jesus these people
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Ken and I took Charlie off to the airport in the morning, and I returned to my struggles with my photo study of vancouver, which has been difficult to organize. It's still not right.
A 50-ish woman accosted me in the grocery store with the words, "Here, sir, this is what you're looking for when shopping for margarine." At a glance, I could tell she wasn't an employee of the store. I was attracting crazies, again. She went on at length about hydrogenated versus nonhydrogenated oils, and about the presence of the dreaded palm oil. I listened for a while - hey, am I pressed for time? - and eventually informed her that I was allergic to milk and couldn't really choose between margarines based on oil content. She said, "but there's no milk in this!" I pointed to the ingredients, and explained that whey powder was indeed a milk product. She said, "Well, I've learned something then. So my milk products are my youghurt and my cream, I've already got those, and now my whey, too!" Happily, we parted ways, and when we met once again in the vicinity of the baking goods, she was all a-flutter about something else entirely.
Whenever I meet people like that, I wonder if I'm the only person that has spoken to them that day.