The Wrong Cottage Cheese

 I went to Winco yesterday. It’s big. 

As I was down on one knee selecting the cheapest sour cream I could find, a couple came up and opened the fridge door a few down from mine. They appeared married a few years. He was in gym shorts(what all people that don’t need to try anymore resort to around here) She was dressed nice. Looked slightly pregnant. He was pushing the cart. She was on the front of it pulling from point to point, doing the opening of doors, comparing, and selecting- So he wasn’t so much pushing as resting his arms on the cart and doddering along like the hind legs on an amputee dog with the little wheels on the front. 

     She asked what kind of cottage cheese he liked. His head lolled around disinterestedly followed by an impassive, “I dunno.” 

     Ducking behind the door she scanned prices. After an efficient pause, she reached for one. His eyes rolled at the monotony of grocery shopping and, for a sliver of a moment, what she was pulling out of the cooler came into focus long enough to resolve some colors, lettering, maybe the trademark.

     He sighed. “Not Darigold.” 

Obediently she returned it to its shelf. 

     I felt uncomfortably awkward. 

     It seems like if you’ve been married long enough to be pregnant, you might know about such a strange eccentricity as his being picky about his cottage cheese make. What could this man have against a brand of cottage cheese? The audacity of being picky when so obviously uninvolved seemed stranger still. 

     It seemed like a situation that could lead to many happy years of Darigold cottage cheese sneaking it’s way unexpectedly into everything you ever eat or drink. I didn’t get the feeling this man prepared his own meals. 

     I resolved as I strolled past the acre or so of prostrate freezers full of cod and frozen peas, that if I ever get married, my intended will know what kind of cottage cheese I prefer so that we don’t face the same awkward impasse.

      I like white cottage cheese. 

     White with lumpy chunks of cheese brain stuff floating around in it. All brands I’ve tried adhere to this standard equally! I’m confident the local grocer will provide acceptable makes. 

Remembering how not cool I am...

  I switched schools in 2nd grade when we moved to Washington state from Florida. I then learned I did not know how to be "cool." I still don't. 

 I remember the shocked expression on kid's faces when they heard I was unfamiliar with Paula Abdul's hit, "Straight Up."

But I was eight. I didn't own a radio. I didn't have any cassettes. I wasn't against it. I didn't say I hated it. I just didn't know that my responsibilities in Washington included listening to the radio.

 I didn't know who Arsenio Hall was.

Probably because his show came on after 11 and bedtime at our house was something like 7:00.

 I didn't have Hammer pants.

or neon colored clothes. There was no denim jacket in my closet.

 I don't know if I had a closet.

     I wasn't "cool." 

I soon found this to be as acceptable as leprosy in The Bible. 


No one could talk to me without jeopardizing their own "cool". No one would play with me. Actually, it turned out being mean to me made kids more "cool." It was a puzzling concept and I guess is the reason I feel obligated to treat loners with some humanity. Whenever I see someone falling way over my mental line of demarkation for cool, I feel an overwhelming sense of sympathy because I assume they face the same unsavory consequences I did. Usually I find out they're very successful interesting people with more friends than I've ever had.
      I don't know what to think about it or why I'm writing about it. It's just that tonight on the way home, my seek button happened upon this song, and I had to stop because I really have not heard it since I was eight! I remembered how absolutely "cool" this song was in my little world at the time. I'd actually hovered over the pause button on my family's cassette recorder for a few days to catch "Straight Up" so I would have it on cassette. It didn't redeem my "cool", but I did get video of myself in a "cool" headband performing the number holding a hanger and a stick just right so I appeared to be rocking an electric guitar. A VHS Cassette labeled "ben's dance" with a fuzzy commercial laden recording of The Princess Bride afterward survived for years on our movie shelf.
      I guess I just thought how interesting it is that as popular as that song was, I have not heard it since. And all the stuff attached to it seems so very "not cool" now. I feel a little proud I didn't wear Hammer pants in public. I never wore a derby hat with a jean jacket. I didn't own a hot pink tank top. I never had a mullet. These are things that made me so not cool at the time, but that I'm very okay with now.
     I still remember the popularity of pumping a fist in the air and woofing quietly to yourself. That was Arsenio Hall I guess. I only mention him because of his importance to the fabric of society at the time and because he appeared in the "Straight up" video. The Arsenio Hall Show of which the barking fist pump became so popular featured interviews with famous people I couldn't identify then and wouldn't recognize now. Back then, not watching Arsenio Hall, not joining in a "woof woof woof woof!" or "hoof hoof hoof hoof!", or just my total inability to identify what the heck that was, seemed to keep me from joining functioning society. At least kept me apart from the children's social system in that particular region of Washington state where everyone was really cool.
     I am not cool. Thankfully the affect seems inconsequential since graduating high school. Since then it's been a much different world that actually works a lot more like the freind-making principles my mother taught me at the time. She'd say, "Just smile and say hi."  I remember the new dawn that broke in adult life when being nice didn't earn me the nickname Fatso.
     It's even gone so far that a few people have actually told me they like my first and last name! Preposterous I know! Thinking back it seems strange that children with such ridiculous names could find ways to make fun of mine. I won't mention the ones I'm thinking of because I trust the children attached to them grew up and got normal. Either that or were hit by cars… Or kidnapped and murdered by clowns at the circus we couldn't afford tickets to. There's gotta be some justice in there somewhere.
     I guess I just felt like writing this to say that sometimes people are really mean, and they know they are, and would be meaner if their small brains could work out a way to accomplish it. Thankfully God limits the intelligence of some. Some parts in life are just hellish. And it hurts. But maybe if you can hold on through it, there's good things out the other side and the bad parts kind of fade away till you don't really think about them much. Because if "Straight Up" and Arsenio Hall were really as important as my classmates believed they were, they'd probably be in front of me a lot more causing me to remember how not cool I was. But nobody plays "Straight Up." Ever. And I don't think most people can identify who or what an Arsenio even is. And no one really cares about cassette tape collections anymore. So I guess this is my theory: that things change and "cool" only exists as what marketers really need you to spend your money on right now. That the world has a way of righting itself- or even better, of giving people who like to dish crap out a whole lot of it back. At least I like to believe it did.
Helps me sleep at night to think of those clowns.