Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for
your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a
machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the
absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy
flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded,
bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such
a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in
the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home
through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et
cetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where
the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded
aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't
make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention
to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop,
because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like
this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my
fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all
the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are
all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are
and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in
the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are
talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how
deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved
and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all
these stupid goddamn people.
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