Got Milk?

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

There’s an old saying that “you are what you eat,” and to certain extent, I suppose that’s true.  Scary, of course, but mostly true.  Then again, what you eat depends a lot on what you’ve got around to eat.  So, maybe it’s more accurate to say that you are what you would eat. 

I think people with families to feed have it easier in some ways when it comes to food, though.  Of course, the meal prep and the cleanup are bigger hassles.  When you’re only feeding yourself, you can eat right out the can with your bare hands if you want to.  It’s not like anyone is going to object.  But there does seem to be something about a child’s ability to use silverware that somehow makes parents feel like they’ve done their jobs.  So, even now, if my mother calls while I’m eating tuna straight out of the handy-dandy foil pouch, I always mention that I’m using a fork.  She seems to find that comforting.  Don’t ask me why.

And I don’t know if actual grocery shopping is easier if you have a family or not.  One day, I saw a woman in the store with a completely full cart and three little kids in tow…AND she was using coupons.  It was amazing.  I mean, I have a good deal of respect and admiration for firefighters who run into burning buildings, but I was utterly in awe of that woman.  If I had had the money, I would’ve paid for her groceries myself.  After all, I think that kind of bravery really should be rewarded.

But shopping for one is a completely different experience.  People always say that you should never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.  But that’s the only reason I ever go grocery shopping.  I mean, if I’m not hungry, why would I go buy some food?  That just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Now, I realize that there are lovely, responsible people on their own who plan ahead and stock up on food accordingly.  I am not one of those people.  I just figure I’ll worry about what’s for dinner when it’s dinnertime.  Besides, if I go to the grocery store when I’m not hungry, I tend not to buy any actual food.  Instead, I come home with 48 rolls of 9-ply toilet paper, an entire selection of coma-inducing cold medicine, and batteries.  Lots and lots of batteries.

And I don’t know what it is about the As Seen on TV aisle that holds such special meaning for me, but if I get anywhere near that section when I’m shopping without being hungry, it’s like being enticed into an opium den.  I mean, I can’t even figure out what half of that stuff is supposed to do, but who cares?  Some little thing will catch my eye, and it’s like I can’t turn away.  I’m totally mesmerized by that thing.  It folds up, it folds out, it expands, it contracts, it absorbs, it repels.  It’s magic!  Magic, I tell you!  And I must have it.  Even if I don’t have any idea what it is.

Of course, when I am hungry, I’m not that much better at shopping.  When you’re single, you can eat whatever you want to eat whenever you want to eat it.  And while that might seem oddly freeing, trust me, it isn’t.  I don’t know how many times I’ve come home with ten pounds of some kind of fish I’ve never even heard of.  I can’t count how many jars of cocktail onions have found their way into my cart.  And every now and then, I just go into an absolute crouton mania.  There’s just no telling what I might buy.  I remember coming home one time only to find that after I’d put all the food away, my entire freezer was filled up with nothing but frozen waffles and vodka. 

I’ve tried the idea of making a list before I go to the store, but it never quite works out.  After all, I don’t have time to make a list.  I’m hungry.  I need some food right now. 

At one point, though, I tried keeping a rolling list that I would work on from time to time so that when I got hungry, I could just snatch it up and head off to the store.  The problem was that lists like that tend to be rather, well, optimistic.  It was more a list of what I thought I should eat rather than what I actually do eat.  So, I’d write down stuff like string beans and peas and low-fat milk and bananas, and then I’d get to the store and wonder, “Who broke into my house and made up this list?”  And then I’d end up going home with a TV dinner, a jar of pesto sauce, and this lingering feeling of guilt and shame.  So, I gave up on that idea a long time ago.  If there’s one thing I don’t need in my life, it’s the stress of trying to live up to my grocery list.

My strangest grocery shopping experiences, though, were back when I was finishing college.  One summer, a friend of mine and I were both working on the graveyard shift as janitors for the university, and since we needed to keep our nocturnal schedules over the weekends, we did our grocery shopping at about 3am on Saturday nights.  Back then, the 24-hour grocery store was a completely new thing, so it seemed like an adventure.  A really weird, kind of creepy, sort of scary adventure, but an adventure nonetheless.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store in our town was really kind of seedy and cut-rate.  Their big selling point was that their prices were lower because you had to bag your own groceries.  Personally, I think their prices were lower because they never cleaned the place or bothered to replace any of the continually flickering overhead lights.  Just walking into that store was like being sucked into a scene out of a David Lynch movie.  From what I could tell, they employed nothing but drug addicts.  Even the customers looked strangely vacant and potentially dangerous. 

I don’t actually remember the name of the store, but they really should’ve just called it The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store because that’s about what it amounted to. When you walked in, you really sort of expected to see an aisle sign that read “Bloated and Dented Canned Goods.”  A section of completely mislabeled food items wouldn’t have been out of place, and to be honest, this was the kind of store that would happily sell you an opened box cereal or a half-eaten sandwich.  I think their whole business plan was based on a mixture of apathetic capitalism and brutal honesty.  They didn’t know anything about food safety, and they weren’t trying to hide it.  But if you insisted on buying groceries from them, they wouldn’t try to stop you.

One of the most entertaining parts of the store was a section located beyond an entire aisle of used cardboard boxes they were trying to sell and just to the side of a fairly disreputable-looking dairy case.  That last section was the kind of area that really should’ve been called something like Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck.  You never knew what you might find back there.  Boxes of prime rib, cases of scotch, Barbie Dream Houses, tube socks.  There was really no telling.  Whenever I went back to that area, I always sort of expected to find some heavy-set guys sitting around smoking cigars and playing poker.  But really, if I’d come upon a chorus line of dancing midgets, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The funny thing is that as strange as that store was, my friend and I kept going there.  After all, they did actually have lower prices, and as long as you made sure that whatever you bought wasn’t misshapen or giving off a foul odor, you were pretty safe.  Besides, back then, bagging your own groceries seemed oddly empowering.  It was like the store was entrusting you with a sacred duty, and that made you more than just a customer.  You were an integral part of the machinery that was The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store.  Whether or not that was something you wanted to admit to your friends was a whole other story.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store is a really common thing these days although shopping at 3am is still a lot like being trapped in an episode of The Twilight Zone with little snippets of the movie Dune thrown in just to confuse you.  What makes shopping even stranger, though, is that the Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck section seems to be a staple in a lot of the bigger, super-grocery stores.  In fact, it’s taken over about half the space of those stores.  And I might just be Old School, but I don’t ever think I’ll understand that.  I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with knowing that the grocery store that sells me milk and eggs is also willing to sell me a car and finance the loan.  My mind just can’t expand quite that far.

My mom, of course, thinks the idea of the grocery super-store is great because it’s more convenient.  I mean, to her, if you need groceries and a new couch, what could be better than finding it all in one place?  And I suppose she’s got a point.  It really is a lot more convenient.  But for someone like me, it’s also a lot more dangerous.  After all, if I find myself in a regular grocery store now without being hungry, the worst thing that will happen is that I’ll go home with five rolls of non-stick aluminum foil, two boxes of dryer sheets, and a loofah sponge.  And frankly, there are worse things I could do.

But the grocery super-store is just a disaster waiting to happen for someone like me because suddenly I’m not just walking out with a package of light bulbs. I’m walking out with a new set of patio furniture. I’m not just buying a new dustpan. I’m buying a lawn vacuum.  And I don’t even have a lawn.  Or a patio.

What scares me most about it all, though, is that I really do believe that you are what you look around your kitchen and decide you would eat.  So I’m perfectly willing to say that I am ten pounds of lutefisk.  I’ll own up to being a jar of maraschino cherries.  I’ll stand on the highest mountain and proudly proclaim that I am a crouton.  But I’m just dreading the first time I go into a grocery super-store when I actually am hungry.  The sheer number of products will be overwhelming, and I have no doubt that I’ll eventually return home dazed, confused, and probably slightly motion sick only to have to look myself straight in the mirror and face the fact that I am a radial tire.

All in all, I miss the days when I was a little kid going grocery shopping with my mom.  My whole job then, at least as far as I understood it, was to hang off the cart and grab random things off the shelves.  These days, I’d happily pay some little kid to do that for me.  Hell, I’d pay a grown-up to do that for me.  But there’s something about being a grown-up yourself that makes people think you should have mastered the fine art of grocery shopping by now.  And I suppose that to some extent, I have at least reached some level of competency when it comes to buying food.  After all, I haven’t starved to death yet.  Still, whenever I see some parent in the store with a child, there’s always some part of me that just wants to lean down and say, “Kid, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.”  But, hey, I’m an adult, so I just gather up my tube of cake frosting, my bottle of soy sauce, and my block of cheese because, you know, it’s dinner time.  And I’m hungry.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Back on the Chain Gang

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

So, Labor Day has just passed us by, and I have to say that I think it’s a bit of a weird holiday.  I mean, it’s cool because most people get the day off, but it’s odd because it’s a holiday that was basically invented by a labor union for no other reason than they thought that people should get a day off.  It wasn’t originally intended to be a celebration of anything, really, except maybe the more mischievous side of union agitation.  In fact, if you listen closely on Labor Day, you can almost hear the faint sounds of Jimmy Hoffa laughing his ass off from…well, wherever he finally ended up.

Of course, what’s really tragic is the day after Labor Day.  It’s like on Labor Day, everyone says, “Yes, let’s celebrate YOU, the American worker!  You are the lifeblood of this country, the machine that drives us forward as a people, the very heart and soul of everything that makes this nation great!”  And people wave flags around and have parades and feel the need to publicly read Carl Sandburg poetry out loud.  Then the next day, it’s like, “And now you better drag your lazy butt out of bed and get to work, or you’re fired.”

Well, so much for the celebration of the exalted American worker.  After Labor Day, if you want a day off to relax and reflect on your contribution to this great land of ours, you have to get it the old-fashioned way.  You have to call in sick.

Now, I have to admit that I’ve long had a somewhat defiant attitude about calling in sick when all that’s really wrong with you is that you’re having a bad hair day or don’t have any clean clothes to wear.  To me, these are perfectly valid reasons to stay home.  I mean, you’re probably doing your co-workers a favor by not subjecting them to your distressing hairdo or your filthy, dirt-encrusted clothing.  But more than that, I think a sick day should be a private thing between you and your not entirely guilt-ridden conscience.  And I can trace that attitude right back to its source:  my first professional job.

You see, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I had a job with a big corporation, and for the most part, I liked the job just fine.  But that company had the strangest sick leave policy I’ve ever seen.  Basically, you got “short-term sick leave,” which was a day or two, and you got “long-term sick leave,” which was five days or more.  The strange thing was that you only got five short-term sick days per year, but you got four weeks of long-term sick leave.  And it wasn’t cumulative, either.  At the end of the year, the slate was wiped clean, and everybody just started over with the same amount of sick days.

The idea, as far as I could ever tell, was to discourage you from calling in sick because you got so few short-term days that you didn’t want to blow one just because you felt kind of sort of cruddy.  As far as the company was concerned, if you felt kind of sort of cruddy, you could drag your sorry butt into work and just sit in your office feeling that way.  After all, we had an infirmary on site in case things turned ugly, so as long as you weren’t actively bleeding from a major artery, the company just figured you could come to work. 

Of course, in practice, the sick leave policy worked the exact opposite.  If you got a stomach bug that normally would’ve taken two days to get over, you stayed out for five days so that you could take long-term sick leave.  After all, if you came back after two days, you’d used almost half of your short-term days.  But if you stayed out for a week, you’d only used a quarter of the your long-term time.  So in the end, the sick leave policy wasn’t even about the number of days you were out sick.  It was just about fractions.  And apparently, whoever made up the sick leave policy wasn’t very good at math.  Or predicting human behavior.

Anyway, at one point, I think the company must’ve caught on to what was happening, but instead of changing the policy, they just tried to make it scarier to call in sick by requiring you to specifically list what was wrong with you.  Now, I don’t know what kind of twisted soul ever thought this up, but listing what was wrong with you wasn’t just a matter of writing down, “I had the stomach flu.”  These people wanted details.  Disgusting, horrible details. 

So, if you had an ear infection, you couldn’t just say, “I had an ear infection.”  You had to describe the blinding, crippling pain.  If you had a cold, you had to tell them all about your runny nose, furry tongue, and pounding headache.  If you sprained your ankle, they wanted an essay on the swelling and torn ligaments.  Like I said, I have no idea what kind of sick mind ever thought that up. 

I also don’t know what kind sick mind ever thought that would work.  I mean, all it did was encourage people to exaggerate or just flat-out lie.  In my department, the phrase “projectile vomiting” became so commonplace that it ceased to even raise an eyebrow among the most sensitive of employees.  In fact, we would just sit around making up the most disgusting descriptions we could think of.  It was everybody’s favorite office game. 

Eventually, though, we realized that even though the “Gross Me Out” system was probably the brainchild of some genius manager in Human Resources, it was the administrative assistants over there who really had to deal with it.  And I don’t think they wanted to read that icky stuff any more than we wanted to write it.  And beyond that, if you used terminology that they wouldn’t be likely to know right off the tops of their heads, they wouldn’t look it up, either.  But really, who would?  I mean, if part of your job involved reading the kind of stomach-turning stuff people had to write on their sick leave forms, why would you want that torture to go on for one second longer than it had to? 

All that mattered was that something sounded reasonably disgusting enough.  As long as you cleared that hurdle, you were golden.  Well, OK, maybe not golden, but at least you were sick as far as the company was concerned.

The problem, though, was that I’d never been any good at lying, especially about being sick.  I’d always come up with something like “beriberi,” which sounds a lot more like a frozen drink you’d buy at the Taco Bell drive-through than a nervous system disease.  Or I say that I had “dengue fever,” which would actually make sense…if I lived in Nigeria.  And when I couldn’t think of anything, I tended to panic and write down stuff like “rabies” or “ebola virus.”   Then I’d always imagine some HR person reading that and thinking, “And you only needed one day off to recover?”  Thunk.  Denied.

But there was even more pressure on that job because you couldn’t just go with a disease name, even if you could come up with one that actually sounded like a real illness and wouldn’t need to involve a mad dog or a trip to a sub-tropical region in Africa.  It was all about the symptoms with that company.  So one day, I got out my dictionary and just started making up symptoms that were basically honest but could still pass the HR retch test. 

And in honor of The Day After Labor Day, I’d thought I’d pass them along.

Symptom	What It Really Means	Why It Would Work
Acute Bellicose Rupture	You got really, really angry with someone really, really fast.  And then you snapped.	Well, it just sounds awful, doesn’t it? “Bellicose” sounds like the first cousin of a varicose vein, and a rupture just sounds really messy.  Besides, “acute” makes it seem like a real emergency, and that’s always a plus in an excuse.
Chronic Ennui	You are frequently bored in a really hanging-around-in-a-French-café-wearing-a-beret-and-smoking-an-unfiltered-cigarette-left-over-from-WWII kind of way.	“Ennui” sounds vaguely gastrointestinal and not in a particularly pleasant way.  But more than that, it’s chronic.  That means you can use it over and over and over.  It’s recyclable.  It’s eco-friendly.  It’s the ultimate green excuse.
Generalized Malaise	You’re just kind of tired and uninterested in doing much of anything…like, say, going to work.  In fact, the very thought of going to work makes you tired and uninterested.	The idea of a generalized illness puts people off right away because there’s no telling what’s wrong with you.  There’s something wrong, but it can’t be pinpointed.  That’s the beauty of it.  It might be nothing. It might be epidemically contagious. Who is to know? And besides “malaise” is a French word…and most people would rather avoid French words.
Impacted Truculence	You have a scathingly harsh sense of judgement wedged into your psyche.  When someone says you have a stick up your butt about something, this is what you have.	How many phrases do you know of that start with the word “impacted” and turn out to be something good?  This isn’t a symptom anyone is going to want to personally verify.  Trust me.
Infectious Juvenility	You’re so immature that it will affect others.  You won’t just come to work wearing a big clown nose.  You’ll bring enough big clown noses for the whole office.	It’s infectious. And infection scares people. No one wants to be around anyone who is infected with anything. No one will even take the chance of making you come in to work if you say you have this.
Intumescent Jackassery	You have a swollen, engorged sense of foolishness. You’re puffy with giddiness.	Actually, I don’t think this one would work.  I just always wanted to write the word “jackassery” on a sick leave form.  I love that word.  It’s like tomfoolery on steroids.
Localized Apathy	You don’t care about one specific thing…like, say, going to work.  You care about other stuff…like TV and candy.  But you don’t care about going to work.	It sounds kind of serious but still like something that, given enough time and rest, you can recover from without having to have something amputated.  It’s definitely one to use if you’re going for the sympathy vote.  You might even get flowers out of the deal.  If nothing else, it automatically authorizes you to walk with a limp.
Oozing Turpitude	You are leaking moral corruption and general depravity.  It’s kind of like having cystic acne on your soul.	Would you really want to see something that’s oozing? I wouldn’t.  And neither would whoever is checking your sick leave excuse.  It’s like the free pass of the sick leave world.
Paralytic Indolence	You’re too lazy to get up.  In extreme cases, they couldn’t blast you off your couch with a fire hose.	Well, you’re paralyzed.  That’s never good no matter what the reason behind it is.  And no one expects you to come to work if you’re paralyzed.
Relapsing/Remitting Hedonism	You are far too occupied with the pursuit of pleasure to come to work.  It can also just mean that you’re too drunk to show up.	It relapses, it remits, it’s all over the place!  It’s completely unpredictable.  It could surface at any time.  And hedonism sounds like the result of some sort of genetic mutation, so nobody is going to question it.  In fact, if you say you have this, most people will feel sorry for you.  And then they’ll avoid you.

The trick to using the symptoms, though, was to combine them in ways that sounded like real illnesses. What started as a small bit of intumescent jackassery, for example, could quickly develop into full-blown infectious juvenility that could ultimately result in a bad case of oozing turpitude. And, of course, a good case of impacted truculence could always quite easily lead to an acute bellicose rupture. I think Hallmark even makes a card for that.  And who could ever predict when chronic ennui, a generalized malaise, and a stubborn case of localized apathy would collide into the perfect storm of make-believe illness?

You had to be kind of smart about what symptoms you put together, though.  After all, the HR people tended to gossip, and it wasn’t like you were never going back to your job again.  So, you probably wouldn’t want to combine something like relapsing/remitting hedonism with paralytic indolence.  That makes it sound like you were too lazy to get off the couch and come to work because you were too busy drinking cheap scotch and watching movies on “the special TV channel.”  And that’s really not the image you want to get back to your co-workers and managers.  I mean, if that’s really why you didn’t come to work, you probably would be better off just saying that you had rabies.

The funny thing is that for all the time I spent making up those symptoms, I never actually used any of them.  In fact, I rarely missed work, mostly because by the time I was awake enough to even think about calling in sick, I was already in my car and halfway to the office.  Still, I always kept that list in my desk drawer, and even after I left that job, I’ve always had a copy of it around.  And I’d love to say that those excuses were my way of flying in the face authority and of sticking it to The Man, but really, I still keep the list around just because it makes me laugh.  And because it reminds that if everything in business really made sense, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.

So, sometime soon, schedule an afternoon appointment for some reparative therapy to address your acute nutritional deficiency syndrome.  In other words, take a long lunch.  And don’t feel too bad about it, either. I mean, we take one day out of the whole year to extol the virtues of everyone who works for a living.  On all those other days that are most decidedly not Labor Day, you have to fend for yourself and remember that in the end, it really is the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the worker that makes a country great.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.