I stop at the grocery store on the way home because its convenience and it’s selection. The store caters to the budget conscious, the spend-thrift, and the luxist all under one roof. Granted, one does pay for such convenience but after a hard day, I try to justify the prices by telling myself that it’s hard earned and really “I can afford it”.

I picked up a fancy jar of indian spice paste, easily four times the price than that of an indian grocery. I mulled over it, thinking this is just an amalgam of ingredients that would otherwise cost me a dollar or two if I took the time to troll the aisles of the spice market and grid it myself. Not wanting to exert my conscience any further, I popped it into the cart, time is money and that curry has to be made.

Strolling around the store I picked up a few more items, one of which I am enjoying as I write this, a swiss chocolate bar filled with almond creme and pistachio. I then made my way to the check out. I loaded the conveyor belt and asked the cashier for a box of cigarettes. Handing over my ID, I look over to see that there’s a kid behind me somewhere between the age of 8 and 14 (all adolescents look the same to me), and I felt really shitty about buying tobacco in front of him, some role model I am.

As my items were scanned I noticed that the kid was alone, struggling to manage his grocery basket and his backpack as he placed his items on the conveyor belt. I saw that he buying simple foods. Not junk, but baked potato chips, a loaf of bakery bread, ramen noodles, and a 2-liter of soda; things that a starving college student would buy. Suddenly my over priced spices, fancy chocolate bar, and the bottle of Spanish cava made me feel dirty about my excesses.

What is this kid doing? Does he live alone? Where are his parents? Are his parents irresponsible junkies? Can I buy meth or weed from his parents? Why didn’t he have a frequent customer savings card?

A gleaming favorite fake-new source, The Onion, has got the internet buzzers a-buzzing over their online news viral video service. Lamers and the uninformed are saying “It’s about time”, showing that they really don’t appreciate the lovliness of the onion’s text-based satire. I haven’t been keeping with the rumors swiriling about The Onion’s aquisition but could this mean that they are transforming their fan-base into reportable clicks, in order to become more lucrative as an online property?

Meh, I forgave them when the moved from Wisconsin to New York but I abandoned them when they started putting ads for Chili’s in their podcasts…. fucking sell outs

Global Shutdown Day is coming up for us in GMT -4 (EDT), but for those of you in UTC/GMT +12, it’s already going strong. The world community still doesn’t know what the effects will be with this voluntary action but it will be amazing if someone can quantify and aggregate results.

I think that I will be participating in this global experiment, but I have a lot of computers and internet appliances running. I think I can get away with shutting down the G4 Cube, Powerbook G4, and Dell lappy. I doubt I can convince Snuff to shutdown his PC, but since we have plans for Saturday I don’t think he’ll mind if it is shutdown for a few hours. As for my main machine, my MacBook, I can get by with staying current on my mobile devices.

I wonder if internettrafficreport.com renders properly on my SideKick

http://www.shutdownday.org

I got a call from my mom, asking for me to stop in and visit dad. I’ve noticed that he’s been shrinking in stature but now I’ve been told, he’s been losing weight. I blame this on mom’s own desire to slim down. While not morbidly obese nor drastically over her ideal weight, she has this unrelenting obsession to lose weight. Oblivious to the fact that men and women differ in the way they metabolize food, she insists on this diet-as-lifestyle regimen going so far as to seek out organic foods; this coming from a woman who handled DDT on her family’s plantation as a little girl.

Strangely enough, despite growing up in hard times in the boondocks, mom is consciously chooses to not partake in the abundance of the first world; rather gleaning off of its surplus. Discounted meats from shops or stalls that can’t shift them, odd lots of produce that would otherwise be thrown into compost heaps, scraps from the fishmonger dismissed by customers who only want clean fillets or headless/tail-less “whole” fish – all are perfectly serviceable foodstuffs.

This abject parsimoniousness can be quite brutal, and I assure you Snuffy can attest to those habits that I’ve picked up, but it’s all good food. The problem is, that my mother takes it to such an extreme, that poor dad is wasting away. I worry that dad sees this weight loss as welcomed and encouraged.

I guess I have to go over to their house with a case of San Miguel and a crate of balut to put an end to all of this.