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Back to School Shopping Posting Date: Aug 25 2008 1:00AM Mom took me back to school shopping this week. Before you get too excited, I want to confirm that it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds. You’d think, judging by the name, that you go shopping before school starts and as a result, you get a lot of stuff. Getting stuff is cool, so you think, “Back to school shopping … cool.”
Wrong.
First, you always go to the wrong store. You always end up at like Zellers or Wal-Wart or something like that because mom doesn’t really care about the stuff, she cares how much it costs. Back to school shopping is like some kind of contest or something to see who can spend the smallest amount of money. I want good stuff, but that kind of logic is wasted on my mom, so off we went to Wal-Mart.
I heard somewhere that Wal-Mart saves like four bjillion dollars a year just by, like turning off half their lights or switching bulbs or whatever. You know what? You can tell. The only place with worse lighting than a Wal-Mart is my refrigerator. And they kinda smell the same too, sort of like air conditioning and vinyl mixed in with aging orange juice.
When you walk into a Wal-Mart, they have these people called greeters who stand sorta near the front door wearing a vest and pants that don’t fit and if you’re lucky they might pretend not to see you, even though you’re like the only person there and you’re practically breathing on the greeter, but they look off in a different direction, but not too different just in case their boss, Mr. Mart, is watching and the greeter doesn’t want to get fired because Wal-Mart has some sort of employee stock purchase plan which means that you can work for $8 an hour for your whole life and then retire as a millionaire and buy a boat and go fishing and tell all the exciting stories from the life you had when you stood near the front door of a Wal-Mart for like fifty hours a week for forty years, so that’s good.
Once you get past the greeter, mom always wants to buy boring stuff like underwear and socks which I guess is OK because you do need those things, but at this point I should probably give everyone a tip. When you buy underwear from Wal-Mart, what you should do is wash them before you wear them because sometimes that Wal-Mart underwear comes out of the package a little crispy and it not so nice on bits and whathaveyou.
Underwear and socks are also OK to buy at Wal-Mart because no one can tell where you got them. But if you buy anything else at Wal-Mart, like a shirt or some jeans, and then you wear them to school, two bad things happen. First, everyone sees they’re new and says something like, “Back to school shopping, eh?” That really burns my bum. The second things everyone says is, “Hey, get those at Wal-Mart?”
So all that’s pretty bad, because mom stocks up on underwear and socks and easily identified Wal-Mart jeans, but then she gets, like seven sweaters. I tell her that the sweater is not a cool fashion accessory anymore, but she says, “That’s nonsense. You need a sweater,” which basically means, “I don’t need to wash or iron sweaters, so you’re getting seven sweaters and you better wear them or I won’t feed you until October.”
I did get to buy a protractor this year, which is awesome because it’s like taking a shiv to school. Sometimes, instead of carrying it in my pencil case like I probably should because a protractor is a mathematical tools with lethal potential, I carry it in my hand with the pointy bit sticking out between my fingers just in case I get jumped. I’ve never been jumped and I’d probably wet myself if I did and drop the protractor in the process, but it’s a reasonably fun way to pass the time between classes, if you ask me.
Actually, maybe back to school shopping is cool after all. |
