The Tory Party

ALDI

So there was this one time I worked at ALDI. Wait. That time is totally right now.

I am not supposed to disclose operational information, and I don’t know how much information that covers, or how to bring up “um, I have this blog?” with a manager, and I don’t want to risk it.

But as someone who used to regard ALDI as sketch and now never wants to shop anywhere else, I have to spread the word.

My first experience with ALDI was street-cornering in Iowa for Howard Dean (ugh, Howard Dean whatevs), and I was all like, what’s an ALDI? And a friend said “it’s this grocery store that’s really cheap because they put the food in boxes in the middle of the floor and you just take it.” And this is the most concise description evar.

And then I moved to Winston-Salem and shopped there once because it was walking distance away, but I unfairly projected the shadiness of my apartment on ALDI and never went back.

Then this year my housemate kept coming home with all this Kirkwood and L`Oven Fresh and Mama Casita food and I`m like WTF and he’s like ALDI and I`m like SKETCH.

Then I went with him once and got semi-converted. Cheap calcium-fortified Propel? Cheap TP? Ooh.

Then I started working there. Jeebus Lord. I will say the hiring process displays the same sleek Bavarian efficiency as the shopping process.

Also, when I worked at Burger King, there were such things as “slammed” and “dead.” At ALDI there is no “slammed.” There is just ALDI. There is always the thing you are doing, the thing you are trying to get back to, and the thing you won’t get around to today.

After I got off work today I did a serious grocery run at ALDI for the first time, and here are my findings:

• The cottage chease is the best I’ve ever had. So seriously. If you get excited about cottage chease like I do, wear your hoppin` shoes. $1.69 a tubba. No lie.
• Yogurt? Also quite badass. I had an individual tubba after lunch and was quite seriously eating and swearing, it was so good. Not just as good as other yogurt (I tend toward the Breyer’s Probiotic whatever the crap). BETTER. Swear words at the dinner table better. Tubba is $1.39. Little tubbas are $0.33. No. Lie.
• Bernaners I got like six for $0.71. I don’t know how that compares to the $0.59 a pound at other grocery stores. Cheap.
• Fit & Active Frozen Fruit Pops. They are seriously nothin` but frozen strawberries mushed into tubes — no sweetener or nothing, and they are like a hit of sweet strawberry crack freebased in your ear. $1.99 for 8.
• Watermelon. Seedless and regular are the same price — $2.99 — and I eats it and make little yummy noises. Is so good!
• Kids Chewable Vitamins. OK, don’t laugh, but kid’s chewables are seriously the only way I`ll remember to take my vitamins. But good sugar-free ones (PowerPuff Girls, ahem) are hard to find, and I got the Lowe’s store brand and they are so bad when I eat them I make faces that scare my dog. But I have to finish them because otherwise they’re wasted. Anyway. Welby’s sugar-free chewables were $1.99 a bottle (60 tabs) and so good they make PowerPuff Girls vitamins taste like bitter poison anchovy mouth grenades of pain. Even the orange ones are good, people. EVEN THE ORANGE ONES.
• Glucosamine and Chondroitin - 100 tabs, and a dose is 3 tabs - $9.99. I don’t know if that’s good, I’ve just been feeling creaky lately and thought I`d try it, because it is ALDI.
• Tuna pouches. Flavored and unflavored. $1.19. Yeah, NOW YOU TRIPPIN`.
• Sliced lunchmeat - One pound. $2.99.
• 3 lb. bag of frozen chicken breasts - $5.99.
• 100 fl. oz (32 loads) of Astra laundry detergent - $1.99. A dollar ninety-nine! Is your brain asploding?

Prices at your local ALDI may vary, but DUDE.

The cashier who checked me out was seriously so damn fast I did not have time to move my cart around and scan my debit card before she was ready for me to pay. Like, I was not putting the stuff on the belt fast enough for her. It was insane.

Someday I will be this fast. Oh yes. Someday.

You may be freaked out by the lack of brand names. You may pick up something that looks just like a tubba Kool-Aid, but says “Mixade,” and you`ll think, “Gah! This is a cheap knockoff! This must be inferior to Kool-Aid!” This is that THE MAN has trained you to think. The Man is also responsible for gourmet cat foods. Don’t listen to The Man! Try the Mixade. No, forget it, try the yogurt first. That yogurt frickin` annihilates.

I don’t know if I`ll ever feed Jake “Shep” dog food (he eats the Iams, oh yes), but that is probably because I am one stop on the puppy subway from Total Dog Retardation. TDR is a condition greatly worsened by all-night puppy nervous cuddles due to thunderstorms.

So now you so totally wanna shop there, right? Maybe just paper towels and stuff at first, cos you’re nervous, but still — you`ll be buying Peanut Delight in no time. Here’s how you do:

• ALDI is less crowded Tuesday - Thursday, mid-morning or mid-afternoon, or first thing when it opens. Note I didn’t say not crowded, just less.
• Bring a quarter to rent a cart. You get the quarter back, but this way people have incentive to bring the carts back to the corral which is l33t and Bavarian and awesome.
• If you don’t want a cart, you can take an empty box which is bound to be lying around. If a box has a couple of items still in it, you can take it and be a good ALDI citizen by stacking those on top of the rest.
• If you use a box, be prepared to put every item loose on the belt. This speeds scanning time. Little pallets of cans are OK. I think.
• You’re gonna bag your own groceries — at the bagging counter over yonder. Don’t bag at the register! We will give you stinkeye. You can buy ALDI bags (too so cheap, like $0.10 apiece for nice reusable plastic ones), bring your own, use boxes you stole, use nothing, whatevs.
• If you have a cart, push around the cart of the person in front of you so the cashier can load groceries into it. If you have a box, as soon as you can put that box in the cart so the cashier can load into your box. Saves evarbody time. Evarbody happy.
• If you’re using debit, scan your card as soon as you can. If you’re using cash, please have it ready. And don’t worry about making change. We have change. It’s koo.

Yays! And unlike Wal-Mart, whom ALDI shut out of Germany due to having such a stranglehold, ALDI is not (to my knowledge) evil. And, unlike Target, once beloved and now anathema, ALDI never supported a pharmacist’s decision not to fill a Plan B prescription.

Ah. My liberal heart is free to beat another day. I`m going to go eat some cheap meat.

Nappy

I come to understand there are words I use that normal people don’t respond to.

Like, “oh meniscus” instead of “oh my God” — cos in the ninth grade there was a kid who latched onto “meniscus” from chemistry class and thought it was the best word evar and applied it equally to occasions of glee and disappointment and it was highly addictive.

I started using “absotively” at work, and I don’t know where it came from but I wish it would go away, cos it’s hard to earn respect with made-up words not weird enough to be funny. Absotively. Pssh-taw.

Or the highlight of my vocabulary, which I was totally surprised to learn that no one outside of NCSSM Third Bryan gets, which is “nappy.” Nappy has nothing to do with hair texture or being sleepy. Nappy, if I dare express it, is possession of the quality of dry and unexpected humor.

Nappy looks through the couch for enough change to go buy pie. Nappy gently heckles but doesn’t gossip. Nappy smells good.

Double nappy points for its appearance against type, such as in a very quiet or physically powerful person.

Used in a sentence: “That girl going into art department seems really shy but if you spend some time with her she’s totally nappy.”

Or, “Gina Torres acts serious in `Firefly`, but you can tell she’s too so nappy.”

Nappy is mission critical, rare and readily detected. That’s all I got.

Underreported Effects of Dreams

OK, this is ridiculous.

I watched three episodes of Series 2 of the BBC “The Office” and went to bed early due to having to be up for work the next day. So this series is the best thing ever and has taught me more about human behavior than anything since “The Sopranos.”

A six-week course in psychology

So the atmosphere of total realism makes the bursts of violence and sensuality TEWTALLY SHOCKING — and I was tewtally shocked by the image of Tim stroking new employee Rachel’s back at the birthday party.

Squidgy!

(I am like three weeks away from having the technology to give you a screencap of this. In the meantime, Imagineer!)

So I went to bed and and a sweet dream about Martin Freeman/Tim Canterbury.

So squidgy!

Not like surfer “sweet.” I mean the kind when people tell you “sweet dreams” and then you go and have one and chastely kiss a British actor on the stairs because you finally want to be more than friends OMG wish fulfillment!!1one! Although it was surfer sweet that it wasn’t about Ricky Gervais/David Brent because I would have Oedipussed my eyes out and joined like three skillion self-help groups to figure out what was wrong with me.)

(BTW there is the world’s WORST picture of Martin Freeman as his cameo on IMDb that is making me laugh out loud RITE NOW. Get all mushed up and squidgy about his character on “The Office” or Love Actually or Hitchhiker’s Guide (had to look up his name because he’s arthurphilipdent to me) and go there. It’s like a Galaxy Quest wig attacked Kevin Spacey and turned him into a zombie.)

Point? Here `tis.

D`jever have a dream that made you, like, LIKE like somebody? Like, you’re all like, loody doot doot, sure am just friends/coworkers/minor acquaintances with so and so, guess I`ll go to sleep and not dream about him/her OMG I JUST HAD THE WEIRDEST DREAM now I get all pink and stutter when I see `em AAAIIEEE!!1eleven!

Had a joke here but it’s not as important as Bubba Nosferatu

This has happened to me a-mennah, mennah times. Like, five. And sometimes it’s kick-ass, like this one where I was working all night at a restaurant and waiting for him to meet me and all night my coworkers have other overlapping adventures and I`m still waiting and then just before dawn he shows up all backlit and smoky OMG feature pitch for Doug Liman!

And sometimes it’s smutty, because, dewd, I`m only human.

110 INPUT “Is this normal? “; A$
140 IF (A$ = “Y”) OR (A$ = “y”) THEN GOTO 160
150 PRINT “Then nevermind”;

160 PRINT “One more thing…”;

If this has happened to you, consider. That. On any given day. This may have happened to someone you know. About you. So one day Simon J. Acquaintance comes around acting as shifty and dopey as you did after you dreamed he made you Waldorf salad and pie and kissed your ears and called you Minnie.

This can be flattering or horrifying, depending on your outlook. Though it is good incentive to look as presentable as one can on a daily basis, to avoid Oedipussian reaction.

That is all.

No, wait. Why hasn’t Bruce Campbell played a president yet? Is it because my feature about a group of superpowered schlemiels working for the government hasn’t been greenlit yet? GET ON THIS, PEOPLE.

One more. It must be rough for actors to get older and make appearances and for people who know them from one role to be like, “Dewd, you look older than you did twenty years ago,” and them to be all like, “Um, yeah, it’s called TIME Look It Up and I`m still hotter than you now CAST ME AS THE PRESIDENT.”

I think all actors should start out really strug and then get better looking and now when Donal Logue goes out everybody be all like, “Damn, you look good!” That would be better for everyone.

Plus four outta four potatoes for Irishness

OK, not done. I feel a need to justify my attractions here, for they are diverse. A while back a friend sent me one-a-those personal questionnaire things, where you learn about the sender and then you’re s`posed to fill it out and send it on as well (tho I didn’t, because I am equal parts lazy and self-conscious.)

Anyway, for “what’s the first thing you notice about a member of the opposite sex?” he put “voice.”

1) This is the best answer evar. Try to come up with a better answer to this question. You can’t. And I have been carefully modulating my Hoke hawnk e`er since.

2) I dunno if it’s the first thing I notice, but a nice voice for damn sure is the only common denominator to the fellas I find attractive. Alan Rickman comes on screen and I need an ostrich fan and a lemonade. Try watching Prisoner of Azkaban with me and not dying of annoyance. TRY.

Trent Reznor! I mean, TEH HOTT

Plus, “Tao of Slither!” would be a good name for a movie. That is all.

Portfolio

I haven’t posted in forevers, so here’s a link to me online portfolio. There is lots of crazy crap here.

Click upon my works ye mightys

Also, once at this address there was a software portfolio. HA. HA HA HA. Heart happy, bank account sad.