Poor Impulse Control

Dearest Rachel –

And this… is why you never shop hungry.

There’s a lot of things I’ve been doing with more frequency now that I am the lone adult in the household. Yes, yes, I know Daniel is officially an adult, but he is still a dependent child as long as he lives here, I think. And it isn’t as if he can run errands, given the present situation and his… heterodoxical beliefs.

Besides, it’s easy for me to stop at Mariano’s on my way home from the ‘office.’ Why, I can even schedule myself to take off well before five, so that that I can make it home by five despite all the errands. What can I say? My boss is a pushover.

Or maybe I can say that my employee walks all over me. And I just let him.

I certainly let him get away with all sorts of stuff today. I had a mild hankering for their pre-prepared sushi. I mean, it’s not restaurant quality exactly, but it’s not bad, and it’s fairly reasonable.

But while I was deciding what I wanted to get for myself, I figured I’d call Daniel and let him know where I was, and give him the option to request some thing while I was out and staring at all the prepackaged stuff. I will plead guilty to having led the witness, as I steered him from ‘meh’ to ‘yeah, sure, the chicken cordon bleu sounds good.’ And I picked up some side items as well for good measure – got to have some vegetables to go with the entrée.

You’re welcome to laugh at that reference to a list, by the way. You lived with me for nearly twenty-nine years, you knew better than that. As Heath Ledger’s Joker put it, “Do I look like a guy with a plan?”

And of course, without a plan, things get out of hand. Walking through the store from the prepackaged area, you need to go through the bakery in order to get into the rest of the store, and so…

And further along, you have to go past the meat and seafood counters. Which means I find myself stocking up on more breakfast selections:

I promise that it will all be used before the week is out, but did I need any of this? Not really.

There are some times, and some places, where are you are well advised to, as the saying goes, ‘go with your gut.’ The supermarket is not one of them.

But that is precisely what I did today. I feel like I should apologize to you, but I doubt you’re really going to get all worked up about it anymore. And compared to all the food that we wasted during the purge a few months ago, this would be a drop in the bucket even if some of the stuff did go uneaten – which, again, I can promise you that it won’t.

Still, that’s the story for this evening. I know it’s fairly short, but they can’t all be War and Peace (and come on, you wouldn’t necessarily appreciate it if it was).

Keep an eye out for us, and remember that I love you.