How to Buy Fresh Produce

It’s Sunday and you walk to the farmers’ market with a Paul Simon Pandora station playing out of your back pocket. Is this a healthy thing that you do now? You buy some fruit that may or may not end up in a smoothie later this week? 

You keep walking. You try to hit 10,000 steps on your Health App, but you think maybe 13,000 is better because you can’t really trust it to count all your steps. Better safe than sorry, or better obsessive-compulsive than sedentary, right?

You like the crowd at the farmer’s market. You see lots of old married couples with their grandkids. You envy them. You envy people with life partners and the patience for vegetable gardens. You see people wearing cut-off Rip City t-shirts, and kids dancing, and other comforting sights. 

You sit outside and try to get some sun, because although you’re all about SPF this year, you remember someone saying once that a suntan makes your teeth look whiter and your clothes look cleaner. But you tell yourself: Slather up that sunscreen, old lady, ‘cause you’re twenty six now and your skin is the largest organ on your body, blah blah blah….

Your friend says you look like the robot from Ex Machina, which makes you feel pretty good because you had major FOMO during the Facebook Doppelgänger week of 2010. The power keeps going out in your office and you think: Wait, am I the robot from Ex Machina?

You want to be surrounded by happy, goofy people. People who laugh at themselves. People who think in puns. People who would be down to play the feely cup game from New Girl. 

You think about your upcoming social engagements, but all you really want to do this weekend is go see Jurassic World and watch the new season of Orange is the New Black to see what that “Pornstache” prison guard has gotten into. You don’t want to be flakey, but your AC is calling, and pulling your nephew in his Radio Flyer wagon to the farmers’ market is starting to sound good enough.