Whole Foods as the Forgotten Corner of Hell

Yesterday, I went to MoMA to finally see the Burton retrospective--something I'd been meaning to do for months and months. It was pretty cool. It took me a while to get into it, probably because it was still so crowded. However, I had tried to go last month and had to leave because it was a giant cluster-fuck, so this was a vast improvement. Once I'd gotten to his drawings from when he worked at Disney that were just so clever and witty, I was pretty into it.

My childhood is so associated with Batman and Beetlejuice and most importantly Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but even Mars Attacks and Ed Wood. The only Tim Burton movie that I didn't like when I was a kid was Edward Scissorhands, which is everyone else's favorite. I always just thought it was so sad how mean everyone was to Edward and how he was so sweet and just wanted to be loved. It was really hard for me to watch, and actually, I have never seen it again. Maybe I should give it a try. Beetlejuice is still one of my favorite movies of all times, though.

Anyway, after the museum, I was going to meet a friend who was walking dogs uptown, so I decided to stop for some sustenance at Whole Foods. I generally avoid Whole Foods because it think it's ridiculously expensive, but because I didn't have any cash, I knew they would take my debit card even if the purchase was only $5.

So I go in, and wander around the insanely crowded store in circles looking for chocolate, foolishly thinking the selection would be by the cash registers (hello impulse buy) and didn't see them. Then I finally find some shelves with chocolate on them, but all the bars are like, $8. Finally, I'm able to get the attention of someone who works in the cheese section, and I ask, desperation starting to creep into my voice, where the chocolate is. She points me to the shelves with the $8 chocolate. I ask her if that's all the chocolate they have, and she tells me that theres more. I ask "Where??". She tells me that it's over in the grocery section. I don't know where that is, so I ask her to direct me. She says it's all the way in the back. So I amble over there and keep wandering up and down the aisles sure that finally my search will yield the desired results.

Up and down I go with nothing to show for it. Finally I flag someone down and ask him where I can find chocolate. Would you believe it, but apparently this guy was deaf and didn't talk. He directed me to someone else. I asked him, "where are the bars of chocolate?". He said, "hmmmmm. I'm not sure--let me ask someone". He asks someone else who keeps repeating "bars of chocolate" like he wasn't really sure what those were, until with full desperation making my voice hoarse, I interject "CHOCOLATE!!! WHERE IS THE CHOCOLATE?!?!". "oh", he says, "it's by the baking stuff, two aisles over". "Merciful Heavens", I thought.

I got my chocolate and tore it up on the train. Fin.