Alfredo Agony

*Yep, I've joined another blog carnival. If I have to suffer, I want to share it with you. Today's humor topic is Injustice. Let's watch the fun.*

Injustice is a lot like a cat. Its path is unplanned and chaotic, but when it settles in your lap, it's there long enough to turn your legs into pincushions unless someone starts up the electric can opener and whirs your way to freedom.

That’s how I feel about the Alfredo sauce. Not the cat part; there’s no cure for that short of finding someone with a more comfortable lap or a bit of string stuck to their shoe. But from years of experience as the youngest of four children, and therefore susceptible to various methods of sibling torture, I have intimate knowledge that injustice is tolerable only when it is ruining the lives of people I don’t know.

When it hits me squarely in the grocery store shelf, it’s unbearable.

The trouble is that I’m not the type that spends a lot of time in the kitchen for fun. For me cooking doesn’t have the allure that, say, cruising down the Autobahn at a number divisible by 150 or stalking Johnny Depp on Twitter might have.

So in the interest of compromise, which is acceptable whenever it benefits me personally, I like to visit the “bottled for your convenience by the loving hands of somebody else” section of the store for a couple of jars of Alfredo sauce for a quick, pre-Twitter meal.

I’ll even go as far as opening the jars myself when I get home instead of asking the “What’s For Dinner” twins to do it for me. Teenage boys are nice to have around the house when you’ve got leftover pizza on hand or there’s some obvious body humor jokes that have been seriously overlooked, but when it comes to kitchen labor, they’re about as useful as a bonnet on a tom cat.

My doctor tells me that eating the stuff is kind of like caulking your arteries, but I don’t know much about caulk, either, except that it’s not near as good as the white sauce when you add it to noodles. It’s just one of nature’s little jokes that something so good to eat fills the body’s passageways with the stuff that Elmer’s is made of. But that’s injustice for you. Once you get a little patch, it spreads like tacky clothes in Ashley Olson’s closet.

If it’s that bad for me, I want to get it on sale. The savings offset the petrified artery situation. But it’s when the little glass jars of goodness go on sale that I have a problem.

I suspect my family is holding the newspaper hostage. Or perhaps once the newsprint hits the breakfast table, Scottie beams the whole thing down to a planet filled children who rip out the comic sections and stuff the rest behind the couch. So before I find out the stuff is on sale, it’s all sold out.

You’d think you could count on your family when time is short and price reductions are on the line. But the priorities in my house vary widely according to random factors such as the amount of gasoline in the car or the availability of high-speed Internet access. When it comes to something as mundane as the grocery store circulars, interest polls reach a new low, and the newspaper ends up as kitty litter.

So when I aim my little grocery cart toward the pasta aisle, there’s nothing there but an empty shelf and an echo.

I guess it’s take-out for supper again. But there’s an Italian restaurant right down the street. I think I can live with the injustice.