Beds, Baths, and Beyond!

Firstly, our sympathies go out to those affected by the Christchurch earthquake on the 22nd. We're relieved that those we know are now safe.

While anxiously awaiting news from home, we've been distracting ourselves with...

Wacky and Wonderful Items Consumers Don't Need :
1. Tie-dyed duct tape
2. A small device used to strip corn from the cob. We have these in New Zealand, too. They're called "teeth".
3. A guacamole bowl in the shape of an avocado
4. Wooden tongs to get your toast out of the toaster (we usually tip the toaster upside down so that its contents spill all over the counter. This way, the appliance gets a clean in the process)

We found these on our second mall excursion. We discovered that the mall was not one building, as we'd previously thought, but rather, three city blocks filled with stores. It's not really designed for pedestrian access, we noticed, after a fifteen-minute walk in bitterly cold wind from Bed Bath and Beyond to Target.

A fuzzy-wuzzy and a cleaning product in Bed Bath and Beyond

We pitied ourselves enthusiastically until we happended upon a homeless man tucked into a corner of the sidewalk outside Target. Our interaction with this man was haunting. Here was a man who was not ill, not insane, not addicted to anything--he simply had no money. Old Job Loss and Foreclosure had attacked, and all that remained after the dust had settled were a backpack, a little camping gear, and a Dickens novel (which the man read to himself, perhaps to distract from the cold). He thanked us for our change, and told us that it "wasn't so bad..."

It occurred to us at this point that we'd been served in all the chains we'd visited not by teenagers, but by educated, middle-aged adults. This, and the abundance of local mortgagee sales leads us to sometimes wonder if the fundamentalists around here aren't correct in their assumption that Judgment Day isn't far off (as an aside, we're not exaggerating here: today, we saw a sign which read "Judgement Day is upon us! Repent before May 21st, 2011, or burn eternally!").

Yesterday, we found where all the secondhand cars went: they're hiding on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the ghetto. Here's what we learned from our experience in da hood: we need to watch less television. Based on what we'd seen on CSI, The First 48, and Operation Repo (taking schadenfreude to a whole new level), we had formed all sorts of implicit associations about people living in poverty. Everyone was a gangster. Everyone was wanted for armed robbery. Everyone was homocidal! Normal people, living out their quotidian routines--all criminal maniacs! Where did we form these ideas? We'd never met any of these people before. And lo, we survived the experience. How about that?

Fraternising with the natives

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.