This entry, and the one to follow, are not mine. How I wish they were!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They are everything that I want my writings to be...funny, clever, BRILLIANT, nationally published and did I mention funny? They are laugh out loud in a room full of people FUNNY!!!! I hope you enjoy them and the insertion of my own thoughts.
Taken from Reader's Digest, April 2014 "Surviving Whole Foods" by Kelly MacLean
"Whole Foods is like Las Vegas. You go there to feel good, but you leave broke, disoriented, and with the newfound knowledge that you have a bacterial infection.
Unlike Vegas's, Whole Foods's clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion...until they get to the parking lot. Then it's war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. A driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off, I catch his bumper sticker, which says "NAMASTE." Poor lady didn't even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther. (OK...when I read that...I nearly choked because I saw a most similar event at the Whole Foods in B'ham! Not that I shopped there on a regular basis...I went when I wanted to feel fancy. Please don't ask me to explain.)
As the great sliding glass doors part, I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss, the land of hemp milk and honey. Think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they're basically the same. (Hemp milk...GAG....rope milk? Pot milk? Not drinking it milk....that's what's the same! I don't conjure up images of Whole Foods when I think of Heaven...in Heaven, I won't have to pay for the salad bar!)
The first thing I see is the gluten-free section, filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. (SNORT!!! My apologies to my gluten intolerant/allergic friends. The culinary suffering you have to endure is no laughing...hahahahahahaha! Sorry.) I skip this aisle because I'm not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don't meet poor people with special diet needs A gluten-intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich-white-person problem. You know you've really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga (Hi, Meemi!). All I'm saying is, if were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.
Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary-looking machine there that you put your face inside of, and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. It calculates your wrinkles, your sunspots, the size of your pores, etc., and com pares the results with those of other women your age. I think of myself as attractive, but as it turns out, I am 78% ugly, meaning less pretty than 78% of women in the world. On the popular "one to ten" hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a three...if you round up, which I hope you will. A glance at the extremely close up picture it took of my face...in which I somehow have a glorious blond mustache...tells me that three is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20% more aged than the right. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide to buy a bottle of delicious-smelling, silky-feeling cream that may raise me from a three to a four for only $108. (The girls who worked at the "beauty" counter at Whole Foods all seemed to come from the same tribe as the brown-beige colored organic farmers that I saw at Pepper Place. When I say brown, I don't mean that as a description of their actual skin color. It's like they were walking through life sepia-toned. I realize their objections to mass marketed soaps, shampoos and body wash...but what about water? And a good wash cloth...and a good scrubbing?)
I grab a handful of peanut butter pretzels on my way out of this stupid aisle. I don't feel bad about pilfering these bites, because of the umpteen times I've overpaid at the salad bar and been tricked into buying $108 beauty creams. the pretzels are very fattening, but I'm already in the 70th percentile of ugly, so who cares?
Next I come to the vitamin aisle, which is a danger zone for any broke hypochondriac. Warning: Whole Foods keeps its best people in this section. The vitamin clerk talks me into buying estrogen for my mystery mustache and Women's Acidophilus because apparently, I do have Candida after all.
I move on to the next aisle and ask a nearby clerk for help. He's wearing a visor inside and it has one word on it in all caps. Yup: NAMASTE. I ask him where I can find whole wheat bread. He chuckles at me: "Oh, we keep the poison on aisle seven." Based solely on the attitudes of people sporting "Namaste" paraphernalia, today, I'd think it was Sanskrit for "go to H***." (Kinda like when those of us claiming to be Christians try to talk about the joy of the Lord, looking like we just got out of the pickle juice swimming pool!)
I pass a table where a vendor invites me to join a group cleanse he's leading. For $179.99, I can not-eat-not alone...not-gonna-happen. They're doing the cleanse where you consume nothing but lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and fiber pills for ten days. What's that one called again? Oh, yeah...anorexia. I went on a cleanse once; it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I detoxified, I purified, I lost weight. On the other hand, I fell asleep on the highway and fantasized about eating a pigeon. I think I'll stick with the whole eating thing.
I grab a couple of loaves of poison and head to the check out. The fact that I'm at Whole Foods on a Sunday finally sinks in when I join the end of the line...halfway down the dog-food aisle. I suddenly realize that I'm dying to get out of this store. Maybe it's the lonely feeling of being a carnivore in a sea of vegans or the revelation that some people's dogs eat better than I do, but mostly I think it's the fact that Yanni has been playing literally this entire time. Like sensory deprivation, listening to Yanni seems harmless at first, enjoyable, even. But two hours in, you'll chew your own ear off to make it stop. (The first time I had a Hyda-scan done to check the function of my gall-bladder, Enya was playing in my room. I was supposed to be relaxing...not so much. I finally had to have the technician turn the music off because I was so busy trying to figure out WHAT in the world Enya was saying, that it was stressing me out!)
A thousand minutes later, I get to the cashier. She is 95% beautiful. "Have you brought your reusable bags?" @#$%! No, they are at home with their other two-dozen once-used friends. She rings up my meet, alcohol, (Truth...you cannot buy the blue box macaroni and cheese, but if you want to baptize your liver by immersion in fancy-schmancy fruit of the vine, you'll find it there...and from countries you've never heard of!) and a wrapper from the chocolate bar I ate in line, with thinly veiled alarm. She scans my ladies' acidophilus, gives me a pitying frown, and whispers, "Ya know, if you wanna get rid of your Candida, you should stop feeding it." She rings me up for $313 (Which is why a good friend of mine calls this store "Whole Paycheck!"). I resist the urge to unwrap and swallow whole another $6 truffle in protest. Instead, I reach for my wallet, flash her a quiet smile, and say, "Namaste."
Taken from Reader's Digest, April 2014 "Surviving Whole Foods" by Kelly MacLean
"Whole Foods is like Las Vegas. You go there to feel good, but you leave broke, disoriented, and with the newfound knowledge that you have a bacterial infection.
Unlike Vegas's, Whole Foods's clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion...until they get to the parking lot. Then it's war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. A driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off, I catch his bumper sticker, which says "NAMASTE." Poor lady didn't even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther. (OK...when I read that...I nearly choked because I saw a most similar event at the Whole Foods in B'ham! Not that I shopped there on a regular basis...I went when I wanted to feel fancy. Please don't ask me to explain.)
As the great sliding glass doors part, I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss, the land of hemp milk and honey. Think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they're basically the same. (Hemp milk...GAG....rope milk? Pot milk? Not drinking it milk....that's what's the same! I don't conjure up images of Whole Foods when I think of Heaven...in Heaven, I won't have to pay for the salad bar!)
The first thing I see is the gluten-free section, filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. (SNORT!!! My apologies to my gluten intolerant/allergic friends. The culinary suffering you have to endure is no laughing...hahahahahahaha! Sorry.) I skip this aisle because I'm not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don't meet poor people with special diet needs A gluten-intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich-white-person problem. You know you've really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga (Hi, Meemi!). All I'm saying is, if were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.
Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary-looking machine there that you put your face inside of, and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. It calculates your wrinkles, your sunspots, the size of your pores, etc., and com pares the results with those of other women your age. I think of myself as attractive, but as it turns out, I am 78% ugly, meaning less pretty than 78% of women in the world. On the popular "one to ten" hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a three...if you round up, which I hope you will. A glance at the extremely close up picture it took of my face...in which I somehow have a glorious blond mustache...tells me that three is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20% more aged than the right. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide to buy a bottle of delicious-smelling, silky-feeling cream that may raise me from a three to a four for only $108. (The girls who worked at the "beauty" counter at Whole Foods all seemed to come from the same tribe as the brown-beige colored organic farmers that I saw at Pepper Place. When I say brown, I don't mean that as a description of their actual skin color. It's like they were walking through life sepia-toned. I realize their objections to mass marketed soaps, shampoos and body wash...but what about water? And a good wash cloth...and a good scrubbing?)
I grab a handful of peanut butter pretzels on my way out of this stupid aisle. I don't feel bad about pilfering these bites, because of the umpteen times I've overpaid at the salad bar and been tricked into buying $108 beauty creams. the pretzels are very fattening, but I'm already in the 70th percentile of ugly, so who cares?
Next I come to the vitamin aisle, which is a danger zone for any broke hypochondriac. Warning: Whole Foods keeps its best people in this section. The vitamin clerk talks me into buying estrogen for my mystery mustache and Women's Acidophilus because apparently, I do have Candida after all.
I move on to the next aisle and ask a nearby clerk for help. He's wearing a visor inside and it has one word on it in all caps. Yup: NAMASTE. I ask him where I can find whole wheat bread. He chuckles at me: "Oh, we keep the poison on aisle seven." Based solely on the attitudes of people sporting "Namaste" paraphernalia, today, I'd think it was Sanskrit for "go to H***." (Kinda like when those of us claiming to be Christians try to talk about the joy of the Lord, looking like we just got out of the pickle juice swimming pool!)
I pass a table where a vendor invites me to join a group cleanse he's leading. For $179.99, I can not-eat-not alone...not-gonna-happen. They're doing the cleanse where you consume nothing but lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and fiber pills for ten days. What's that one called again? Oh, yeah...anorexia. I went on a cleanse once; it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I detoxified, I purified, I lost weight. On the other hand, I fell asleep on the highway and fantasized about eating a pigeon. I think I'll stick with the whole eating thing.
I grab a couple of loaves of poison and head to the check out. The fact that I'm at Whole Foods on a Sunday finally sinks in when I join the end of the line...halfway down the dog-food aisle. I suddenly realize that I'm dying to get out of this store. Maybe it's the lonely feeling of being a carnivore in a sea of vegans or the revelation that some people's dogs eat better than I do, but mostly I think it's the fact that Yanni has been playing literally this entire time. Like sensory deprivation, listening to Yanni seems harmless at first, enjoyable, even. But two hours in, you'll chew your own ear off to make it stop. (The first time I had a Hyda-scan done to check the function of my gall-bladder, Enya was playing in my room. I was supposed to be relaxing...not so much. I finally had to have the technician turn the music off because I was so busy trying to figure out WHAT in the world Enya was saying, that it was stressing me out!)
A thousand minutes later, I get to the cashier. She is 95% beautiful. "Have you brought your reusable bags?" @#$%! No, they are at home with their other two-dozen once-used friends. She rings up my meet, alcohol, (Truth...you cannot buy the blue box macaroni and cheese, but if you want to baptize your liver by immersion in fancy-schmancy fruit of the vine, you'll find it there...and from countries you've never heard of!) and a wrapper from the chocolate bar I ate in line, with thinly veiled alarm. She scans my ladies' acidophilus, gives me a pitying frown, and whispers, "Ya know, if you wanna get rid of your Candida, you should stop feeding it." She rings me up for $313 (Which is why a good friend of mine calls this store "Whole Paycheck!"). I resist the urge to unwrap and swallow whole another $6 truffle in protest. Instead, I reach for my wallet, flash her a quiet smile, and say, "Namaste."
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