When you don't want to be seen shopping

Do you enjoy grocery shopping? I appreciate its convenience, but it’s like a whole thing to go. I feel the need to explain to men the difference between genders when going to the grocery store. Men can get away with wearing the same clothes when doing yard work, shopping, going for ice cream, or whatever. They have very comfortable, functional clothes. When women want to look nice in public, their clothes are not always comfortable…we sacrifice comfort to look nice. What we wear to garden is more comfortable and not as presentable in public as something we’d normally wear to leave the house. So when my husband says lets go for a ride up town to go to the post office or other errands, he’s instantly ready. Same clothes, his hair hasn’t moved in 49 years, he’s good to go. Not the case for most women. So my first question to him is, “Do I have to get out of the car?” That determines whether I’m instantly ready to go or not. He promised me no, so I hopped into the car with my yard work clothes. Sure enough, we pull into the grocery store because he forgot that we need to pick something out. This is when we tell ourselves two huge lies…..one is that we won’t run into anybody because nobody shops at 7 pm on a Tuesday night. The second lie is that it’ll be to just get one thing so it’ll be really quick. You check your hair quickly in the tiny visor so you can’t get the full impact of what’s going on and you have no taming equipment with you, so you hope you’re under control. But do you know who is actually in the store shopping? Everyone. Everybody you have ever met in your life is in that store at 7 o’clock on a random Tuesday night. You feel like you’ve walked in on your own surprise birthday party that you really wish you knew about so that you could have dressed appropriately. People you haven’t seen in 15 years see you with your wild, wind blown hair that caught some stray weeds in it, dirty hands and nails from the garden, ugly mud shoes, suntan lotion not completely rubbed in on your face, full blown puffy allergy eyes, stained, comfortable clothes drenched in offensive bug spray, and now they think you’ve fallen on hard times, you’re really not aging well, and you’re basically failing at life in general. They may even plan a benefit for you because you look so bad. It’s to the point where you feel like greeting people with, “I was told I didn’t have to get out of the car.” After a painfully long shopping experience, you go to check out and you can’t help but notice only 2 cashiers are on duty with 100 people checking out. You know deep down that the length of time to check out is ALWAYS proportionate to how little time you have. The less time you have and the more you don’t want to be seen by anybody, the higher the chance of bigger lines at the check-out; it’s just how the universe works. If you tell yourself otherwise it’s just based on wishful thinking and zero empirical evidence. Basically, men need to understand that women’s hair has a mind of its own. It doesn’t stay in place all day like theirs. I believe all of a woman’s emotions are directly tied to her hair as well. Humidity? You’re one big frizzy puff ball. Mid life crisis? Your hair goes from decades of being straight to just one day becoming permanently curly, and not necessarily in a good way. In the morning your hair is beautiful and full of life, within two hours it’s completely lifeless, flat and unrecognizable. That’s partially why we go to the ladies’ room all the time. You have to periodically keep an eye on that head of hair because it spontaneously morphs into a different entity throughout the day, several times! Most of the time in the ladies is spent looking at ourselves saying wait a minute, I looked nothing like this when I left the house! What happened? It doesn’t help that the lighting in the bathrooms are so bad that it looks like the set designers of scary movies staged the creepiest illumination in there that highlights all sorts of problems you didn’t know you had. Maybe the men’s room has the same sketchy lighting and they feel the same way as they say to each other, “Bob I don’t want to go to the store right now, I’m having a bad hair day and this outfit makes me look bad.” But just in case men don’t, when you ask your Mom, your wife, your daughter, or your girlfriend to go somewhere with you and you tell her that she doesn’t have to get out of the car, she’s going to hold you to that! She’s not being difficult, she’s just heading off a world of speculations and problems…trust me.