Stick It To Me

Driving home in the snow on Thursday was a bit of a hassle. The roads were okay, but visibility wasn’t the greatest, especially considering that it was day after my night off for wearing the gentle molding contacts. I can see okay on those days, but my vision isn’t quite as clear as it is when I’ve worn them the previous night.
However, the really scary drive was on Friday morning on my way in to work, as the roads were a bit slippery, and because I ran out of wiper fluid about halfway there.
This was problematic because there was a lot of gunk getting kicked up by other cars, and without wiper fluid a lot of residue built up in a very short period of time.
Further, for much of the drive I was heading directly into the sun, and the combination of sunlight and gunk rendered my windshield almost completely opaque.
Still, I managed to make it there successfully – despite the best efforts of some guy in a flatbed truck who decided to just casually drift into my lane, ignoring the fact that two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time – though my turn into the parking lot wasn’t so much a turn as it was a semi-controlled skid.
Apparently simply because I could, I stayed up fairly late last night doing a combination of nothing in particular and watching TV, and woke up this morning after only six hours of sleep.
I’m not sure why I decided to stay up once I was awake, but I did.
Eventually I decided, against my better judgment, to go out into the world and so some shopping. I bought a new case for my cell phone, as the expensive aluminum one I bought a while back betrayed me for the last time last week and I decided that it needed to be replaced.
(The aluminum case had a tendency to spring open and eject my phone at the merest touch or simply unscrew itself from the belt clasp and fly off. When it did the latter last week, it got bent out of shape and will no longer close properly – not that it ever closed especially securely in the first place.)
I stopped to get a late lunch/extremely late breakfast and headed off to the grocery store, which was a nightmare.
There were just way too many people, and far too many of them were over the age of 50. I did manage to avoid waiting in too long of a line, but navigating my way through the aisles had been a major challenge.
While I have no fear of germs – they’re pretty much impossible to avoid completely and nearly 36 years of constant exposure to them and bacteria and viruses has yet to do me any significant harm – I find that I’m increasingly annoyed at just how goddamn sticky the world is. Thus, like Adrian Monk, I’ve decided that I need to have some sort of moist wipes close at hand at all times.
Of course, actually finding what I was looking for at the store proved nearly impossible. I was just looking for a little travel pack of wet naps or whatever, but they didn’t appear to exist. I ended up buying two boxes of these Kleenex versions, one for the car, one for my desk at work, but they weren’t exactly travel-sized. The nearest equivalent I could find were actually these Off insect repellent wipes.
Once I got in line, though, I finally found what I was looking for amid all the impulse-buy items at the register, so now I have something to keep handy when the world imposes its stickiness on me.