How to be an American

As has become my custom since I moved back in with my mother, I went to Wal-Mart for my Sunday evening grocery run. Every time I go to the store and venture within glimpsing distance of the half of the store that is food, I think that it would really be worth it to pay someone to grocery shop for me. Not for the convenience of it so much as to save future money on diabetes medication. I don't have diabetes, but every time I go to Wal-Mart I get the strange sensation that I don't have enough sugar in my diet (clearly a sign of delusion) and take the necessary steps to put myself into a diabetic coma for the next two days and probably that much closer to Type II. Tonight, I couldn't leave without buying (and subsequently baking) a bag of Betty Crocker Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix which, beside an egg, required no wet ingredients beside butter. So I'm thinking, if someone had been shopping for me, they would have come back with tomato soup and I wouldn't be trying to type a blog with a sugar-induced twitch and a butter-induced ass.

I would miss the nuances of grocery shopping sometimes. For instance, the cereal aisle. I love cereal. I lingered on the cereal aisle for a disproportionately long time tonight and let me assure you that it was the highlight of my day. I took waaaay too long deciding which cereal I wanted, looking first at Froot Loops, Cap'n Crunch and the like, then moving on to the sliiiiightly less saccharine Honey-Nut varieties. I sensibly settled on Wheat Chex and Cheerios, two old standbys that never let you down, nutritionally or tastally. But the knowledge is always there that I could have taken home a little frosted number in a tarted up box, and that is infinitely comforting.

The greatest void that would be left in my life if I ceased to grocery shop would be the magazine aisle. In the past couple of years, I have gone from someone who would never have to buy toilet paper again if I just used my magazines, to a thrifty shopper who realized that I could JUST READ US WEEKLY IN THE STORE and never again have to deal with the guilt of paying the people who take pictures of Paris Hilton. Therefore, after I hit the cereal aisle, pick up some milk, and smell all the laundry detergents, I pull my cart into the intellectual section of the store where they sell Danielle Steel, Joel Osteen, and In Touch.
Thus my week begins with a robust evening of discount supercenter shopping and celebrity scandals.
God bless America.