I almost got hit by a train today. It wasn’t my fault. Trains have got no business being in shopping malls.
Yes, it was a little kiddie train, and it damned near ran me right down. Boy, that would have been an embarrassing way to go. As it was, they tooted their whistle, I moved out of the way, everybody had a good laugh (including several complete strangers in the immediate vicinity) and that was that.
This is a bit off track
I hate going to the mall. It’s not because of the malls. I know some people complain about the soullessness of the architecture in shopping malls and airports, but I don’t actually agree. The concept of a shopping mall (which was predicted in Looking Backward, the late 19th century socialist utopian novel by Edward Bellamy) is not bad – a concentration of shops for convenience, out of the rain and the cold. Although it was a lovely spring day today, you never can tell. And the mall we were in is a fairly nice one, with a huge dome of a skylight at the center, and a reasonably varied food court. I had seafood, the wife and kids had Chinese, our friend had Indian.
No, it’s shopping that I hate, and the thing I hate most about it is when everybody else seems to like it. The kids were happy with the train, and they got balloons (I hate balloons, too. They give them to you everywhere, it is not a novelty, even the kids tire of them quickly and it’s just one more damned thing you have to carry around.)
My wife, of course, likes to shop. It’s the classic male/female difference. I think what it comes down to is this – women see shopping as an entertaining thing to do, it’s like going to Disneyland. There are trains, there are balloons, you look at things and come home with bags full of stuff. Men think of stores as places where they are trying to take your money away from you. The fact that they will give you products in return doesn’t make it much better. It just legitimizes the con.
As shopping trips go, today wasn’t my worst ever. We got what we were looking for, and most of it wasn’t any more expensive than we expected. But it did seem to take forever.
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