It’s Friday, I’m in Love!

The Cure is great. OH and yesterday I got the Outkast single Hey Ya! It’s very great. A gem of a song that makes me shake my head back and forth rhythmically. (That sentence just sucked all the soul out of Outkast but I’m sure they don’t care. I’m white. I have no soul and they know this). It also makes me smile uncontrollably:

How can you not smile when someone tells you to “Shake it like a polaroid picture!”?

So I made it to the grocery store, finally. It amazes me that at any time of day there are a bazillion people at Superst*re. Opening, closing, noon, 3 pm. Always with the people. In the rain, wow is it a noisy place! All the sneakers squeaking and jackets dripping and asshole men talking on cellphones slipping and falling kaTHUMP in the soup isle. Oops! Shoulda got a basket Mr. Important Guy! Now all your stuff is all over the floor and so is your bum and you’re turning red and about to take it all out on one of the nice boys on the rollerblades. There’s a disaster waiting to happen: rollerblading 18 year olds & shoppers with cellphones who aren’t paying attention to their surroundings & little old people pushing shopping carts filled with cases of whatever is on sale this week & wet slick floor.

Anyway, I bought mozzarella for my lasagna and was going to buy a nice block of parmesan, the real kind, not “Italian Style” (uh, Italians have their own style, OK? and it’s called Good Cheese. so don’t call your crappy cheese Italian Style. just don’t). But ho! What is this? We have blocks of romano, yes (but ew! it’s sheep cheese!) and we have blocks of something called BABY PARMESAN for god’s sake. I don’t know what that means and I’m not sure I want to. And there are gi-get the truck, Mother-gantic blocks of Reggiano which is, you know, aged 4 years and not pasturized and has a pretty stamp on it so of course it’s worth $3.98 per 100g but who can afford a piece that big? Nobody who shops at Superst*re! If you have that much money, you can afford to spend the gas money to drive your SUV over to the Cheese Store and buy all the cheese in the world. I had $25 for groceries, not $25 for a piece of parmesan! Buon Giorno! Frommagio peeps? Per favore, un pocco (POCCO!!) di parmigiano padano. Grazie!

I have no idea if that’s the correct Italian or spelling for “please sell me some Padano parmesan, just a LITTLE, not enough to feed my whole extended family who has their own cheese anyway because they’re farmers in Italy” or not. But that’s certainly what I mean.

So I bought some Swiss Gruyere (cleverly disguised by a label stating “Swiss Emmenthal”) and that will be the sharp melty cheese on the top of my lasagna. And next time I’m at the other grocery store, the one with the cheese selection, the parmesan will be mine.

If I had never worked in a cheese shop, none of this would matter. But I also wouldn’t have finished university, so there’s the rub, right there. RubbityRub.