are many sincere mint chocolate fans out there, including my wife.  But I always regarded them as a small, endearing subset of our society like left-handers or Libertarians.  I harbor nothing but fondness for you minty types out there.

I just don’t like mint messing up a good piece of chocolate.  Those are two worlds that, while perfectly fine on their own merits, should just not collide.  Think about those old Reese’s commercials where two nincompoops walk around with chocolate and peanut butter until they strategically run into each other so that the chocolate goes cleanly into the peanut butter jar instead of, say, one of their corneas.

Nincompoop 1:  Hey!  You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!
Nincompoop 2:  What kind of moron walks around in public with an open peanut butter jar?

Now imagine that same commercial but replace the peanut butter jar with a tube of Crest toothpaste.

Nincompoop 1:  Hey!  You just squirted toothpaste all over my Hershey’s Kiss!  And, boy howdy, does it ever taste good!
Nincompoop 2:  (Backs away slowly)

It just doesn’t work, does it?  Then why, I ask, would you deliberately mix that same taste of toothpaste in with chocolate?  I go so far as separating the non-mint Christmas candy so it doesn’t get ruined by marinating in the invisible fog emitted by the mint candy.

Anyway, to each his own.  No harm, no foul.  You in the mint minority can just knock yourselves out.

And then I heard a statistic I simply did not believe.  I even went online and looked it up myself.  According to the official website of the Girl Scouts, here is a breakdown of their top-selling cookies by percentage:

25% Thin Mints
19% Samoas®/Caramel deLites®
13% Peanut Butter Patties®/Tagalongs®
11% Peanut Butter Sandwich/Do-si-dos®
9% Shortbread/Trefoils

I was gobsmacked, assuming of course that I am thinking of the right definition of gobsmacked.

The engineer in me made a last-gasp effort to make sense of this.  I seized upon the fact that there were in fact TWO  entries for peanut butter related cookies.  Aha!  Thin Mints only won because peanut butter is so popular that it is the main ingredient in TWO cookies, thus splitting the peanut butter vote.  Then the engineer in me added up the peanut butter entries and realized that they still lost to Thin Mints by a score of 25% to 24%.  A close second for all-types peanut butter, but my worldview held that Thin Mints ranked somewhere behind even the simple but delightful Shortbread.

And also I thought “Trefoils” were some kind of Christmas decoration.

So I am resigned to admitting that perhaps you fans of mint chocolate outnumber the rest of us.  Then again, the Girl Scout statistics only add up to 77%, meaning there are a whopping 23% of total cookie sales unaccounted for.  If peanut-butter related flavors outsell mint-related flavors by a significant amount among all the cookies comprising the mystery 23%, then my worldview may yet still be sustainable, even if somewhat shaken.

Keep hope alive.  And keep your toothpaste off my Hershey’s.