December 2nd
It was cold today, which shouldn’t have been so upsetting since it’s December now, but it’s always nice to have a good reason to be in a bad mood. After clicking back and forth from my email to my Google Calendar for a few hours, I decided to go to Trader Joe’s with my sister. Right next to the entrance there was a giant blue bottle of Pinot Grigio, which is the only white wine I can reliably drink, so I picked it up to show my sister. “Look at this thing! Pretty huge huh?” A woman working one of the cash registers had heard me. She gave me a warranted suspicious glance and then resumed scanning gluten free pastas and vegan pestos. I take some sort of strange pleasure in looking at least 3 years younger than my actual age at any given time, it helps of course that my self-assigned quarantine uniform is a baggy sweatshirt, leggings, and dirty sneakers.
After carefully piling into our cart chicken fried rice, chocolate, romaine lettuce, and inevitably some things inbetween, we pull up to the checkout line. Before he even looks at the cart, the cashier asks if he could please see my ID after clocking the 5 bottles of wine. After almost a year and a half of being the legal drinking age, I still experience some strange twinge of guilt every time I produce my ID for examination. It could be that I don’t really believe I’m 22 years old because I still sometimes wear my American Eagle jeggings from high school and have yet to achieve financial independence, but I think there’s something else at play: I’m living in a state of perpetual guilt. There’s no discernable origin for this state, I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious family, I’ve never been shamed for anything I’ve done, but for some reason there are times when I can’t shake the idea that I’m about to do or have done something really terrible without even realizing it. So, of course, my eyes betray the validity of my ID as if to say “I’m so sorry we couldn’t look any older today, we really did try.” After careful inspection, he decides I bear a passing resemblance to the grimacing face on that small piece of plastic.
After succeeding in looking my own age, I pull out my parents’ credit card to pay for the groceries. I’ve been home from college since March now and the one thing I could never see myself getting tired of is spending my parents’ money on wine and gluten free cookies.
Once we’ve completed our weekly pilgrimage to our favorite grocery store, we pack our groceries (can you say groceries if it’s mostly just wine?) into the car. My sister drives. She usually drives because I got my license at 20 and my driving speed is reliably 5-10 miles below the speed limit at any given point. I think my driving style is charming if not generally unsafe, but she calls it what it really is: impractical and honestly just annoying. Well, those aren’t the exact words she uses, but I’d like to be able to share this blog with my parents so I’ll just end things here.
sorry for asking 