come ON

After a lovely morning at the Urbana farmers' market, Kasey and I cut through Lincoln Square Mall on the way to pick up some delicious bagels from Schnucks. I wanted to check out the new piano bar there. I'm so glad we did, because we also got to take a gander at the featured pieces in the window of a local studio photographer, including this one:

food stuffs

I think if this teaching thing doesn't work out I might become an anthropologist who studies grocery stores. I think what goes on in grocery stores is fascinating.

On my last trip to the grocery store, I engaged in no less than three super-cheery conversations with strangers; one was about produce, one was about the difference between grape juice and grape drink, and one was about shopping carts. Brief as those conversations were, I wonder why they were all so... peppy? Maybe it's me, since I was a control factor in the unintentional study, but I wouldn't generally consider myself to be a person of such spunk.

Or maybe I could be a geographer and look at where grocery stores are located in relation to various neighborhoods. Last summer we observed that the grocery stores in several of the low-income neighborhoods we we worked in were actually just a few food racks in gas stations. All the Doritos you can handle, but not an apple in sight. What's up with that, huh.

Anyway, I think I could be happy spending my life writing books with cheesy titles that capitalize on cliche grocery store stuff like "clean up on aisle nine" and "SPAM" and "B.O.B."

Unrelated, but um, oh hey sweet endorsement from Caroline Kennedy: NYT: A President Like My Father

It's the little things in life, you know?

Today as I was leaving the grocery store, there was a man coming in, in his fifties I'd say, and wearing a vintage teal B.U.M. Equipment sweatshirt. He had longish gray hair and just as he was stepping into the sensored zone of the automatic door, he kicked his leg forward, did this karate chop thing, and yelled, "Hiyah!" He was by himself, no kids with him or anything. But after he did it he looked so happy. He looked at me with no shame and said, "I've always wanted to do that." Yeah, man.