Some posts ago, I claimed that things were looking up for me on the job-front. Unfortunately, that assessment turned out to be a bit premature, but life trudges on, and here we are on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, and the tumult in my professional life, while not resolved, I can happily say has been compartmentalized. I spent a month -- I realize now -- totally preoccupied with my misfortune. Somehow, I didn't manage to devour books, or go to the gym obsessively, or tear through Season 1 of Mad Men, or make moves on that novel I keep talking about. I brooded, I worried. I think the middle of October to the middle of November 2008 will go down as the Lost Weekend of my life, but now I'm fixated on being productive, on re-entering society. This blog is my cotillian, and you, reader, you are my dashing white-tied son of plantation aristocracy. As I am a society type now, I have started calling up people and seeing if they want to do lunch, catch a movie, go to a concert. If you have time to chat on the phone, let me know. I recently got a blue tooth machine and now the world is my oyster.
Yesterday, on 'Pockets' orders, I went to the grocery store to do the necessary, and had to face down one of the few things I did not miss in my self-imposed exile: the insufferable Northern Californian stereotype. How this place challenges my liberalism. I showed up at Berkeley Bowl, mission command center for East Bay smugness, and encountered the inevitable long lines and packed aisles. That I was expecting. What I was not were the two men -- and this shows how I am still an easterner in a strange land of organic produce and fixed-gear bicycles-- two perfectly sculpted and bare-domed men, arguing over whether or not to purchase a bag of sugar:
Man 1: Jeffrey, Where is that sugar from?
Man 2: Michael, I don't know. It doesn't say.
Man 1: If it's from Paraguay, we can buy it. But if it's from China...
Man 2: Well, it's probably from somewhere we don't want it to be, but we need sugar.
Man 1: I will not eat sugar from China! I will not eat agrochemicals.
Man 2: Well, I'm buying this. I am not hunting for Paraguayan sugar tonight...Also, they are out of brown sugar, so we've already got enough problems.
Woman: Well, you can just mix the regular sugar with molasses. You know, that's all brown sugar is...
Man 1: But I want naturally brown sugar!
When the Chinese make a gulag our of our western outposts, and feed us nothing buy processed foods and lead-coated toys, I'll wash down my despair with the knowledge that Michael will be getting the reeducation he deserves.
Happy Thanksgiving.
2 comments:
This is pretty hilarious, though you clearly underestimate the deliciousness of Paraguayan sugar, which is hand shucked from the slopes of the Andes, bundled up and carried via llama on an arduous trek to the processing plant where it is ground by hand with the utmost care by women of Incan descent, in the ancient style.
Clearly all these things make it taste that much better, you philistine.
Jeffrey and Michael would clearly not approve of my 3pm vending machine Snackwells habit. Seriously though, nothing gets me through the afternoon like Snackwells. Snackwells, take me away!
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