Holes In Thoughts

Friday, December 19, 2008

But it's chocolate chip!

I enjoy shopping when it is relatively focused. Maybe it’s a deep-seated hunter instinct, but I enjoy having a particular goal in mind, and hunting it down. Aimless wandering, window shopping, and similar activities are, on the other hand, very frustrating for me. This is particularly true when there are a lot of other people in the store.

So naturally, there are few activities I can think of that are less pleasant than doing Christmas shopping.

Strangely, I’ve found myself in several typical Chrismas shopping places (Target, Ross, etc.) without doing any actual Christmas shopping, buying random household items. Today, I found myself at Ross, searching for a bag for my new MacBook. It’s no good having a laptop on the road without some sort of case, even if the boss did insist on getting the protection plan.

I was debating the merits of my options with Rachel when a woman with a petulant teenage boy in tow approached me. He was whining about how they hadn’t bought him anything. I asked her if she was just going to get his gift when he wasn’t around to see what he gets. She made a face, leaned over to me conspiratorially and said, “I’m in the business of getting rid of stuff this year. I have too much junk.” She noticed we were going through laptop bags and said, “oh, are you looking for a bag?”

I looked down at the obvious and explained why I was getting one.

“You want one? I have one. I’ll give it to you. I was going to give it to a thrift store anyway.” She gives me her phone number and tells me to call her. I thank her profusely and leave Ross with nothing but a confused look on my face and the watchful gaze of the Resource Protection rent-a-cops.

Our next stop was Walmart, another epicenter of Christmas Hell, to pick up a surge protector for Rachel’s desk. The shopping part of this was pretty straightforward, but as we were driving home, we noticed there was a cookie on our windshield.

It was difficult to concentrate on driving, just because we were so preoccupied with how on earth a cookie ended up on our windshield. I also wanted to know what kind of cookie it was.

As we drove, the debate over whether or not I should it flared. Rachel was adamantly opposed, as we didn’t know where it came from or whether or not it had any extra ingredients – be they the “happy” kind or the malicious. I, on the other hand, was having trouble ignoring the fact that it was a free cookie.

Moreover, it struck me as a test of the 3-Second Rule. You know – that if you drop something on the ground, but pick it up quickly and blow on it, the item is as sterile as a surgeon’s prep room. And if you only have to blow something for a few seconds to make it sterile, then obviously exposing this cookie renders it as fit to eat as you can get.

Rachel was not impressed. I ended up sneaking an extremely small bite out of the corner. It was chocolate chip.

Labels: Christmas, crazy people, food, Rachel, shopping, stories

posted by Steve @ 4:58 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Meat the New Me

For the first time in recent memory, and perhaps ever, I came home with an appreciable amount of groceries (~$70) without any meat.

I've never really had a problem with eating meat in general. It's a bit of a cruel fact that animals eat each other all the time, and in the wild it's not even as nice as a quick blow to the head. I do have more of a problem when the source is completely unidentifiable... and even then I sometimes eat it (Rachel won't), and just with happy thoughts. But if the government, activists and corporations can agree that factory farming is ultimately socially destructive (damaging the environment and risking airborne diseases) and not as profitable as they might seem (due to disease and condition control in tight spaces), the meat industry can move ahead with a relatively clear conscience. And so will a lot of other people, myself included.

Of course, with that clear conscience, they should probably still eat a lot less meat. Americans eat far more meat than is really necessary to stay healthy. I wasn't much different for a long while, and am now cutting back a bit.

Labels: food, shopping

posted by Steve @ 8:58 PM 0 comments

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Walmart during the holidays

Today, I was forced to go to Walmart because we needed a space heater for our place. It was about fifty degrees inside the house this morning; that's not OK.

So I took a candy cane from the Renaissance Festival people at Bookman's, and sucked on it until it formed into an impromptu shiv.

People are very gullible. Seriously: strawberry jam-coated candy canes? Silly officer.

Labels: holidays, shopping

posted by Steve @ 7:57 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 03, 2007

Things that really are awesome

Most third graders are familiar with what I'll call shopper's ennui: the sense that what you bought can't possibly live up to the fantastic ideal that it's been built up to.

I realized this when as a twelve-year-old boy, I convinced my Dad to buy a $60 (that's six-zero point zero zero dollars, people) remote control car. It was fast, had a pair of tracks instead of wheels, and lasted for exactly fifteen minutes per five-hour charge.

Trouble with that being, of course, that I could use it at most twice a day, since I couldn't see it at night.

I did enjoy that little remote control car enough to remember it a decade and a half later. I also remember that it took me about three weeks to get sick of waiting for the damn thing to charge. It was effectively destroyed within a few months from pretty reckless (though awesome) driving, most of which involved making ramps and launching it in ways that one day, God willing, I'll do with my Volkswagen.

---

Anyway, the reason I bring up the remote control car is that it was, for about a year, the Thing I Coveted Most. A few years later, it relinquished that title to kissing and/or sex with girls, but at the time I recognized the feeling and the risk: few things are as good as you think they'll be. I figured kissing and sex would be an exception, but even then I correctly came to the conclusion that buyer's ennui was a real thing.

So in light of the holiday season ramping up its machine, here's a list of things that I bought that were every last bit as awesome as I had hoped they might be:

1. Dating and marrying Rachel. We have our dumb moments, usually caused by myopia or general illness, but I really can't imagine being really happy with anyone else because there is literally nothing I would really want to change. Not even the things that irritate me; those are usually the only things that keep me improving as a person.

2. My VW Beetle. Sure, it has had more repair problems than Chernobyl, but it's every last bit as rewarding as I think having a car can be. I suppose you can say that how awesome something is has little to do with how perfect, practical, or popular it is.

3. The Ampeg 8x10" bass amp I bought. I can feel my brain vibrating uncomfortably when I turn the Gallien-Krueger head past the "5" on the volume dial. It is wonderful being able to play a note that is remorsefully gentle and understated ...and still be 110 dB.

4. My Black & Decker power drill. An odd thing for this list, but it was so amazingly useful when we were pretty much building everything in our apartment, had ridiculously-long battery life and just did things it shouldn't have been able to for longer than I had a right to ask of it.

5. Radiohead's OK Computer, which I bought when it came out without knowing anything about the band, at all. I just liked the cover art a lot. Few things in the history of mankind have exceeded expectations like that purchase. U2's Achtung Baby also ended up being my favorite album, but the magnitude of the difference between expectation and reality were what set OK Computer apart.

6. My trip to Tokyo in 2001 with my family. It went about as well as any family trip can possibly go. We had fun, I slept very little, had about fifteen million great memories, and took some amazing pictures to help reminisce, which in turn really got me into becoming a photographer.

7. The book U2 at the End of the World, which I read at the height of my U2philism, was about as good a rock bio as has ever been written. I remember finding it in the Phoenix Main Library, and thinking, "there's no way this is going to be better than I hope it's going to be" -- but it was. You should read it. There's a part about a giant snake and hookers in Tokyo.

Labels: holidays, life, money, photography, sex, shopping, Tokyo

posted by Steve @ 9:56 PM 0 comments

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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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