The market's newest advertising ploy is to profile an individual blankly smiling in different montages and explain how the chain, Ralphs, helps them grow. This particular sign was of a woman with two children, smiles set far apart enough to warrant a "wide load" sign neatly drapped on their foreheads. 'I need Ralphs to help me raise my growing family!' The woman proclaims with a double-shot exclamation point.

I hadn't felt anything the whole day. Suddenly, I was utterly disgusted. The sign was like a desperate stab at idealism, wholly inappropriate for how we shoppers actually felt. I looked around me. People weren't miserable, people weren't happy; we were all just there, waiting.

I began to wonder what the point was; not that "what's our ultimate purpose in life?" question, but just why we keep going. Why was I driving with Gran for hours and hours, standing here or in a pharmacy for 40 minutes. You could say the lines and driving and soccer practice are just necessary things to get at the happy moments, but I disagree.

We like routine. I can't remember all of what I did yesterday, almost nothing about the day before and so on. Routine is comfortable that way. Pain, happiness, depression, anger, all these things can be useful, but routine just silently follows you like a good dog. It's like a drug with legs: it just seems to wander into your mouth, your blood, like new oxygen for your brain, lulling you to drift off to some place else. Marx had it wrong: we literally have a low-grade narcoleptic opiate every day.

It's not a happy place; it's not a sad place. We're all just there, waiting.

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