Is Wal-Mart Coming Around?

I've never been a huge fan of Wal-Mart, and after watching various documentaries of years past exposing their cut-rate exploitation of their employees and the overseas production workforce, I decided never to shop there again.

But then I saw a segment on the news about Wal-Mart's new "made in America" campaign while waiting on an oil change.  They claimed to already carry many items made stateside, and plan to add more.  Apparently the rising cost of fuel makes it more worthwhile to invest in domestic production than to go overseas.  Maybe the mantra about Wal-Mart's "cheap Chinese crap" no longer applies.

Just to see for myself, I put Wal-Mart to the test yesterday before our big road trip.  I was originally planning to go by three different stores - Petco, for disposable puppy pads, Target, for a travel cooler, and Trader Joe's, for healthy snack food.  Instead, I swung into the Wal-Mart lot to see what I could find.  

The disposable eco-friendly puppy pads AND the cooler were quite affordable and both stamped with "Made in USA."  While I was at it, I picked up some chewing gum and 100-calorie nut packets.  Shopping done.

Very interesting.  I will have to investigate this further. 

Our Concert Experience

Overall, it was a lot less intimidating than I expected.  Rather than a huge crowd of hard-rockers, it was a moderate crowd of assorted geeks and nerds like us.  Nobody was mugged, trampled or otherwise injured, so I call the evening a success.

I was amazed by the enthusiasm of the other fans.  We just bought tickets on a whim because the event was in the neighborhood, but some of these other people were practically modern-day camp followers, crossing state lines and some even the Atlantic just to be in Baltimore.  Some were following the tour down from Philadelphia.  There was one guy from France wearing a Delain t-shirt and at least four old concert armbands.  Somehow we felt like we weren't talking the experience seriously enough.

The venue was so small that there wasn't really a bad place to stand, but we managed to be almost right up front.  The only downside was that after waiting all night to see Kamelot and lead singer Tommy Karevik (definite eye-candy), the moment they walked out on stage a sudden thicket of camera phones sprouted overhead along with the distinct oder of at least sixty sweaty armpits.  Fortunately, that didn't last forever, and there were so many other people taking video I knew I would have several good clips to choose from on YouTube this morning.  I found this one which pretty much accurately describes our view.




Dave bought a t-shirt and I came away with a hoodie.  We got home around 1 AM and felt very irresponsible.  :)

Type-Casting

We were celebrating the beginning of our mutual vacation last night with a longer than normal marathon of "CSI: NY," which resembles "Bones" and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" enough to be much less annoying than "CSI: Miami."  Anyhow, it seems we watched one episode too many, and we ended up going to bed depressed.

The episode in question featured a plot device I've seen before, the mentally unstable housewife who has failed to have children of her own and resorts to stealing them out of other pregnant women.

Why do I always have to be type-cast as the crazy person?  Is the public perception of women like me really becoming so suspicious?  We've all noticed the growing tendency of the populace at large to assume all veterans are ticking PTSD time-bombs.  Apparently aspiring mothers who are for whatever reason unable to produce like normal women are supposed to develop a dangerous and slightly psychotic obsession with getting a child, any child from anywhere.

Which isn't to say it hasn't happened, and just goes to show the depth of feeling and strength of the instincts involved.  I am all for bringing miscarriage back into the social consciousness, because no matter how early or how physically painless it might be, it still messes us up emotionally.  We might be less stereotypically crazy if we weren't so repressed.

I've mentioned it before, but secret first trimesters should not be socially mandatory.  Why did that become the norm?  Is it just to spare our friends and neighbors the awkwardness of hearing about miscarriage and not knowing what to say?  It might be awkward for them, but it's life-changing for me, so they can just deal with it.  Real friends will want to know what's going on in our lives regardless, good or bad.

Maybe we just need some kind of acknowledgement that there may be something other than a pastel-colored paradise on the other side of a positive pregnancy test.  Maybe it will be nothing but emergency rooms, IVs and blood tests.  Maybe it will be days on end of sitting as still as possible and praying there won't be any bleeding.  Maybe it will be chronic disappointment and a special colander under the bathroom sink.  Maybe you'll end up right back where you started with nothing to show for it but a ragged scar, hospital invoices and a bottle of oxycodone.  We aren't allowed to even mention it, because somehow it's considered bad taste.  But, seriously, every woman should consider the possibility and have a plan so she won't be broadsided the way we were the first time.

If we'd had a plan, maybe we would have been coherent enough to ask for Alexis' body rather than letting him/her be thrown out with the medical waste.  Maybe we would have known about conditional baptism in case of miscarriage.  Maybe we would not have felt so completely alone and defective.

This last time we were joking darkly that we'd only really start freaking out if the unthinkable happened and we actually ended up with an infant.  We were just starting to get hopeful when it all fell apart, and then we wondered why we had ever expected anything different.  I received my soulless paperwork diagnosing miscarriage in the mail the same day as the congratulatory pastel packet from Johns Hopkins covered pictures with happy pregnant women.  The former went into the medical file, the latter into the shredder.  For a brief shining moment, I was a member of the happily pregnant club, but once I inevitably miscarry I'm supposed to retire quietly to grieve in the privacy of my own home so as not to rain on anybody else's pregnancy parade.

That could just be my perception, but it's hard to shake.  Fortunately many of my friends, not all of whom have experienced miscarriage for themselves, manage to not be obnoxious to me while they are pregnant.  Better, they don't seem to mind me talking about it.  It needs to be talked about.

When I was sending our wedding invitations, I did not imagine that almost four years later we would still be living the extended honeymoon phase, pet-parents to a toy poodle.  This was not the plan.  If anything, I have learned to have alternative plans, or at least to expect the unexpected and plan for the unplanned.

Alexis Constans

25 June 2010

13 weeks

David Edward, Jr.

6-8 March 2011

24 weeks

Celestine Michel

13 August 2013

6 weeks