I hate grocery shopping, which is unfortunate because I dearly love to eat. Cooking doesn't bother me. Heck, I can even do the dishes... it's always the grocery shopping that kills me.

It's some weird combination of buying food and then not knowing for a fact that I'll eat it before it goes bad and thus I waste money AND food and there are all these people who have neither and then I feel like a big, fat jerk... it's dumb. And the process itself is horrible.

More than anything I think I hate pushing the shopping cart. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I hope I find a guy who knows that, probably above all other domestic tasks and responsibilities, he will HAVE to push the shopping cart because I will absolutely refuse to do it. I hate having to maneuver around other carts and in narrow aisles and I constantly think I'm in someone's way. Oy. I hate it.

I even hate picking out food. Last week I needed more peanut butter and stood staring for twenty minutes at eighty different peanut butters. No, I don't want one with jelly mixed in or one that's flavored like chocolate or one that's low sodium or low sugar or low fat. I don't want one that comes with a free toy or a coupon for some off-brand jam. I don't want one that comes in a jar too big to fit in my cabinet, or one that costs $8. I don't want the soy one or the all-natural one.

Peanut butter used to come in two varieties: smooth and chunky.

But they've even made that complicated. There's extra smooth and extra chunky now. Extra chunky I suppose I can understand. You can always put more peanuts in. But extra smooth? What the hell does that mean? Are they putting less than no peanuts in it? Are they putting negative peanuts in the peanut butter?

I DON'T THINK SO!

So, finally, after spending half my morning in the pb&j aisle, I picked up regular, store brand, chunky peanut butter.

I'm grateful for the aisle with the ramen and canned tuna, which should be renamed the "Almost as poor as dirt" aisle. Or the "food that will survive a nuclear holocaust" aisle. I'm a fan of either of those. I generally enjoy that aisle because that's where I can find all my friends. I don't always know the people, but I know their type... college students or the newly graduated who found that, despite no longer being a college student, they have come in to no more money than they had as a work study filing papers in the dean's office. AND they have loans.

Anyway, it's a comparatively decision-free aisle. You just have to know how much you want. Last week when I went to get my weekly ration of ramen I found the individual packages next to the twelve packs. Stay with me. The individual packages were 15 cents (don't get me started. I remember when they were 7 or 8 cents). The 12-pack was $1.82. Let's walk through this. 12 individual packages would cost me $1.80. A box of 12 would cost me $1.82. I felt mighty proud of myself as I loaded 12 individual packages into my cart. I figured the extra two cents was to pay for the classy and attractive packaging. Raw cardboard and stretchy orange plastic that always seems to be covered in some sort of powder.

The freezer section is also not a horrible experience, though it's getting worse. I just want toaster waffles and someone dropped an A-Bomb on the Eggo factory or something and now there's this massive, national shortage. DAMN THIS RECESSION! It's ruining my life! So I have to try other brands of toaster waffles. Admittedly, they'll all taste like freezer burn anyway so I'm not sure it's worth my money to buy designer toaster waffles. And, for the record, I don't want mine with blueberries or chocolate chips or to be shaped like pancakes or to have Zac Efron's face in the middle. Am I reaching for the stars in my desire to have normal toaster waffles?

I think the absolute worst part of the food-picking process is easily produce. I always wonder who woke up one day and decided that of everything growing in the continent, THESE particular things would be cultivated and widely distributed.

I just don't know HOW to pick this stuff. Obviously, if there's a sunflower the size of my face growing out of my potato, I know not to eat it. But there are so many other things like.. like.. melons and stuff. You just can't get a good one. OH! Cucumbers. Somewhere in the middle of my long list of oddities is the fact that I like cucumbers on my sandwiches. So last week I decided I should buy a cucumber to, well, put on my sandwiches.

It occurred to me that I had never before in my life bought a cucumber and I've come to the conclusion that they make me very uncomfortable. They're all weird and waxy and, above all, inescapably phallic. I'm up to my elbows in cucumbers looking at them and feeling them and squeezing them and wondering if they should be softish or firmish. If little bumps are ok. If it should be curvy or not. If that little extra stem is normal. It got to the point when I had to wonder if I was even thinking about cucumbers anymore at all. I don't know, but I was blushing quite a lot, so I just grabbed one and ran for it.

It's embarrassing to admit that such a mundane errand can cause me this much upset, but I can't help that. I can obviously not handle having choices.

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