Universally Acknowledged

I’m currently rehearsing for a play. On an entirely unrelated note, if you are in Albuquerque between September 14th and October 7th, you should go see a show at the Adobe Theater in the North Valley. I have it from scrupulously unbiased sources that their upcoming production of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is the single best thing to hit the stage in this millennium.

Since most of the setup in Jane Austen’s stories takes place at country balls at the turn of the 19th century, the cast is learning a few vaguely Regency-era dances for the party scenes. As a result, the women are asked to wear skirts at rehearsal so that we can practice moving correctly.

Several of the actresses possess varied collections of flattering sundresses; I, on the other hand, have been bringing the same ankle-length skirt to every rehearsal and adding it to whatever blouse I wore to work that day. It usually makes me look like a colorblind Puritan.

I’ve started doing my grocery shopping after rehearsal without changing. It’s fun watching the checkers try to decide from my purchases which fundamentalist sect I belong to.

It probably doesn’t help that the grocery store is my favorite place to talk to myself out loud.

There may also be some dancing around.

I even got stopped at my car last week by a sixteen-year-old Albertson’s parking lot monitor. Apparently they frown on exuberance after 10 p.m.

The poor guy seemed kind of disappointed when I started obediently pointing out the items on my receipt. Next time I’ll have to make more of an effort.

Goes Great with Circuses

Bread is pretty much the greatest thing. That’s why no human advancement is ever “the best thing since sliced turkey.”

I was reflecting on this starchy truth while making toast the other day, and I realized the proof was heating right in front of me. We have an entire, omnipresent appliance dedicated not even to making bread, but just to toasting it. This item has been produced and improved for nearly 120 years—not counting the pre-electric days—to do just one thing with bread, and it’s so fantastic that everybody everybody everybody has one.

I realize that today the Bed Bath & Beyonds of America are full of single-dish appliances for everything from cake pops to cornballs, but do any of those have their own screensaver-based merchandising empires?

(Here’s a video of that one, though. Anybody hungry?)

Parking Lots

This is me in the wee hours of Saturday morning, running laps around my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

From what I hear, the party I had just left continued for three or four more hours, though I can’t imagine why because the cheese crisps had run out. My ability to sit still without falling asleep had also run out, which is why I pulled in to Wal-Mart for some crash-prevention calisthenics.

This negligible energy boost did not last me all the way home, though, and I ended up mumbling memory drills out loud like Hawkeye Pierce with a concussion.

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This is me on Saturday evening, dashing furtively across the dark grocery store parking lot with a glass bottle of amber liquid stuffed in my coat.

I had rushed into the store for something legitimate like orange juice and emerged with a bottle of hazelnut flavoring syrup instead. Plastic bags will likely play into the coming apocalypse, so I just swept out the door clutching my prize. I really wanted to taste it on the way home, but I really didn’t want to explain to the cops that my big weekend plans featured an instant Folger’s latte and four hours of sci-fi TV on NetFlix in my kitchen.

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This is me after work on Wednesday, flattening other people’s moist cardboard boxes to make room in my apartment complex’s recycling bin for more than just a single-family supply of Orange Crush cases.

This is the concerned citizen who pulled up behind me to monitor my suspicious activity.

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NOTE: Those of you who follow me on Facebook may recall a statement I made about this week’s post not containing butts. Looks like I was wrong on that one.

You borrow my brain for 5 seconds and just be like, "Dude! Can't handle it!"

I talk to myself pretty much all the time, even when I miraculously manage to avoid doing it out loud for a while. Occasionally I’m writing or making a grocery list, but often I’m just replaying a loop of the last thing to enter my mind until a new thought happens.

This habit is distracting and psychologically worrisome, but it doesn’t become a problem until I forget I’m in a public place and open my mouth. I’m apt to hold lengthy discussions with myself at the grocery store—it’s a consequence of the fact that, since finishing college, I can no longer do simple arithmetic without speaking out loud.

This process eventually devolves into shouting at various groceries for their myriad infractions.

They never submit to my authority, either. In general, I’ve noticed that the inanimate objects I address have a disheartening tendency not to follow my instruction.

It’s like they aren’t even trying. Somewhere in the midst of the melee, I’ll look up and realize that other people are around as well. Then I get all self conscious.

When they eventually take me away to a little white room with bars on the windows, at least I won’t be lonely.

Is There a Continuing Ed Class for That?

Somewhere in middle school I missed the class on how to dress in clothes that look good. This omission left me incapable of distinguishing between outfits appropriate for not getting teased in 7th grade and those appropriate for repainting a doublewide outside Wal-Mart in 1987.

Conveniently, I also missed the lessons on how to be self-conscious, thus preserving my love of brightly-colored stretch leggings and extra-large t-shirts from the science fair. That’s how I reached the decision to adjust for cold weather by wearing red stirrup pants with my new lavender dress.

This was the day my balloon of blissful ignorance began to leak and I begged my mom to buy me a pair of jeans. This was also the same classmate who, a few weeks later, took advantage of our napping substitute teacher to wrap masking tape around my eyes and drag me across the floor by my braided hair, so I got those lessons in self-consciousness after all.

Anyway, my continuing lack of fashion standards makes clothes shopping an ordeal that I only attempt when all of my existing garments develop enough holes to be used for draining pasta. Paralyzing anxiety about the term “business casual” couples with my ingrained unwillingness to spend more than $20 on anything short of a life-saving appendectomy.

On top of that, I primarily shop at discount superstores that require you to navigate around the 87% of the options that proclaim either “Hootchie Mama” or “Thanks for coming to my retirement party.”

I am also not big on shopping when it comes to gifts for non-relatives approximately my own age. I have no ability to determine maturity-level-appropriate presents. I also can’t use the “buy something you would like to receive” metric anymore because I would just get everyone Play-Doh, and anyone who has invited me to a previous birthday party already has some.

(Two-hour intermission while I browse the Play-Doh website. Did you know there’s one with confetti in it? You can also buy it by the pound, or teach children to inject it into dogs.)

Ultimately, the only shopping I really enjoy is at the grocery store. While I’m there I can imagine myself as the kind of person who prepares mouthwatering delicacies instead of just smearing things with peanut butter.

That’s how I end up with a pantry full of orphaned crab meat and saffron and a kitchen spattered in Cement of Béchamel Sauce.

The resulting failure-related reversion to a ramen-based diet is also why I keep having to go shopping for pants.

Un-Milk

While checking out at my local yuppie grocery store, I realized that I was buying all the staples of New Age life: edamame, bulk raw seeds, something with tofu, and milk that isn’t milk.

Edamame and pumpkin seeds are delicious, the tofu thing was on sale, and the un-milk was part of an intensive scientific investigation. I am accustomed to drinking skim milk, and when I moved in with my staunchly 2% roommates, I decided to examine all the options since I was buying my own cereal whitener anyway.

I am almost dangerously willing to sample new foods. In my college cafeteria I served as the canary in the mineshaft, informing my friends which offerings were delicious and which might cause them to miss class for a week. That’s how I found out that, when it comes to falafel, texture is everything.

The gently steaming pile of dark tan nuggets did not invite dining so much as a little plastic bag and a trowel. I scooped one onto my plate, where it nestled between the breadcheeks of my emergency backup sandwich. With my tablemates looking on incredulously, I bit into the thing.

It might have tasted good—I couldn’t tell. Any flavor was completely overwhelmed by not only the precise color and shape resemblance to my childhood Basset Hound’s backyard deposits, but also the exact sun-brittle texture of old dog turds in the desert. I had never wondered what it would be like to bite into one of those, and I am not glad to know.

Anyway, the experience still didn’t scare me away from weird food, and the aforementioned yuppie grocery store has a lot of fake milk. I started with vanilla soymilk, which rocks because it’s lightly sweetened for when your chocolate Cheerios aren’t meeting your morning sugar needs.

Then I moved on to vanilla almond milk, which is even sweeter and kind of almond-y. It’s also slightly brown, but if you stick to a chocolate cereal regimen, the color is not too disturbing. This one was so yummy that I started drinking it for dessert, and I bought a second carton the day the first one ran out.


About ten ounces into the half gallon, the bleh threshold hit, and I had to get sweeter cereal to hide the taste.


Next was coconut milk—not the watery stuff inside a coconut, but a shockingly white milk imposter. It felt too thin to be that white, and it tasted more like the chilled spit of someone who had recently been eating coconut cream pie.

During the coconut period, thanks to another sale I picked up a half gallon of dark chocolate almond milk. Even I am not self-destructive enough to put this on cereal, but chocolate definitely goes on the Ice Cream List of foods I always want to be eating.

Apparently, I had conveniently forgotten about the bleh portion of my previous almond milk adventure.

There’s nothing wrong with the actual taste of this beverage, I’m pretty sure. The problem is the scent you notice right before it touches your lips—that whiff of protein that suggests you are not about to taste a refreshing beverage but rather bite into a nicely charred piece of chicken.

It’s the falafel all over again, really, with other senses beating out taste for a lasting impression.

I gave the rest of the carton to my mom. I did warn her beforehand. Also, she has a minimally effective sense of smell and has never even noticed a problem with powdered milk.

Mom says the chickenmilk tastes fine. Personally, I’m thinking of going back to cows.

(P.S. Does your regular, non-yuppie grocery store still have an aisle labeled “New Age Beverage” like mine does? Every time I see this I giggle a little.)

Beets

A few weeks ago I suddenly caught Produce Fever, as happens occasionally, and bought about five pounds of vegetables I’d never cooked before. The beets seemed like a great idea at the time—they’re cheap and good for you, and as I’ve mentioned before I do not require my meals to be very interesting.

So I chose six large beets and, not wanting them to go bad, boiled them up all at once. Let’s pause for a moment to reflect that beets are very, very colorful. When you eat cooked ones or cut raw ones, this color is a purpley-red of easily identifiable plant origin. When you boil a huge pot of beets on the stove, though, the whole mess turns the rusty red of fresh blood. It foams. Big chunks of red beet flesh bob to the surface. When you spill drops on the white stovetop—and you will—they dry quickly into the unmistakable signs of a catastrophic nosebleed. I felt like Bluebeard with his boiling bowl of wife chunks.

The cooked beets were indeed blandly delicious, appearances aside, so I set them in a Tupperware vat in the fridge and looked forward to devouring them over the next three or four days.

As it turns out, it takes a lot longer than that to eat a half gallon of beets, for the following reasons:

1. They become a lot less exciting over time
2. Thanks to my lack of self-control at the farmers’ market, I also had a pound of carrots, four cups of broccoli, two cups of cauliflower, a grapefruit, a sack of green beans, four apples, two bananas, and a cantaloupe to eat within the week before they started to ooze
3. I kept thinking about that bowl of blood

All this excess produce fit beautifully into my cooking style, which consists of two methods:

1. Cook some things and mix them together

2. Cook some things and don’t mix them together

In the end I handled the botanical bounty by developing an additional method:

3. Don’t even bother to cook things

Ultimately, I bid farewell to the last half pint of beets and their accompanying mass of purple sludge. The experience taught me a valuable lesson about impulse-buying unfamiliar perishable food, though:

No, never mind. Look, there’s a sale on chard!

Walk This Way!

Do you remember the Malt-O-Meal commercials with the man who crouched down in the cereal aisle and said “Walk this way!” when he showed you the cheaper brand in bags instead of boxes?

Thanks to the squatting man, I became devoted to bargain shopping in childhood. I could get four times as many Marshmallow Mateys as Lucky Charms, and the marshmallows tasted just as good when I fished them out of the cereal and sorted them by color for proper anal-retentive consumption. Also, it turned out that pretty much every product had a knockoff version that my mom was more likely to give in and buy, leading to my lingering taste for Dr. Thunder.

I mean, some foods clearly have superior and inferior varieties. I’ve eaten enough bargain ice cream to be familiar with that unsettling yellowish foam that won’t rinse out of my bowl. But with other products, it’s hard to imagine where they could go wrong.

Now that I buy my own groceries, I typically stand at the freezer case trying to guess what could possibly make the Ultra Premium broccoli worth an extra three dollars. Since the nutrition facts don’t mention sparkly unicorn magic flying dust, I usually grab the 99-cent store brand.

However, it turns out that not all vegetables are created equal.


For years I accepted these disappointments as a fact of life—perhaps part of the disillusionment that accompanies adulthood.


Eventually it occurred to me that some of the extra price tag pays for stuff like ingredients and flavor—and also that I have an actual job and can buy actual Oreos.

I’m still swayed by low prices, though, especially on products I don’t intend to ingest. It’s hard to spend $3.50 on Hand Soap With TV Ads when you can get the Compare-And-Save kind for eighty-seven cents, for example. Plus I’m susceptible to belief in advertising claims—the package uses the same colors as Dial, so they must be the same, right?

That’s how I ended up with a family-size bottle of hand soap in new, improved Poocumber Melon scent. My roommate was a good enough sport to help me fight through the whole bottle—we were getting our 87 cents worth, by golly—before replacing it with something that didn’t make our hands smell like we’d been searching for a missing retainer in last Thursday’s Wienerschnitzel dumpster.

Grocery Shopping for the Chronically Paranoid

I like to get all of my embarrassing grocery shopping done at once.

This is because I believe that the checker is judging me, and I’d rather get it all in one concentrated dose than spread out over all my visits to the grocery store. By adhering to this method, I’m usually safe when I buy my chocolate Cheerios, aerosol cheese, and other staples.

But sometimes I’m getting dressed and realize, “Ooh, I’m almost out of extra-strength deodorant. I might as well stock up on tampons and acne cream!”

“Hey, I’m going shopping,” I tell my roommates. “Can I pick up anything? Preparation H? Pregnancy test? The Best of N*Sync?”

When I get to the store, my first order of business is to pick out a large decoy item that can be used to shield everything else in my cart. This is why I have so many decorative gift bags and $1 dishtowels. Also acceptable are giant bags of bargain breakfast cereal or, in a pinch, a whole lot of produce.

Next I begin collecting my items. I tend to stride purposefully from place to place, as if to say, “Naturally, I am merely walking down the Odor Control aisle on my way to another destination.”

To preserve this illusion, I usually avoid aisles containing others, unless they look equally uncomfortable. For instance, if you are only picking out shampoo, I will circle around and come back when you have left. If, however, you are deciding between liquid and paste fungal control, I am willing to stand next to you and compare the merits of Xtra Thin with Wings vs. Contour Leak Guard.

Finally, it’s time to pick a check-out lane. The ideal register is staffed by a woman in her mid-forties who was not the same person to ring up another jumbo-pack of toilet paper for me just last week. I arrange my items on the conveyor belt with the decoy at the end to distract the next person in line from my other purchases. As the checker rings everything up, I make a detailed study of the credit card PIN pad, punctuated by furtive glances to see if she has realized yet that I’m the most repulsive freak ever to shop there.

Of course, through all my paranoid shopping trips, no checker or bagger or fellow patron has ever commented—or even smirked—about my humiliating groceries. Retail employee training probably includes a session on not making crazy people self-conscious, lest we suddenly snap and tear through the aisles, squirting facial-hair remover and shouting Hanson lyrics.

I only hear smalltalk about my most innocuous purchases: