the soupmenu

i did it again. i made the mistake of going to our lovely neighborhood walmart. while i don’t mind walmart and still remain passionate about my first place of employment, our local walmart in orlando is actually satan’s little nephew. let me explain, our walmart on the east side of orlando is a super-duper-biggerthanmost3rdworldcountries-supercenter. I believe it officially is one of the busiest grocery stores in the world with like one septillion dollars of food flowing through it monthly. (had a grocery manger in one of my classes). orlando has this thing where the small towns around orlando don’t allow certain things to be built…such as walmarts. so this one magical walmart quite gracefully serves the entire east side of orlando. so i go to walmart to pick up some stuff for the roadtrip. it’s just utter chaos there, but i’m really good at detaching myself and just looking down and walking fast to avoid running over families and old people. but here’s the part where i feel the need to blog. i go to get batteries for my camera. there’s a couple in their 30’s looking at all of the rechargable batteries. the husband is on the floor looking deep into the price tags while holding a recharger in his right hand like a mellon. i think…okay… since they are taking up the whole area and i don’t feel like looking over their shoulder to pick out my battery’s, i’ll just wait..they won’t be that long. i walk to the music dvd’s and act like i care that 311 has a live dvd. the couple sits there. the husband keeps talking the whole time…’should i get this? how about this? well this one has 6 batteries…and the other has 4…but this one is $20 and the other is $18′ the whole time the wife was looking down at him, but i think she was actually trying to look through the walmart floor and down to hell where there might be someone who could help her out of this situation. she was doing the standing thing that i love, where a person is standing, but every single joint in their body is trying to be relaxed while still remaining standing. if you are in the position and sneeze you completely just fall flat on your stomach and look like a whale. this standing position is only made when you know you have to stand so that you don’t get yelled at by whomever is near you, but you truly want to be laying on the floor because you don’t want to put any effort in being where you are. so the husband just kept on comparing products and matching chargers with batteries in a cycle of wastefullness. they did this for about 15 mins until i couldn’t take it anymore and just walked up and grabbed the prettiest batterys and ran to the checkout. it’s really crazy how there is soo much selection that people busy themselves with the minute differences in price and product. wouldn’t it be strange if people had to use their time on earth maybe for something like survival?

i went to the front where an old cuban woman was cussing because the 10 items or less lane couldn’t take debit. wal-mart was out to get her. nothing like the orlando wal-mart. there is no such thing as a trip to walmart without a corresponding blog entry

it’s happened again. time magazine has created a list of the top 100 movies of all time.

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html

I’m not going to debate any of the picks in depth. here’s some of my two second observations:

gone with the wind isn’t on the list—plus
barry lyndon is on the list–plus
invasion of the body snatcher is on the list–minus
it’s interesting how they cheated and grouped all star wars and all lord of the rings together, while only having godfather I and II count.

I really am fascinated on how humans everywhere need lists. i truly believe that list making and reviewing is such a necessity to everyone. I understand the benefits of creating easy topics of conversation and debate as well as a method to place various levels of importance upon items of interest. still everything does not seem to completely add up to me. humans just seem overly-obsessed with lists. for some reason people seem to almost get insecure without lists by which they can express their opinions about what they are interested in.

no matter what i will always think back to my old roomate who was the master of lists. at any point in time he had perhaps 5-10 different lists of his favorite books, movies, or just experiences. yes he would write these lists down and yes he would update these lists on a daily basis. definately an interesting guy. it made him happy.

so i did a cute thing again. i wrote out a blog post on the airplane ride up to illinois. i think it was a good one. i have not read it yet, so i might just have typed up a bunch of junk and i haven’t realized that i was just high off of the oxygen in the plane. anyways i left the notebook with the post in my brother’s car. i might swing by tomorrow and pick it up just so i can post it and put a fake timestamp so no one knows how late i am to post it

i will post other fun watseka stories including classmates being prostitutes, walking down mainstreet drunk (and being the only people on main, fun encounters with people with babies, and of course the usual observations about going home after being away for 2 years.

so i’m heading out for the huge road trip next thursday. I am going crazy with all of the planning, arranging, and making sure that i am able to leave for a month without my life blowing up here. it will be quite a releif actually when we get everything ready and are simply on the road. once on the road we basically have no official obligations. we have our account set up for the website and hopefully in the next few days i will have a basic site up and will of course give out the address to everyone for everyone to enjoy…and spread.

here are the only plans so far:

June 2nd -> fly to dallas…amtrak to oklahoma city
June 3rd -> purchase bus, stock up on supplies
week later -> make it to san fran
week later -> make it to austin
week later -> make it to New Orleans

basic order of cities…. oklahoma city. denver. salt lake city. san francisco. las angeles. tuscon. roswell. austin. new orleans.

here is a late night drawing of our driving path….just wanted to make it to see if it formed anything…it doesn’t.