Love means never having to shop
The store was cold.
I couldn't shake the feeling that it was cold for a reason. To hurry shoppers into making rash decisions, perhaps? Or maybe the people who controlled the air conditioning just thought an ice-fishingly cool temperature setting was comfortable.
I walked nervously through the aisles, trying not to draw attention to myself by showing my wife that the goosebumps on my arms were a good topographical likeness of Russia's Ural Mountain range, by bumping into anything with a price tag that had more digits than my paycheck, or by saying something maternal ears would take offense to - like anything.
This store was full of shoppers. The dangerous kind. The kind of shopper Stephen King would write about if he never wanted to sleep again.
It was a baby store full of pregnant women, and they were nesting.
I've never understood the female desire to coerce men into doing things they'd never do on their own. Like use a plate, wear pants when walking around the house, and go to a store to register for stuff nobody's going to buy for us anyway.
Of course, for the official record, I wanted to go register at the baby store, honey. Remember, I said that when you asked me, oh, about an hour into our mock-shopping extravaganza. Somewhere around the 20 minutes we spent looking at the doody bin shaped like a duck.
Registering for items goes completely against every brain cell a guy has left after we had fun in our 20s.
A guy's thought process is like this: When a guy wants something, he determines where this item is most likely to be, he goes there, he buys it, then he goes home and drinks beer.
Walking around a store knowing we're not taking anything home with us seems like something people in other countries would do when there's not a game on. The concept is just foreign to us.
Like breast pumps.
"If you're going to breast feed, this is the model you've got to have," a woman in a smock said to my wife.
The breast pump was electric and looked like something Kirk and Spock used to destroy brain-sucking aliens on Cestus III.
It was also worth more than the car we'd driven to the store.
"What about that one?" I asked, pointing to a manual pump that looked like an oversized PEZ dispenser. It was at least in my price range, by which I mean I can generally afford PEZ. The pump itself was still pretty expensive.
The lady in the smock looked at me with the kind of look usually reserved for people who kick puppies.
"Would you really want that for your wife and baby?" she said in a way that didn't resemble a question.
"No, of course not," I said, and put it on the list.
After two hours, we left, exhausted and cranky.
"We didn't register for much," my wife said. And she was right. Good Lord, what did we do for two hours?
Some time later, my wife went back to the baby store, and she didn't ask me to go with her.
You know, she really does love me.
