All the way to next door and back! Truly, if this does not impress those doddering old fools at the World Adventurer’s Society, nothing ever will!

I am pleased with myself because I did, in fact, manages to motivate myself to actually get dressed, get into my outerwear, and go next door to Shopper’s Drug Mart to pick up the various diabetic supplies I needed, including the most important one, the insulin.

And, as if to reward me for my finally getting off my ass and doing something, they had my favorite sale on, where the boxes of snacking crackers like Ritz Bitz Sandwiches (oh how I love those!) were on sale for $1.99 as opposed to the usual $3.50 or so.

This is faboo for me, because normally I don’t get the cracker type snacks because they are too expensive and I can get something like chips a lot cheaper.

But when they are on sale, well, I yust go nuts. Well, a little nuts. I bought three of them, one of those Ritz Bitz Cheese Sandwiches (I am such a slut for artificial cheese flavour), one of Swiss Cheese Crackers, and one of… hmmm. I don’t recall, actually.

Oh wait, Vegetable Things, that was it.

And I will probably end up buying more, because I will be back there tomorrow. Turns out, when I went to get my diabetes stuff, I only scored 80 percent on the mission.

I knew there was five things I needed (this is one of the tricks we forgetful types use to cope, numbers) but when the pharmacist only gave me four things and said “Is this everything?”, I could not remember what the fifth thing was, so I ended up with only four.

Turns out, it was the lancets for my blood sugar meter. They are the little disposable pokey things that do the actual job of making me bleed for the machine.

Let’s just savour how marvelously overdramatic that phrase is, shall we? Bleeding for the machine.

It is both a literal description of what blood testing involves and incredibly emo. I love it. I am totally going to be saying that when it is time to test my blood now.

“Well, time to go bleed for the machine. ”

Sometimes I amaze myself. Anyhow, where was I… oh right.

So I could not remember what I was missing until I got home, so tomorrow after therapy I will be back for more lancets and then I will probably take further advantage of the lovely sale and buy even more snacky cracker type things.

Might as well take advantage of the sale while it is on and I am going to be there anyhow.

Normally, I resist the pressure of sales. I used to live with someone who was more or less a slave to them. She just kept buying worthless little doodads because they were on sale and it was a good price.

So that made me painfully aware of how the whole concept of a “sale” is just a way for retailers to create a false sense of scarcity and manipulate the “gatherer” side of our hunter/gatherer instincts, and blled poor people of their cash.

But still, a deal’s a deal, as long as it was something you were going to buy anyhow.

And I need the extra snack power, because one of the side effects of having my blood sugar down to the normal range is that my appetite is through the fucking roof.

This will be, I hope, temporary. Diabetes literature seems to agree that once my body realizes that way lower blood sugar than usual does not, in fact, mean that I am starving, my appetite should level out.

Until then, it is a seriously pain in the ass, though. A healthy one, one that means I am actually doing quite well, but still. Waking up feeling like I could gnaw on passersby is getting to be a serious drag.

I am serious. I get so hungry I feel like smacking somebody. Thank goodness I am nearly always alone at the time, I imagine I could get pretty grumpy.

Oh who I am fooling. I am never grumpy, not really. But it feels good to pretend I might be.

But I have an incredibly pervasive and powerful sense of responsibility for my own actions coupled with a high level of empathy, and that means that I cannot knowingly behave in a way that harms others, no matter how I feel.

Then again, I suppose that presupposes everyone is as delicate and sensitive as I am. Not everybody is, and I suppose if I was around people a lot tougher than I have every been, a little grumpiness might be morally justifiable, if not downright necessarily to deal with the rude bastards.

That has been my theory of New York City for a little while now. Looking at how pop culture depicts NYC from the point of view of a polite and reserved Canadian, it makes you wonder how on Earth anybody can live there without becoming a spree killer.

The answer must be that it is easier to handle people being rude to you if you are not required to be polite to them back. They are rude, you are rude back, maybe you both get a little heated, but then it is over and you go on with your lives.

Seems like madness to a Canadian, but for them, it sort of seems to work. Who knows, maybe the ability to vent some of your life tensions in the bump and hustle of NYC life actually makes some people calmer.

Certainly, holding everything in all the time is no kind of solution. That just leads to depression, stress related illness, and a high level of background anger that can erupt in seemingly senseless acts of violence or even riots at any moment.

So who knows? Maybe passionate cultures like the Italians could teach us “reasonable” types a thing or two about how to live right.

But I will always be the polite Canadian that I am.