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Perhaps you’ve heard the adage: “Never shop hungry.” If you go to the grocery store with an empty stomach, you’re more likely to find the candy/chips/canned goods section, stick your arm out and run down the aisle, pouring everything on the middle shelf into your cart. When you finally check out and bring the food out to your car, you’re left wondering just how long you can survive eating nothing but lima beans. Recently, I discovered that the opposite is true as well: “Never shop full.”

After a large meal at Olive Garden—lots of pasta, soup and breadsticks—my parents and I went to pick up some food for the next couple days. We walked up and down the aisles… and didn’t want to buy anything. “We don’t need to have dinner, we can just starve tomorrow night.” At the time, it sounded like a reasonable proposal, reasonable enough that we followed through on it. Well, just the “not buying food” part. We didn’t starve the next night—we had plenty of lima beans from the last time we shopped hungry.

Announcement over the P.A. system in Walgreens:

“It is 10 minutes until 10:00. We’ll be closing in… 10 minutes.”

Here’s a hypothetical scenario (based on the Christian faith and conceived after watching Heroes last week—three cheers for TV polluting my mind!): Just before you die, you go to confession or somehow purge yourself of sin and thus believe that you’re dying with a pure soul.

You pass away in your sleep and “wake up” in an stereotypical conception of Heaven, clouds underneath with a deep blue sky and bright shining sun overhead. It’s very peaceful, very pleasant and you feel warm and happy.

However, as you travel around amongst the clouds, all of the souls drifting around you are strangers. They look at you and smile as they float by, but you don’t recognize any of their faces. You have family and friends who died before you, but you don’t see them anywhere. All of the people you loved and cherished, those you respected and admired… none of them are there.

Here’s the question: Are you in Heaven or Hell?

If I remember correctly, February 2nd commemorates the 5th anniversary of me flying home to revel in my failure of being one of the four remaining Beauty and the Geek participants in the mansion. Okay, technically, there wasn’t much revelry—even if Scarlet and I had won the $250K, we wouldn’t be allowed to revel in our victory lest the producers take the money away and slap us with a big, nasty lawsuit. I wouldn’t think that going from victorious to penniless would inspire any festivities, but that’s just me.

The thing I’ll remember most about that day isn’t waking up in a hotel bed instead of my room in the mansion. It isn’t eating normal food instead of brand-name food with duct tape covering up the brand names. It isn’t even passing out on the airplane before the stewardess could tell me how to buckle my seat belt for the flight home. Nope, the thing I’ll remember most is getting off the plane. (more…)

I was at a restaurant on Sunday and had to use the bathroom before we left (one of the downsides of drinking three glasses of Mountain Dew in one sitting). I headed through the door, walked past the urinals and saw two toilet stalls: one regular and one handicap stall.

As you probably know, handicap stalls are designed a little differently to make them more accessible for someone in a wheelchair: the stalls are wider so the chair can turn and there are handrails to help the person lift himself from seat to seat. (The stall can also be helpful for someone with constipation: you can spread your legs wider and grab the handrails to brace yourself every time you squeeze.) There was just one problem.

As I looked at the stalls side-by-side, the one on the right was wider and had rails, but both were unoccupied and both doors were swung in towards the toilets. In other words, if you’re using a wheelchair to get into the handicap stall, you push the door open, roll your chair inside and the door gets pinned between the chair and the wall.

Since you can’t use the urinal, you need to use the stall. If you need to use the stall, all you have for protection from prying eyes is the wheelchair, so if you’re shy about peeing where people can stare at you in the face… better lay off the Mountain Dew until you get home.