What is it about the local Wal-Mart that instantly brightens my day? Is it the abundance of fresh fruit and veggies? The wide selection of paper towels and glade plug-ins? Perhaps the array of various lawn and garden tools. No, no...Wal-Mart brightens my day because I know that no matter how bad off I am, there will inevitably be some overweight, middle-aged man buying a cubic zirconia engagement ring at 9pm on a Monday night that has to be worse off than me. Walking through those automatic doors you know that you will invariably run into at least half of the seven deadly sins. Gluttony demonstrated by the three hundred pound woman in her do-rag and flip flops fighting over the "best" piece of fried chicken at the deli counter. Slothfulness shown by the middle-aged seemingly healthy man insistent on using the 10mph electric chair with basket. Greed from the elderly woman single-handedly harboring the cities entire supply of Aquafina bottled water. You get the picture.
So there I am amidst the grocery store section pushing the saddest most blatant example of the "single-girl shopping card" ever (half gallon of milk, bag of lettuce, three oranges, tampons, diet Dr. Pepper, and three Lean Cuisine cheese pizzas). You would think this would get to a girl. A woman of twenty-five surrounded by other women shopping for their families...kids in tow...husband lost on aisle 12, but the opposite occurs. You start to realize that even though your going home to an empty house to heat up a frozen lean cuisine for dinner - these women have a multitude of other things they are going to have to be confronted with; diapers, bills, children fighting, faking headaches to their significant other, etc. You on the other hand need only walk your dog and eat your pizza while watching TCM. Plus your not nearly as sad a sight as the group of Mexicans on the toilet paper aisle counting out Charmin coupons in Spanish and throwing 12 pack after 12 pack of toilet tissue into their carts. These were carts that should merit questioning....not mine. I started to look at other carts....the fifteen year old girl with a mid-drift top, where no mid-drift top ought' to be, carrying a handcart containing Cosmo magazine and a large box of condoms. The thirty-something girl with a basket full of cat food and frozen dinners. The woman in the middle of the store (past the grocery section) seemingly ecstatic over the concept of getting "anything she wants" airbrushed onto a white cotton t-shirt. These are baskets and individuals to question, not mine.
There you have it....a moment of single-girl realization that could have been depressing, rescued due to the increasingly more tragic lives of those around her at the local Wal-Mart. The grocery trip was not a total brightening of my day, there was still the awkward whistle and mumbled Spanish encountered when walking past the Mexicans on the toilet tissue aisle...but all the same Wal-Mart was just the pick-me-up I needed on a Monday night. Because even if I'm an unemployed graduate student, unmarried, no kids, and am only going home to an overweight black cocker spaniel named after an alcoholic beverage....at least I'm not the lazy moron in the motorized basket-cart backing up (complete with obnoxious "beep-beep" sounds) to grab a second bottle of Hydroxycut off the diet/exercise pill aisle.
* Apologies to my previous blog's readers who have read this piece before. Its an oldy but a goody and in such I felt compelled to put it on the new site *
