i just ate a current scone, and i swear i feel my ass growing. not a nice sensation...anyhow, i wanted some underpants for our cruise so we went to a mall in L.A. JCPennys was like some giant garage sale at the end of the day when the people having the garage sale start hauling everything and anything out to the side walk hoping to make some extra cash. pyramids of shiny, colorful bottles of gooey, goby stuff that looked like chain lube were stacked eye-high right in the entrance. piles of the stuff. it may have been bath soap, detergent, lip gel, antifreeze, who knows. but JC Pennys sure as heck wanted to move it. and all those rotating jewelry wheels, ladened with the sparkly junk i used to swipe when i was a kid. i'd hide the stuff in my room in a plastic bag because i didn't know what else to do with it until my mother found it and paraded it before my eyes asking, "what's this? where did you get this?" as if she hadn't seen all this crapolla when she told me to "wait right there and don't touch anything," at the pharmacy when she picked up her meds. i told Linda i'd only be "one minute. i'll run in and run out," which i should never have said. Linda's a very literal gal. you say "one minute" and she rotates the little wheel on her watch and gives you one minute. and there's no running in department stores at Christmas. There's full-body slams, side-ways shuffling, small child hurdling, definitely no running. i read somewhere that department stores are designed to disorient. i dunno, when i find myself muttering such things as "get me the fucking hell out of here," i'm maybe a little more than disoriented. and is there some unspoken rule that during the Christmas shopping period (which for me is roughly Dec 24th) if you pick up something only to discover that it's the wrong size, wrong color, wrong price that it's completely okay to chuck it into the air and let it fall wherever it lands? Hmm? anyhow, i found 4 pairs of underpants for $14 dollars and according to linda it took me 23 minutes.