"Wal-mart trips breed Wal-mart trips"

One of my friends (and I'm sorry, friend, for not acknowledging you by name, but I forgot who said it first) once said that Wal-mart trips breed Wal-marts trips, and (s)he was completely right.

The first time I heard it, I didn't want to believe it. After all, Wal-mart is the corporate evil. Every time I enter Wal-mart, a sliver of my soul is left there, and I can never get it back. I don't know what they intend to do with the soul shards or even if they know they're amassing a mighty collection of them, but the thought of Wally World actually harnessing and using the power of these soul shards is completely terrifying. Just saying, it is.

Despite the soul-eating, morale-crushing nature of Wal-mart, I often end up there. Target is 15 minutes away, and when I need a $2 thing, it hardly seems worth the drive. Really, it's give up a shard of my soul or pay for extra gas. I know I'll want that shard of my soul later in life, but for now I want my money to stay in my account. I'm not always the best at thinking long-term. I'm sure I'll pay for it when/if I need to sell my soul and find out that a controlling share is already owned by Wal-mart and that the corporate evil is creating a zombie army and their controlling share turns me into a zombie, which makes the rest of my soul really not worth buying. The next thing I know, I'll be eating the innards of total strangers with the rest of the Undead, and the remainder of my brain will be wishing I'd driven to frakking Target at least half of the times that I caved and went to Wal-mart so that I could be, you know, not a zombie and maybe even a member of a band of survivors during the Zombocalypse instead of eventually getting a cricket bat to the head from one of the survivors.

If you kept track of that train of thought, you get a gold star and should probably reward yourself with a cookie.

Anyway, I thought I would tell you about my Wal-mart trips this past weekend. Jer (my husband) and I needed two things: a toilet paper roll plunger and a bathroom trashcan with a lid. Our old toilet paper roll plunger had lost its springiness and was prone to popping out of the holder at random, throwing the toilet paper roll to the floor, unrolling a few feet of t.p., and then rolling out of reach of the person on the toilet that needed it. Clearly, it had to go. As for the trashcan, we have a new roommate coming into our second bedroom, and I have reason to believe that he hasn't had a female roommate in the past (unless he has a sister. I don't know). I figured it would be nice of me to get a covered trashcan, so that I wouldn't be advertising my menstrual cycle to him. There's an extremely small chance that he would be like "Ew, ew, ew. Not ok, not ok. How do those things do all that bleeding and not die?!?!?! Burn the witch!"

Pst, new roommate, if you're reading this, I'm sure you wouldn't do that. I just got the trashcan in the off chance that you were super creeped out by the evidence of girlishness.

So, we went to Wal-mart, got a trashcan and a toilet paper roll plunger in exchange for a few bucks and shard of each of our souls. Good. Done. Right? Of course not. We got home, and I was like, "Jer, we should've gotten a new alarm clock... and I want my own bedside table cuz groping for a kleenex box on the floor at 3 AM is scary and I'm gonna fall some day and that will suck." In my head I thought, "Wal-mart, you sneaky bastard! You've made me need another Wal-mart trip... evil." Jer looked at me like I was a little crazy for not remembering these things before, but our alarm clock is missing the protective cover over the face from one too many encounters with the floor, and I think he doesn't want me to fall out of bed, so we went to Wal-mart again.

When we got the clock and the tables (2 matching tables. Yay, symmetry), I was determined to beat Wal-mart at its little game. I wracked my brain for anything else I might need. A tendon in my foot is angry. Pick up a support wrap. Our Wii controllers sometimes need batteries. Get a pack of AA's. Jer sees something for our old roomie's birthday. Great, get it. Haha, Wal-mart! We know your game, and we will beat you! We triumphantly took our items to the front, parted with $40 and two more soul shards, and left.

We won! We beat Wal-mart! Right? Nope. A bit later, Jer calls from the other room, "Your alarm clock needs AAA batteries."

My brain broke a little. DAMN YOU WAL-MART! I will NOT go back. Not 3 times in a weekend! You can't make me! I don't need a functional alarm clock that badly! Spitefully, I decided to get batteries at Kroger when I went out to get snacks, but the evil spirits of Wal-mart made me completely forget to pick them up. They were trying to force me to bend to their will, and they would fail! Jer was out, so I texted him that I was lame and forgot to buy batteries. He was awesome and brought some home like a knight in shining armor!

And before you ask, I have no idea if he got them at Wal-mart. I didn't ask. I'm kind of afraid to. The important thing is I didn't let Wal-mart make me go a third time. I broke the cycle and kept a piece of my soul! Hopefully, Jer did too. I don't want him to become a Wal-mart zombie without me because then I'd have to kill him and that would be really, really hard and not just emotionally. He knows martial arts.