An ode to the universe in all its mysterious glory

So I've been doing this thing, lately, where I buy snacks. It's about once a week, and probably bad for my health, even considering all things intuitive eating, but when the most dangerous thing my parents buy is popcorn, I think I have to just do it somewhere. So naturally, I stop at WalMart, where one can buy uncanny amounts of chocolate for just $2, and while I'm in there I think hey, I have that sweet grad student study carrel now. I should buy some of that low-quality microwaveable Kraft Dinner to leave in there in case I need a quick snack. And there I am, in line, juggling 3 10-packs of Reese's and 4 separate cups of microwave KD, and of course WalMart lives up to its quality promises and lets us know they can't take anything but cash today because their machines are broken.

An embarrassing squat on the floor tells me that I have only $5 in my wallet and the line at the ATM is longer than I want to pretend my lab work went on for before I came home WITHOUT stopping at WalMart first, so I leave. But of course, I don't want to be one of Those Customers so despite the fact that I have been walking all over creation since 8:45 because my stupid campus was built by a moron who thought surely students would enjoy the scenic views of the river valley enough to enjoy climbing 5 flights of stairs to get from one's car to one's lab, and because they also put my one required class in the farthest building from that first building- despite all that I walk back to the aisles where I found my shit to put it back in its place. It's then that I see they were selling easier-to-juggle-in-your-arms pre-packaged 4-packs of KD, and curse myself, and leave the WalMart in a righteous fury.

"I know" I think. "I'll go to the Dollarama that's just... somewhere across the street." So I get in my car, and drive across the street- and I should mention here this is like a 6 lane main street, and it would have taken me an hour to walk to this Dollarama and back- and as soon as I turn I'm like "Oh shit, there's no Dollarama here, but there is a Dollar Tree and that's basically the same thing" so I park, realize I'm in a disabled spot, park again, and go inside.

Except the thing is that Dollar Tree isn't basically the same thing as Dollarama, not in this story. Dollarama has this air of laziness that just sort of hangs around, and yet it's always full of people despite the fact that there's always ONE aisle where an employee is stocking new seasonal shit onto mostly-empty shelves. Dollar Tree is perhaps the quietest place I've ever been in my life. It was almost a little alarming at first, like I seriously considered for a second that I had gone deaf right there in the Dollar Tree, because I've never heard silence that quiet before. I used to sit in the car in the empty garage in the morning, waiting for my mom to drive me to school, but that always had a sort of dull ringing to it if I was quiet enough. Not in Dollar Tree. Dollar Tree is the poor man's equivalent of that one room scientists invented that's so sound absorbing you actually go insane listening to your own heartbeat, but at least here you can buy anything for $1.25 or less (inflation really is a bitch).

And I swear to god, I was literally just looking for the Kraft Dinner and the fucking Reese's and got swept in by this fucking Dollar Tree. I spent extra time in there again DESPITE the fact that my campus is stupid and I'd been running all over since 8:45. I wandered up and down every aisle. I entertained vivid fantasies of this being the place where I came when life was too stressful, to remind my mind what true peace and quiet really is. They didn't even have the Kraft Dinner and I wasn't even mad solely because of the fucking ambiance of Dollar Tree.

Eventually I decided that my feet did hurt badly to overcome my fascination, and got in line to pay. The woman in front of me was buying something like 50 rolls of duct tape because of course she was, this is Dollar Tree. And because it was late and there were literally 5 people in the store, the cashier asks her what she's doing, and she explains- and you really just have to appreciate how this added to the whole experience so far- she explains that she's making a dress mold for herself to make her own wedding dress out of doilies. Because she's getting married in a chill little hippy wedding in the woods in August, and of course this entire story is immediately the best thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I mean, I know you can make crazy shit out of duct tape, but this is hands down the best reason to buy 50 rolls of white duct tape at a Dollar Tree that I can even fathom. The world truly is a more interesting place when you leave your house.

So ANYWAY- the cashier gets to me, and she's ringing up my candy and the giant ass can of Peace Tea I bought solely because I've always been fascinated by the size of the cans, and I tell her it's for my weekend of marking, and we have this nice little chat about marking and feedback and courses and she convinces me to buy a bag for $0.05 and by the end of it I felt like I'd been Immersed In My Community and was already planning to only buy my snacks from this exact Dollar Tree from now on.

And on the way home I realized that sometimes we think that the universe did things for us, or some other higher power or whatever, because it's really nice to think that there was some Force that saw that I had a bad day and needed to be steered away from WalMart and into that Dollar Tree, and I know that that's not how the world works. I know that it was just a random coincidence, but I only had $5 in my wallet from paying for yoga on Sunday, and I only had cash to pay for yoga because my grandparents gave me some for Christmas (that was literally stapled into the card- I feel that detail only adds to this story so far), because my Grandmother believes that it's bad luck to give someone a purse without putting money inside it, and I guess they got me a purse because I'm A Girl. And I only know about yoga because of the friends I made in high school, and I only made those friends because my parents made me go to the high school with the IB program. And I only get to go to yoga because I applied to grad school here after being depressed and not applying to grad school literally anywhere else. So in conclusion, thanks universe, for the X chromosome, nerd brain, depression, and the shitty day that led me into Dollar Tree.

And like I know, I get it, "swegan, what the fuck is wrong with you, this is the most basic ass thing" like O K A Y sure, fine, but you weren't in that Dollar Tree.