Supermarkets, Pilates, polenta and so forth

I was thinking about supermarkets. I went to one recently - Fairway - where the prices are very low (1/3 that of Whole Foods, for produce anyway) and insanity is high. At one point I got locked in the center of a hub that couldn't move. I patiently pointed out, "If you'd wait a minute and let me move, then we all could move." They allowed me to move, and then they could all move too! Who would have thought? Then my irritation faded as I shifted into survival mode, concentrating on getting what I needed and emerging in one piece. It was so crowded that the cashier lines extended into some of the aisles. If you wanted to look at dish detergent, it was too bad because the aisle was full of carriages waiting to be checked out.

I'm not usually silly enough to go there, but it happened to be in the neighborhood of the Pilates class I had just tried. To my surprise, Pilates doesn't involve sophisticated equipment. It's done on a mat, just like yoga, with some props, but it's very grounded (none of the balletic, balancing moves from yoga that I love). And it's all about the abs. It's a little scary, but I'd like to try it again.

Brokeback Mountain? If you've seen it, feel free to leave thoughts. I read somewhere that it was "beautifully shot [and] tediously paced."

I'm making pumpkin polenta for lunch today. My craving for the orange family (squash, sweet potato, pumpkin) could no longer be subdued. D decided to have lunch with a friend. I wish he would try it; he doesn't know what he's missing.

I finished "In Cold Blood" a couple of days ago and it was excellent. I would have told Truman to cut the first 5 pages or so but the rest of it was great. You could see he had finally found his subject. The writing was so evocative and the killers were actually sympathetic. I had some things in common with one of them (namely, being oversensitive sometimes), but I decided not to worry about it. It's "abnormal psych effect." When I took abnormal psych in college, the professor told us we'd all think we had one of the disorders we studied, but the fact that we were so self-aware meant we didn't. Or something like that.

I'm currently reading "The Wife of Reilly" by Jennifer Coburn. It's about a woman who's cheating on her husband, but she doesn't want to leave him alone so she creates a personal ad for him and vets his dates so she can find a new wife for him. He doesn't know this is going on. At first I thought she would be an unsympathetic character, but it's very funny, like all her other books. They always have an outrageous premise.