Grocery Shopping

Effective grocery shopping takes strategy and skill. Make a list. Stick to the perimeter. Don’t go in hungry. Don’t look the Produce man in the eyes. I relate people’s purchases and grocery selection with their personalities, perhaps more intensely than I should. A man buying ribs and beer says so many simple manly things while a girl buying wine and ice-cream lends one’s imagination to an explosive breakup with a straitlaced fella that had no tolerance for her enormous nail-polish collection. Bagels and kombucha? Go back up north.

I even consider my own personality type when I go grocery shopping. I buy a lot of produce. Responsible and orderly. If I buy meat I buy it fresh, not frozen. Articulate and strategic. I adore dairy products of all kinds; down to earth. And on rare occasions I'll buy a box of crackers or tortilla chips that may suggest I’m laid-back or easily amused. What I want to hide from other shoppers are my reckless and immature traits -my compulsion to buy myself a little treat every time I go to the store. Sometimes it’s a minor thing, a candy bar at the check out line; spontaneous and whimsical  but other days I buy an entire bag of peppermint patties and a bottle of chocolate milk with a cookie straw: enduring mental warefare. I stuff these items down underneath my progressivist avocados and blatanly southern bundles of collard greens, shuffling around my pragmatic canned goods.

Sometimes people have such an odd mixture of things in their carts. I write them off as possible scientist/inventors of the food world. Maybe you're a soccer mom on snack duty this week, an angsty teen buying cigarettes or possibly just a delightful member of society. I try to figure it all out by the contents of your grocery cart. And at the end of my grocery store outing I pile my items strategically on the conveyor belt so that offensive or immature items are never at the start or end of my food pile. I can’t have the cashier reach for a box of cookies right away nor can I have someone behind me eyeing my goods and finding no redeemable qualities, I mean, food stuffs. I hide my bag of dark chocolate kisses; Future Fatty of America underneath some grapes and a bag of Indian food that might lead one to conclude that I'm an intrepid explorer. Somehow this makes me feel better.

But surely no one is reading into what I buy at the grocery store.

Anyways, here I am with my three favorite fellas back during our one cold week of winter. They kindly let me be one of the guys...until I talk about stuff that falls into the same category with things I notice at the grocery store. Then they're quick to point out that we're different. I don't see what the big deal is.