modern guilt, purchase abandonment & not a clue

Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, has been on heavy rotation for the past two days and have had some time to marinate. I’ve always liked Beck, not all of his songs, but on each album I can usually find a few songs that I really like. But I really like this album in its entirety. It’s the first of his albums that I’m not skipping tracks. I know this isn’t supposed to be his best work (according to the music critics), but I like it the best. I think his collaboration with Danger Mouse worked out well. This album makes me want to throw a party with good friends or go on a long road trip.

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Whenever I walk around the grocery store, I always take a strange delight in seeing misplaced products. A box of Cocoa Puffs abandoned next to the Bounty paper towels, a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix left next to the jars of Ragu. It’s interesting. I wonder what happened in the aisle that triggered the abandonment. I think it’s pretty inconsiderate of people because then the stockers have to put everything back in place but I have been guilty of this on a few occasions. The only time it is really horrible is if it is a perishable item that needs to be refrigerated or frozen. I’ve seen packages of cheese, cups of yogurt, and a bag of defrosting peas abandoned before. That’s just plain wrong.

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On the flight back from Mexico, the husband was completing his first-ever Sudoku puzzle in the back of the in-flight magazine (after doing his customary giggling while flipping through the SkyMall magazine). Puzzles like that don’t really appeal to me. Neither do word searches and crossword puzzles. I used to really love logic puzzles with the matrix where you put x’s and o’s in the box as you solve the problem. That was probably the only puzzle I liked. I was thinking about why I disliked puzzles and it reminded me of this one Sunday School teacher I had. I can’t even remember what grade I was in but he would basically tell us a bible story for 30 minutes and then hand out these crossword puzzles with no clues. That’s right, no clues. Just an empty grid of boxes. He would tell us to fill them out using real words and whoever was first to finish the puzzle would win. And he only had ballpoint pens for us to use! So there was no erasing. The puzzles were impossible, but we kept quiet for the rest of the time because we were so busy trying to figure it out. I think a few kids actually “won” but he never checked their answers because it was usually time to go and I suspect they didn’t use real words. Maybe that’s why I don’t like puzzles.

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