a.1. :: tj+dj monday evening brings a visit by a young, professional lady who has spent the early part of her twenties in school and in striving to get a decent job. she has been too busy to settle into a long-term commitment, but she is still energetic enough spend all weekend drinking and dancing and fucking and blowing white lines. she wakes up on monday morning in a cocaine haze, stark naked in a strange bed. she throws on whatever semen-stained clothes she is able to find, and she rushes to work with the reek of stale Captain Morgan still on her breath. before she leaves the office for her apartment, she realizes that she has been too irresponsible during the last two or three days to do any decent shopping; there is nothing waiting in her food cupboard but a jar of jerk marinade and a box of Theraflu. so, she pulls her full-sized Honda into the Trader Joe's on the way to her apartment to grab a basketful of supplies which can tide her over for the next couple of days - just until she can get some time together for a more serious errand day. she makes her way to the prepared-food aisle, where she can grab a plastic tub of bean salad or a cellophane-smothered vegetarian Wrapito. While she inspects the nutrition facts on a carton of oil-soaked dolmas and tries to justify to no one but herself the consumption of the 4 grams of saturated fat, she notices a young man pick out a tray of organic cabbage salad and throw it into his basket. she looks into his basket and finds a carton of coffee-flavored Soy-Um and a jar of unsweetened apple sauce. she watches him move through the store until she sees the proof of his bachelorhood; he snatches up a box of freeze-dried curried lentils and hurls them into the basket without glancing at the label which indicates the 900mg of sodium that the sauce contains. he is shopping alone, and, just like her, he is buying only single servings. she knows that he also must drive through the darkness to a lonely manufactured meal by the light of a string of forgettable sitcoms. she knows that this is the guy that she needs to meet; he is mild-mannered and responsible, unlike the nameless dolts that parade endlessly through her alcohol-drenched, drug-laden weekends. she still wonders as he silently pays for his single bag of groceries and stares at the floor on his way through the door.

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