Friday, August 30, 2013

Arrrr Matey

I love you, man.
Hey, so does anyone else have a running list in your head of foods you could happily eat until you actually blew up? Pirate cookies are def high on my list. Oh gawwwd, do I ever love pirate cookies. They make me weak in the... wherever it is I keep my willpower.

I once invented a homemade recipe for pirate cookies that was even more powerful than the original, if you can believe it. Like, seventeen times more. There's a bubble universe somewhere where I'm making a killing peddling those things like crack, but in this universe I had to burn the recipe for fear of ruining my girlish figure.

And speaking of my girlish figure, it's really not. I'm mostly pretty cool with this* but I sometimes** still fret that other people might not have reached quite the same level of acceptance as I have with the ol' voluptuosity. Mostly this manifests as a general, all-encompassing suite of appearance and food-related anxieties. Y'know, nothing much. Just everything.

* not really
** perpetually

In a direct manifestation of my own irrational concerns that people are constantly judging me about what food products I am or am not purchasing or consuming, I realized that I habitually assess other people's food purchases and make snap judgements about their lifestyles and personalities. Call it grocery cart phrenology (GCP). I can't help it - the thoughts form in my mind regardless of the fact that my rational brain is fully aware that it is ridiculous. But it's tough when people play to type: college kids with a cart heaped with potato chips and 2L bottles of pop (i.e., mix); hypertanned and ripped people with two baskets (carts would be too easy) full of chicken breasts and cottage cheese; unhealthy-looking families with more or less the same pickings as the frat boys; old people with Bovril and bananas. I'll bet you a nickel that cashiers make similar inferences all the time.

Actually, I know they do - when I was a cashier, I always did. You couldn't help it; you could see the patterns. I once had an elderly regular at the grocery store where I worked come through my till with a bag of cherries - Oh, he told me, he just loved cherries. Could eat them 'til he darn near blew up. This is how the pattern went:

Day 1: bag of cherries.
Day 2: bag of cherries.
Day 3: bag of cherries and a bottle of Pepto Bismol.

Let he among us who would not have noticed that and imagined certain aspects of this fellow's life cast the first stone, but I'm pretty convinced that GCP is a common phenomenon.

Normally I try to prevent anyone conducting GCP on me by tossing confounding items like kale and lightbulbs into my cart, but I must have been in a cloud today because I didn't notice until I got to the till that my purchase consisted entirely of fem hygiene and pirate cookies. Hello! Super obvious! I grabbed a pack of gum and stuck it on the pile. Much less obvious that way that I'm bitchy and binging, right?

Oh, hell. Gum doesn't work at all as well as kale and lightbulbs. I put the gum back and added wine gums and two gossip magazines to the pile. Might as well roll with it.

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