In search of a potato

Imported from MySpace blog

A visit to one of my city's discount grocers is like a social experiment for me.

I went there the other month to acquire a potato, some sour cream and various other foodstuffs. I grabbed my cart and began wielding it, maneuvering through the clumps of young mothers with newly expanded hips on which to balance wailing whelps; teenagers clad in hand-me-down Wal-Mart fashions loudly snapping their gum and trying to look bored; crack heads twitching and picking through the bargain bin bulk section; strutting grown-up high school dropouts wearing low-slung pants showing off their practiced swaggers, perfected over a lifetime of afternoons spent swigging 40s on tattered couches on sagging front porches; morbidly obese grandparents wheezing their way toward the frozen food aisles, tattered t-shirts hanging off their fat rolls proclaiming their allegiance to the Chicago Cubs or emblazoned with outdated slogans from the '80s.

An acne-scarred woman in her late 30s screamed into her cell phone in the produce section, berating the person on the other end for not warning her about the crowd that Winco always produces around the first of the month, when welfare checks arrive, and food stamp funds are replenished. And, she hollered, on Super Bowl weekend, too! Ah, the Super Bowl, when God-fearing Americans everywhere get together to celebrate the athleticism and physical prowess that is so prized in our culture by drinking in excess, eating salty, greasy animal byproducts and screaming incoherently at large-screen televisions in smoky bars.

It took me a solid three minutes to get my greedy little fingers around a potato. After patiently waiting for a mullet-sporting family with shiny black Raiders jackets in front of me to finally stop yanking their children about and move on to another aisle, I had been parked in front of the potato section for what seemed like an eternity. Likening the crowd to a herd of obstinate sheep unaware of their surroundings, I decided to change my tactic: instead of waiting for them to notice me and let me pass, I barreled ahead, letting them know by my steely gaze and purposeful stride that it was get out of the way or get sliced open with my cart-shaped cage of knotted steel. It worked momentarily, until a middle-aged ex-meth user / gas station attendant announced loudly that if you're in a hurry, Winco is not the place to be.

I stopped. I thought about what he'd said. I then shrugged, abandoned my cart, and carefully but quickly fled the scene of my social discomfort. I got back in the car and drove all the way across town to the decidedly more bourgeoisie Albertson's, where I could shop without having to rub elbows with the rabble.

So what does it mean that the poverty-stricken residents of Medford made me so uncomfortable that I had to leave? It can't be that I hate poor people: I stood in the poor kid's line at the cafeteria in my middle school; I wore the same three pairs of pants with holes in the knees for most of my early adolescence; survived without shiny new CD players (or any CD player at all). My family's class status has swung wildly during my lifetime, which means a number of things, one of which is I'm pretty comfortable in a wide range of social situations. Maybe I was just cranky. Maybe I just really hate football. But maybe it's just a cultural thing.

Take the money and run

Imported from MySpace blog

Alternately perusing the pages of the morning paper and surfing the Web whilst whittling away the precious free time I have, I'm always drawn to trend stories.

I don't know why, I just love them. I almost always end up reading them to the end, poring over the nifty fact boxes that accompany them, and glancing at the colorful graphs and charts that illustrate whatever trend the story is about. You know those amusing feature pieces, the ones that give a newspaper's front page "color:" kids in suburbs learning to dance on top of moving cars; the craze among barhoppers in college towns to use their iPods or whatever to get dates; the resurgence in the popularity of knitting; etc., etc. ad nauseum. I read 'em all. I guess I just like to find out what ridiculous craze my fellow humans are slavishly following now.

Sometimes I find myself getting jealous. Jealous that I thought of whatever trend featured in today's edition of NY Times' Web site first. Or that I haven't caught on already. Or sometimes I'm pissed that whatever trend is obviously a good one, but meant for a select few only, and now that some reporter did their job and reported on it, a whole mess of sheeple will join in with said trend and make it un-cool in a hurry.

But mostly I just get jealous. Jealous that I thought of selling my eggs for money FIRST, before the AP got wind of lots of others doing the same thing and wrote an alarmist story about the would-be lucrative trade in human flesh. (Questionable judgement, yes, but MY questionable judgement). Jealous that I didn't think up the idea of trying not to buy anything new for a year myself -- that I had to steal the idea from some yuppies in California, courtesy of another AP trend feature.

I want to be on the bleeding edge all by myself, dammit, and I don't need any help from the bloody mass media run by crusty old white men. Or do I?

Recently I was reading about tea shops and thinking to myself, "What a neat-o trend. I've been trying to cut down on coffee anyway..." And just as I was about to mentally jump on the bandwagon, it struck me: Tea shops aren't any cooler than coffee shops, or newer, or better, or really any different. Tea shop proprietors, just like coffee shop proprietors, want my money. They want your money. They want everyone's money. Trend stories, essentially, are all about taking our money. They might even be considered free advertising.

Those college kids texting furiously on their Blackberries? They all had to fork over a huge chunk of change to buy them first. Knitters hanging out in tea shops? They all bought "Stitch 'n' Bitch" books and cup after cup of trendoid tea.

I immediately snapped out of my teahouse reverie and came back to reality: I refuse to allow my emotions to be manipulated by advertisements, and there's absolutely no reason to allow legitimate reporting to do the same.

Sure, there are jillions of perfectly innocuous trend stories that do what they're supposed to: enlighten, entertain, warn, teach. The story that reports on students in the U.S. going to school for fewer hours and days than in other industrialized nations could spur a change in U.S. educational policy. The one that talks about increasingly suburban, scattered neighborhoods or adults with longer commutes and fewer close friends could be seen as a call to action for people to rally around their communities.

But then there are those stories that are basically unpaid publicity: All the cool kids are doing this; this is what young people in uber-hip burg that's not YOUR hometown wear/do/listen to/eat. F*ck that noise. We need to start seeing this kind of reporting for what it is: lazy and unworthy of our time.