It began with the trip there. I needed to travel a little further this time, since my standard food outlet doesn't carry the requisite alcohol for the stew I'm cooking this week. All well and good. Unfortunately, the gods decided the extra distance would be an excellent opportunity to test my patience, as I needed to stop for every… single… stoplight.
When the lights finally deigned to turn green, the drivers in front of me completely forgot how gas pedals work. After a few presidential administrations of me losing my mind, those cars eventually got up to speed, which was approximately five miles under the speed limit, by their reckoning. This resulted, of course, in all of us missing the next traffic light. I could feel the grey hairs forming when I finally reached the grocery store and parked.
Filling the shopping cart was blessedly uneventful. I was cooling down from the ride when I finally reached the checkout line. Naturally, only two lanes were open, so the lines were, at a conservative estimate, thirty miles long. I squeaked my cart to the end of the queue somewhere in Azerbaijan and hunkered down for a long wait. By the time I caught sight of a cashier, I was wizened and malnourished.
My natural impatience was compounding the annoyance from the commute a lifetime ago, but I was finally here. The promised land. The conveyor was within my reach. I was fully prepared to begin unloading my cart, but the lady directly in front of me was very busy leaning against the end, blocking all access. I was going to say something, but my stiff upper lip precluded any formation of actual words with my mouth. I remained silent, and waited. Employing the sunk cost fallacy, I rationalized "what's a few more hours of waiting?"
Then, the lady in front of the lady in front of me did something I am still incapable of grokking. As the cashier was processing her five-hundred shopping carts' worth of goods, she looked over her kingdom and decided that two bottles of Pine-Sol was too extravagant. Rather than hand it to the cashier and say something along the lines of "I don't need this," like some kind of human being, she picks it up and tosses it into one of the hand baskets someone left under the conveyor belt. I leaned against my cart, agog at what I just witnessed. What did she think that basket did? Teleport the goods back to the shelf? Melt the cleaner into its constituent atoms for future integration into the universe? Provide a path to Narnia? Such was the depth of my incomprehension at this middle-aged Hispanic lady's action that I was shouting in my head, "that's it lady! Get me a pillow case! I'm joinin' the Klan!"
At last, my time had come. The cashier began beeping through my future purchases. Being the savvy and caring shopper I am, I already had my reusable grocery bags ready and waiting. I have four, a number which has never failed to comfortably carry a standard week's worth of groceries. In a shockingly blatant display of black magic, the cashier somehow fit all of my groceries into two ultra-dense bags. I was legitimately worried those bags would collapse into a singularity if I added even a single candy bar. I was fully prepared to provide testimony against her in a future witch-burning trial.
I was glad to finally turn my back to the store, but I still wasn't home yet. The ride home broke every last thread of human decency and rational thought. There was a driver in front of me. A very slow driver. I was fairly certain he or she was training to achieve their lifelong dream of being the lead car in a Macy's Day Parade. This car was taking the exact same route as me, down to entering the same apartment complex, so I was stuck behind this car for the entire trip. I'm pretty sure I didn't get home until just before the heat death of the universe.
As I was putting my groceries away, I learned that one of my eggs broke in transit.
I've been curled up crying in the shower for the last five hours.
