Man Shopping

Pity me. I’ve been performing that most abhorrent of female duties: Man Shopping. No, not shopping in order to acquire men, as I’ve chronicled here, but shopping for the men in my life. And worse than that, even…today I shopped for stocking gifts.

Urk.

The women in my family have always adored giving and receiving stocking gifts, as long as they are for or from other women. The problem is that once we’ve filled each other’s stockings to the brim, we’ve felt obligated to do likewise for the men in our lives. And I don’t think I’ve ever known a single man who really likes small, inexpensive gifts. They don’t even seem to understand the whole small-gift-concept.

Still, my dad always dutifully made an effort to be appreciative each year:

 “Wow! A mini-moose-horned back scratcher! Now that sure is something.”

“All righty…just what I needed. Socks! Those will come in mighty handy.”

“Ha ha, yes siree…a polishing kit for bald heads! That sure is pretty funny.”

I’m not sure what was more painful—buying the stocking gifts, or watching him open them.

We must not be the only family who goes through this, because stores make an effort to set up displays of suggestions for men each year. There must be an enormous amount of pressure to get creative, because today I passed more than the usual wallets, desk games, cartoon-themed boxer shorts and creatively inscribed golf balls.

For the wife who is trying to combine good hygiene and a love of tools, there was a large and varied display of electric toothbrushes. Interesting to me were the racks and racks of pink flashlights and animal-themed bag clips, which surely must be high on every man’s “want” list.

The one exception to the shopping rule is my son. When he was a teenager, shopping was torture. Then a girlfriend entered the picture and everything changed. I don’t know how she does it, but if she likes it, he does, too. Once I took him shopping and brought his girlfriend along. While we loaded him up for his trip into the dressing room, I winked at her and handed him a short-sleeved button down shirt in aqua and white gingham that I’d had the wonderful luck to find brightening up the clearance rack. My son solemnly took it.

“Your girlfriend really likes this one,” I prompted. He only nodded, completely clueless as to why I was snorting and giggling.

I am so proud…not to mention relieved. He just might be getting a set of monkey-themed bag clips. I’ll just blame it on his girlfriend.

Happy holidays to you and yours!

• I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.
• This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.
• I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can't put it down.
• I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.
• They told me I had type A blood, but it was a type-O.

~Puns lovingly passed down from my friend Jim’s dad

Succinctly Yours Weeks 241 and 242: I Spy with My Little Eye

Thank you to Grandma of Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours! Participants are invited to step it up and tap out a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer based on the photo. Life has been beyond crazy lately, so I am combining Week 241 (bonus word, “autonomous,”) and Week 242 (bonus word, “parse”). I invite you to parse the preceding sentence. Would you place the period where I did, or inside the last set of quotation marks? Grammar-obsessed minds want to know.

They had won the vote at last. Still, she found it hard to believe women were becoming more autonomous when they were still bound by the feet.  116

Evelyn was known to hide and parse the neighbors’ eating habits in minute detail. She was sure they weren’t washing their food properly.   114

Aim for success, not perfection.  Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. ~Dr. David M. Burns

All I Want for Christmas for My Two Front Teeth

 “Where is it!? I will f-ing die if I don’t get it! I mean it,” she turns to me. “It’s like a f-ing fix, you know?

I look over at her, startled, wondering if this girl is trying to shock me with all of those f-words. I decide she doesn’t even seem aware of them. She is a tall, thin, pretty girl maybe in her late twenties, with braces and glasses, edgy-intellectual looking. In a movie, I would cast her as the cool-quirky girl. We are alone in a Target aisle, almost alone in the store late on a Saturday night with the first snow of the season coming down in wet, lazy flakes in the dark parking lot. The “fix” she is talking about is, of all things, dental floss.

“No sh-t, I mean it. This stuff is so good, I’d buy up every last one the store had if they ever discontinued it. And not just because I have braces, but because I almost need my dental floss to, you know….”

“…gouge that stuff out of there,” I finish for her, nodding. I’ve been standing in front of the floss display, lamenting the fact that my last good brand has apparently been discontinued (again!), willing another good one to appear. And by “good,” I mean serious floss. None of this namby-pamby stuff. No cutesy little spools of thread. Not the gentle kind. I don’t want my floss to hurt the food particles’ feelings a little. I want it to decimate them with what appears in the pictorial blow-ups on the label as miniature medieval weaponry.

She explodes with the shock of finding a commiserative sister-in-dental-floss-obsession. “YES! I mean, I don’t care how hard I have to dig into those f-ing teeth, I need that f-ing sh-t out of there. People don’t realize you can smell it if they don’t get it out. Their f-ing breath smells!” She is clearly appalled by those filthy mouths. “But this sh-t”—she locates her brand, and I feel the briefest disappointment that her brand is different from mine—“this is the bomb.”

I study the one she is offering. Unconventional packaging. I like that, but I’m wary. I’ve been fooled before. “It isn’t the kind that’s like tiny pipe cleaners that poke between your teeth, is it? Or the kind that’s like a long rubber band that flings food particles across the room like a slingshot?” I ask. I’ve tried them all by now and I especially hate that kind. Who wants to catapult masticated food across the room with a little band of elastic? Eww.

“NO!” She explodes again. Is she drunk? On drugs? Or merely that excited about dental floss? I honestly can’t tell. “Oh, f-k, I can open it, I’m buying it anyway. No sh-t, it’s the f-ing bomb.” She opens it to show me.

I admire the dental floss, thank her, and take some to try. She strolls away, this patron saint of dental floss, this paragon of clean mouths.

And—go figure—the girl knew her floss. It really is the f-ing floss bomb.

This drives me crazy, that God seems to have no taste, no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope. ~Anne Lamott, Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith

The Other People of Walmart

I hate shopping at Wally World. Love the prices, but the experience itself reminds me of Hunger Games-Meets-Honey-Boo-Boo. Some WalMartians, I’ve found, appear to regress to their ancestral roots when it comes to obtaining food. It’s famine time, and they are willing to threaten death-by-grocery-cart for anyone who comes between them and that mega bag of off-brand jalapeno corn twists.

I once tried repeatedly dodging a customer who’d gone on an expedition in the frozen food case. The aisle was blocked with those displays they like to add, so every time the woman would lean in, her derriere jutted out and blocked the aisle like a railroad crossing gate. She was performing major calisthenics in there. When she’d stand up, the path was free again. Up down up down. She was so lost in the frozen tundra of Tater Tot Land that she couldn’t hear me say, “excuse me” repeatedly. So at one point when the path was blessedly free, I darted past. Down came the booty and threatened to ram my cart like a Rocky Mountain Billy Goat—truly giving new meaning to the action of butting something.

Recently I had an errand in one of the nicer parts of town, so I stopped at their Wally World on my way home. I couldn’t believe it. Who knew the wealthy hid such treasures from the rest of us? Shoppers stayed to one side so others could pass. No children camped out in the middle of aisles, unattended. People uttered the magic words, “excuse me.” When my yogurt package broke, three people politely informed me. Three. And they were so nice about it! No one scared me even a little. Oh, sure, maybe it was a tad Stepford-like, but if they had said they wanted to make me one of them, I would have been okay with that.

I dubbed it “Weird Wally’s,” and I dream of going back there someday.

Alas, “my” WalMart is much closer, so I got the bright idea to shop late at night when fewer customers are there. Turns out that’s when the aisles are stocked, so instead of being blocked by oblivious shoppers, they are blocked by forests of gigantic carts and stockers who are possibly on work release programs for those who don’t work well with others.

Not only are they more hostile than the usual clientele, those giant gurneys make a grocery cart look like a little red wagon lost at a monster truck rally. In the paper goods aisle, I feared a TP avalanche that might smother me. Worry about the resulting headline—not to mention my obituary—caused me to abandon the paper items on my list. Then I dodged several convicts, a former roller derby queen, a few meth heads and an angry granny trailing Luna Lovegood’s locks behind her.

When I finally emerged alive from that obstacle course, they added insult to injury by making me do self-checkout…for my entire cartload of groceries, produce and all. Have I mentioned before that I send out Carrie-like anti-machinery vibes that break things? Any time I saved by avoiding shoppers was more than wasted with a scanner that told me repeatedly I needed help.

Well, duh. I bet the people at Weird Wally’s are getting free hors d’oeuvres and massages at the end of their shopping trips.

Life is much trippier than first imagined. ~Anne Lamott, Stitches

Dastardly Dozen

On the twelfth day before Christmas, many hassles befell me:

Twelve people in line,

Eleven shirt boxes missing,

Ten shoppers griping,

Nine un-matching gift tags,

Eight packages that need mailing,

Seven ornaments shattered

Six inches of packing tape left

Five more inches of snow!

Four backordered gifts

Three mile parking lot walk

Two sore feet

And a light that still won’t light on the tree!

It’s been a particularly hectic season here. Isn’t it amazing that a holiday that’s about love and brotherhood can so quickly and ironically make you feel the opposite? So it’s all the more important to me this year to stop and remember all that’s wonderful—and you are one of them. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, and have a happy holiday!

Squidward: Who would want to celebrate a holiday where a fat man breaks into your house and leaves gifts?
Patrick: Like a genie!
~Spongebob Squarepants