Back to the ski trip.
It was noon on Saturday, and I was still serving in Purgatory at the megamarket grocery store situated in a suburb of Paris I had been writing about during the previous five blog entries. I was there with a friend shopping for food that we would bring with us on a two week ski trip. I don’t like supermarkets, and I hate shopping during the weekend rush, but being here wasn’t my choice. Drusilla had been leading me around the store, and I was pushing the cart, trying to keep up in the heavy crowd. I felt like a retard on a trip to the zoo.
The next thing Drusilla led me to was the bananas. She picked up a bunch of enormous green Cavendish bananas. They were so green that they could not ripen in two weeks. They rot before they ripen. Despite that, ripe or green, Cavendish is disgusting for its flavor, its week-old garbage-like odor, and its potato-like texture.
Some varieties of banana I like, but I do not like Cavendish bananas. Their odor makes me queasy. The flavor is bland. I will eat them as an alternative to starvation, but I unless I’m on the brink of starvation, I avoid them. Also, bananas do not travel well. They are a terrible thing to take on a road trip. They tend to get crushed and turn into stinky black slime in transit. The place they were stored will reek for months afterwards.
There happens to be more than a hundred varieties of banana commercially grown, and some of them are delicious. Unfortunately, Cavendish bananas are the only kind of banana most grocery stores in the West sell. They are cheaply mass produced. Cavendish store for months on ocean cargo ships, provided they are harvested while rock hard and green. Other varieties rot or suffer from a mold disease during ocean transport.
Drusilla wanted those bananas, and she can eat what she wants. I won’t eat that crap. I won’t comment or argue. By now, I needed to leave. I would cut my losses and buy my own food in the ski village. I just wanted to get on the road. We were wasting the day.
She went on to pick out a lot of turnips, beets, radishes, cucumbers, cabbage, and other cheap and flavorless food that I had no intention of eating. The one rooty vegetable I like is carrots, but Drusilla does not like carrots, so we didn’t get carrots. All of this stuff was so cheap, I didn’t see the economic advantage of dealing with this supermarket, especially if all she wants is cheap stuff you can buy anywhere. Not only is it cheap everywhere in the world, but after hauling it, all 200 pounds of it, 500 miles across the Europe, it would cost us more in gas tro transport this crap than it would to pay a slightly higher price for the same thing when we got there.
Drusilla might have been a math whiz in college, but she is old and her brain appears to have ossified. She wasn’t thinking things through. She fails at economics 101. Math majors, at least in US colleges, learn some basic economic calculations including logistics and how to calculate the cost of transporting consumer goods. Her actions made no sense. I was only a math minor, and even I could do this simple calculation in my head while I was waiting behind the campers in the cheese aisle.
All together, the experience was killing me. This isn’t meant to pick her apart for not knowing things but to point out that she is pushy and forces poorly thought out ideas on others.
I had the feeling she was used to getting her own way, like the Queen of Hearts. I felt sorry for any man who would marry her. Her general lack of knowledge and inability to apply what little she might know wouldn’t have bothered me if she hadn’t been so insistent on saying the last word, on winning every argument, on having everything her way or else.
Most of what she picked was either toxic to me (like the garlic, onions, scallions, cow milk, pork) or just disgusting. Many of her choices didn’t even make sense. She ate the kind of food old people eat, bland rooty things, and she was willing to pay a fortune in extra gas hauling them across Europe in her car.
During the shopping trip, observing her food choices, I thought of a way to cure obesity. I could solve America’s obesity problem if people would just listen to the following suggestions. All one needs to do is eat a diet of bland, rooty things, and then America will be trim again. The food is so unappealing, that I prefer to go hungry rather than eat it.
If that is all I have to eat for the next two weeks, I will starve. If the food does not taste good, if it is not sweet, salty, spicy, or somehow interesting, I lose interest. I prefer to go hungry.
Overhead in the store were fluorescent lights, and they flickered slightly but perceptibly, at 60 hertz, the temporal periphery of my visual perception. The color spectrum of fluorescent lights is a bluish cast which is found nowhere in nature. It had now been an hour since we entered the supermarket, and I had begun to see bright afterimages and trailers.
The sounds in the store were also overwhelming. Manic announcements were continuously broadcast over the store’s public address system. People everywhere were talking, coughing, sneezing, blowing their noses, and making all kinds of other noises. It was making me dizzy. I would hate to see the effect this place would have on an Autism patient. I felt a migraine coming on. It was Saturday, family shopping day at the supermarket in the suburbs. The Suburbs are a projection of Hell on earth.
You can learn a lot about somebody by shopping with them, and you can learn even more about them by travelling with them. I didn’t like what I was learning.
We checked out and loaded the car.
“Why don’t you drive for a whle now?” she said.
“I don’t have a French driver’s license. I told you this last week,“ I said.
Even if I had a French license, I was in no condition to drive after being in that store for an hour.
“Why don’t you have a driver’s license?” she insisted with an undertone of accusation in her voice.
“I have a driver’s license, just not a French one. You know I haven’t been here five months, and I don’t know if I’ll even be here a year, so it hasn’t been practical. There is public transportation everywhere in Europe, so I don’t expect to need one here.”
She already knew I had just arrived in this country. She was like an aggressive cop or trial lawyer. I felt like, by not pleasing her, my liberty was at stake. In the field of psychology, there are people wwho have certain personality disorders, specifically clinical narcissist, sociopath, and psychopath, who deliberately make the people in their lives feel this way in order to manipulate them. I wondered whether Drusilla is a clinical narcissist. She was demonstrating the manipulative behavior known as “stone walling” and other manipulations.
“Come on,” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You know I almost never drive even in the US, and you ask me to drive a car that has different controls for the first time in the middle of Saturday rush hour shopping traffic. I will be happy to drive once we get a couple of hours away fromthe cithy and there isn’t any traffic. We talked about my driving status weeks ago,” I said. “Why are you bringing it up now?”
“But you should get one. You should have already done it,“ she said. “Why don’t you drive?”
“Cars are dangerous and bad for the environment. The oil they use creates a demand that causes oil wars,” I said.
I continued, “I’ve only been here a few months, and I don’t know how long I will be here. My work contract is temporary, keeping a car in the city costs several hundred a month in parking and other expenses. A bicycle is faster for distances under ten miles. Owning a car is not a priority. “
“I still think you should get one. It is not that hard. “
“I’ll be happy to drive for a couple of hours when we get to a quiet stretch of road, but I haven’t driven a car for years, and doing it now in heavy traffic with a foreign car and unfamiliar road signs is a bad idea,” I said.
She was silent.
I gave up. There are certain kinds of people with whom it is futile to argue: religious nuts, the insane, drunks, people who insist that they are always right, and after today, French Women. She had surprised me just when I had started to trust her. She was pushy and aggressive. I was pretty sure I knew why she was single at the age of 50.
The drive was six hours. I did offer to drive. There was a safe stretch of highway for me to drive, a couple of hours through a sparsely populated area with little traffic where there are no traffic cops on the highways France who do ID checks on foreigners driving for a while to relieve their companion. She refused to let me.
She drove the entire way, and the highway took us through a valley surrounded by 10,000 foot mountains. She wouldn’t let me drive when I asked two hours later. We talked much of the time.
The ski resort was another hour away, and I wondered if she would make any more revelations before we got there. Whatever she might say didn’t matter. I realised had no romantic feelings for her. That was out of the question. What she expected from me and how all that was dealt with is another chapter.
For the last segment of the drive, we climbed through a quick series of Alpine valleys. The town where we would stay, Huez, is a village built on the foot of the mountain Alp d’Huez. It was dark, and the full moon lit up the snowy landscape.
It was noon on Saturday, and I was still serving in Purgatory at the megamarket grocery store situated in a suburb of Paris I had been writing about during the previous five blog entries. I was there with a friend shopping for food that we would bring with us on a two week ski trip. I don’t like supermarkets, and I hate shopping during the weekend rush, but being here wasn’t my choice. Drusilla had been leading me around the store, and I was pushing the cart, trying to keep up in the heavy crowd. I felt like a retard on a trip to the zoo.
The next thing Drusilla led me to was the bananas. She picked up a bunch of enormous green Cavendish bananas. They were so green that they could not ripen in two weeks. They rot before they ripen. Despite that, ripe or green, Cavendish is disgusting for its flavor, its week-old garbage-like odor, and its potato-like texture.
Some varieties of banana I like, but I do not like Cavendish bananas. Their odor makes me queasy. The flavor is bland. I will eat them as an alternative to starvation, but I unless I’m on the brink of starvation, I avoid them. Also, bananas do not travel well. They are a terrible thing to take on a road trip. They tend to get crushed and turn into stinky black slime in transit. The place they were stored will reek for months afterwards.
There happens to be more than a hundred varieties of banana commercially grown, and some of them are delicious. Unfortunately, Cavendish bananas are the only kind of banana most grocery stores in the West sell. They are cheaply mass produced. Cavendish store for months on ocean cargo ships, provided they are harvested while rock hard and green. Other varieties rot or suffer from a mold disease during ocean transport.
Drusilla wanted those bananas, and she can eat what she wants. I won’t eat that crap. I won’t comment or argue. By now, I needed to leave. I would cut my losses and buy my own food in the ski village. I just wanted to get on the road. We were wasting the day.
She went on to pick out a lot of turnips, beets, radishes, cucumbers, cabbage, and other cheap and flavorless food that I had no intention of eating. The one rooty vegetable I like is carrots, but Drusilla does not like carrots, so we didn’t get carrots. All of this stuff was so cheap, I didn’t see the economic advantage of dealing with this supermarket, especially if all she wants is cheap stuff you can buy anywhere. Not only is it cheap everywhere in the world, but after hauling it, all 200 pounds of it, 500 miles across the Europe, it would cost us more in gas tro transport this crap than it would to pay a slightly higher price for the same thing when we got there.
Drusilla might have been a math whiz in college, but she is old and her brain appears to have ossified. She wasn’t thinking things through. She fails at economics 101. Math majors, at least in US colleges, learn some basic economic calculations including logistics and how to calculate the cost of transporting consumer goods. Her actions made no sense. I was only a math minor, and even I could do this simple calculation in my head while I was waiting behind the campers in the cheese aisle.
All together, the experience was killing me. This isn’t meant to pick her apart for not knowing things but to point out that she is pushy and forces poorly thought out ideas on others.
I had the feeling she was used to getting her own way, like the Queen of Hearts. I felt sorry for any man who would marry her. Her general lack of knowledge and inability to apply what little she might know wouldn’t have bothered me if she hadn’t been so insistent on saying the last word, on winning every argument, on having everything her way or else.
Most of what she picked was either toxic to me (like the garlic, onions, scallions, cow milk, pork) or just disgusting. Many of her choices didn’t even make sense. She ate the kind of food old people eat, bland rooty things, and she was willing to pay a fortune in extra gas hauling them across Europe in her car.
During the shopping trip, observing her food choices, I thought of a way to cure obesity. I could solve America’s obesity problem if people would just listen to the following suggestions. All one needs to do is eat a diet of bland, rooty things, and then America will be trim again. The food is so unappealing, that I prefer to go hungry rather than eat it.
If that is all I have to eat for the next two weeks, I will starve. If the food does not taste good, if it is not sweet, salty, spicy, or somehow interesting, I lose interest. I prefer to go hungry.
Overhead in the store were fluorescent lights, and they flickered slightly but perceptibly, at 60 hertz, the temporal periphery of my visual perception. The color spectrum of fluorescent lights is a bluish cast which is found nowhere in nature. It had now been an hour since we entered the supermarket, and I had begun to see bright afterimages and trailers.
The sounds in the store were also overwhelming. Manic announcements were continuously broadcast over the store’s public address system. People everywhere were talking, coughing, sneezing, blowing their noses, and making all kinds of other noises. It was making me dizzy. I would hate to see the effect this place would have on an Autism patient. I felt a migraine coming on. It was Saturday, family shopping day at the supermarket in the suburbs. The Suburbs are a projection of Hell on earth.
You can learn a lot about somebody by shopping with them, and you can learn even more about them by travelling with them. I didn’t like what I was learning.
We checked out and loaded the car.
“Why don’t you drive for a whle now?” she said.
“I don’t have a French driver’s license. I told you this last week,“ I said.
Even if I had a French license, I was in no condition to drive after being in that store for an hour.
“Why don’t you have a driver’s license?” she insisted with an undertone of accusation in her voice.
“I have a driver’s license, just not a French one. You know I haven’t been here five months, and I don’t know if I’ll even be here a year, so it hasn’t been practical. There is public transportation everywhere in Europe, so I don’t expect to need one here.”
She already knew I had just arrived in this country. She was like an aggressive cop or trial lawyer. I felt like, by not pleasing her, my liberty was at stake. In the field of psychology, there are people wwho have certain personality disorders, specifically clinical narcissist, sociopath, and psychopath, who deliberately make the people in their lives feel this way in order to manipulate them. I wondered whether Drusilla is a clinical narcissist. She was demonstrating the manipulative behavior known as “stone walling” and other manipulations.
“Come on,” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You know I almost never drive even in the US, and you ask me to drive a car that has different controls for the first time in the middle of Saturday rush hour shopping traffic. I will be happy to drive once we get a couple of hours away fromthe cithy and there isn’t any traffic. We talked about my driving status weeks ago,” I said. “Why are you bringing it up now?”
“But you should get one. You should have already done it,“ she said. “Why don’t you drive?”
“Cars are dangerous and bad for the environment. The oil they use creates a demand that causes oil wars,” I said.
I continued, “I’ve only been here a few months, and I don’t know how long I will be here. My work contract is temporary, keeping a car in the city costs several hundred a month in parking and other expenses. A bicycle is faster for distances under ten miles. Owning a car is not a priority. “
“I still think you should get one. It is not that hard. “
“I’ll be happy to drive for a couple of hours when we get to a quiet stretch of road, but I haven’t driven a car for years, and doing it now in heavy traffic with a foreign car and unfamiliar road signs is a bad idea,” I said.
She was silent.
I gave up. There are certain kinds of people with whom it is futile to argue: religious nuts, the insane, drunks, people who insist that they are always right, and after today, French Women. She had surprised me just when I had started to trust her. She was pushy and aggressive. I was pretty sure I knew why she was single at the age of 50.
The drive was six hours. I did offer to drive. There was a safe stretch of highway for me to drive, a couple of hours through a sparsely populated area with little traffic where there are no traffic cops on the highways France who do ID checks on foreigners driving for a while to relieve their companion. She refused to let me.
She drove the entire way, and the highway took us through a valley surrounded by 10,000 foot mountains. She wouldn’t let me drive when I asked two hours later. We talked much of the time.
The ski resort was another hour away, and I wondered if she would make any more revelations before we got there. Whatever she might say didn’t matter. I realised had no romantic feelings for her. That was out of the question. What she expected from me and how all that was dealt with is another chapter.
For the last segment of the drive, we climbed through a quick series of Alpine valleys. The town where we would stay, Huez, is a village built on the foot of the mountain Alp d’Huez. It was dark, and the full moon lit up the snowy landscape.