I chose Georgia because it's just a new risky one offered on my 'options' bar. It's appropriate to bring up how I had a 10 minute thought process over font choice because it pertains to the subject of my blog. I'd like to think that I'm smart or even wise, but when I go into a large retail/grocery store I have a full boar melt down of my mental functions. I can't process anything. I had this experience publicly very recently. My friend wanted to get some Thanksgiving treats at the grocery store and asked if I needed anything. I offered to walk there with him and we'd kick ass inside that store and get an array of goodies for Thanksgiving. My goal was to get the following:
pie, Coke Zero, more pie, beer, and egg nog. Upon entering the store I feel the panic set in. Too many people, too many sounds, too much shit to choose from. My friend asked me to help him out and grab some Ritz crackers. Okay.... No problem. I have a task now and I will meet the challenge of this Ritz finding. I failed. I couldn't find anything. The Ritz cracker is an illusive thing. You'd think it would be on the chip aisle, then you shamefully figure out it's not as you saunter to the "party food aisle"- my rationale is "hey we are having a party, I'll go on the party aisle and I'll find all the Ritz I can man handle." I found none. I found Ding Dongs, Pringles, Triskets, and the like... no Ritz. Do they make Ritz anymore? Of course they do. It's the answer to your cracker needs when Saltines won't cut the mustard.
Finally I realize that my friend has been calling my phone repeatedly. "Where are you? What in the hell? Did you get lost?" I asked how much time had elapsed and his response was "30 minutes!".... I apologized profusely and explained relative time in time space as it relates to gravity or magnetic fields... I offered up a theory that maybe the grocery store has high electro-magnetic fields which just warped my sense of time. After my friend shot me in the head, he effortlessly found the Ritz crackers. They were on an aisle I had walked down about 7 times while cursing the very air I was breathing because I couldn't find them.
My mind started reeling about this. My friend is a gay guy... I am a chick... I should be able to find things at stores right? Wrong. I don't think like a woman at all. I don't have compartments like that in my brain for spices, breads, various cheeses, recipes, decor, shopping, babies... none of that is within my reasoning. My friend is way more of a woman than I am.
So moving swiftly along.... The next day after Thanksgiving we all decide to walk around downtown and just look in stores, etc... I knew I needed a few things. I needed gloves, new socks, and I needed a sweater that didn't look like I had been living under a bus for the last 10 years. The options were intense. Too many. If I found a sweater that I thought would work for me, I would find another one that had a pocket that was a smidge different but yet it was 10 dollars more... this got me a' thinkin', "is that pocket structurally more sound than the pocket on the cheaper edition of the EXACT SAME SWEATER?" I may never know. I didn't buy either of them. All in all, I tried on about 8 sweaters of the same color and style and none of them seemed to me to be the excalibur of their lot.
The endless options we have in our cathedrals of capitalism are ridiculous. However, how it started in the first place is why we live in the USA and why people envy us... Creativity. If there were one gray sweater and that was all you had to choose from, someone, maybe even me, would say "I can make a gray sweater just like that one only with pockets or red buttons cause that is what I would want so there must be someone else who is wanting a gray sweater with red buttons?" This is the whole reason people make dreams come true here in the United States when they had no options or less options in their homeland. If you were born here, you take for granted the options you have. It's all you've ever known. Even if you were poor and living in the slums of Detroit, you were still surrounded by plenty within a few blocks. Americans(myself included) shouldn't complain about the Ethiopian owned corner store or the Korean nail salon's popping up all over the place....We should check ourselves and think about how they came to another country and didn't know jack shit about jack shit about jack shit regarding our culture, the language, ET AL... and still had the balls to say "I know there is a nail salon over there but my nail salon (or car repair, corner store) will be different somehow, and I will make money here."
And they do.
Maybe it is because they believe in the fairy tale of the United States of America , i.e. "As a man thinketh, so is he." If I think of something for long enough as being "the answer to all my problems" or "my dream situation"... you will make it work even if you realize it's not all that easy or rose tinted.
As for my meltdowns in grocery stores or retail outlets or font choosing.... I think I'd rather lose track of time in a grocery store looking for Ritz crackers than I would losing the option to create a better grocery store layout or better yet- write freely a blog about not finding the Ritz crackers.
