Size Matters, Dude

A trip to the suburbs is a little bit like a special adventure to the land of wonder. Not to sound like some bi-coastal, elitist prick who uses expressions like "fly-over states" -- or to insinuate that I live in some uber-urban metropolis instead of an overgrown college town. The people are the same -- it's just the stores. They're colossal, elephantine, brobdingnagian -- so big, in fact, that I needed three words from the thesaurus to fully encapsulate their impressive girth within the bounds of language.

Sure, I'd prefer to do my shopping at locally-owned businesses, where they pay everyone fairly, and do their best to capture the good-natured small town spirit from America's mythic times of yore. But the only way I could afford to do that and feed my family would be to eat nothing but dry bread and cheese past its expiration date -- and let's be honest, unless you're sewing your own clothes and eating leftover stew made from what you grew with the other villagers in your community garden, your dollars are probably funding the ethically egregious exploitation of some malnourished 12-year-old, somewhere.

So while I buy my veggies from the farmer's market (and recycle, damnit), I'm still forced to shop at Target for furniture, else I'd be dropping half my newly acquired mortgage on a coffee table, or using some wobbly ass piece of shit I tried to make myself with wood from Home Depot (which isn't exactly the most good-natured of corporate superpowers, anyway).

Fortunately, in the suburbs, you're not stuck with boring old regular Target, there's Super Target! Seriously, these are like man-made Wonders of the World. I know it sounds like I'm being a sarcastic douche bag, but this is totally earnest adoration for whoever was able to conceive of such a well-designed, well-oiled machine of consumerist convenience. The automatic doors give way to a row of checkout counters that extends off into the horizon, a vastness like that which our ancestors discovered as they forged westward across the uncharted American plains, all covered in a pristine luminescence that says "shopper, you have arrived." For a moment we were motionless, temporarily stunned like small woodland creatures, trapped by the sheen of oncoming headlights -- and then it began.

We didn't even buy anything. We knew we were heading to IKEA (which is like Wal-Mart for snobby urbanites) later that morning, and I had the sneaking suspicion I wouldn't be as enamored with those funky Swedes as I was when I briefly considered decorating my first apartment in college. At least not enamored enough to spend hundreds of dollars of furniture that's about as raucous as a John Meyer concert, or some self-indulgent, naval-gazing Zach Braff movie.

But we wanted to know -- while we zig-zagged through display after display, dodging the other thousands of moderately-priced-modern-design enthusiasts (who all wanted to steal my fucking shopping cart) -- that, in the event we weren't ready to pull the trigger on an IKEA purchase, we had something to fall back on. Plus, we don't want our house to look like Edward Norton/Brad Pitt's apartment in Fight Club. Nevertheless, our brief trip to Super Target! made us feel much better about the money we finally did end up spending on a new entertainment unit, which will look nice in our new living room, which the previous owner recently adorned with new wood flooring, which, we discovered yesterday, he purchased at IKEA.

Home ownership, here I come!