great things are never easy, but sometimes funny

So I decided the best way to celebrate the new year would be a feast with some great friends and some traditional "good luck" dishes. I love a good reason to cook a large meal and invite people over and celebrate hedonism together. That, and since I had to work on New Years Eve I wanted a  reason to party. I decided this a few days before NYE, and realized the only time I would have to shop would be before I went to work on NYE day.  Don't worry, hilarity will ensue (or at least it would have if you had been following me around with a camera during the shopping trip). I decided the night before what I was going to make, and wrote a list of necessary ingredients to get in Williamsburg the next day. I sleep a little later than I intended to on NYE - and then I don't know something happened. I tried to figure out where I was going to get a pork shoulder while chugging a cup of coffee.  Found some place that looked good off the Lorimer stop on the L train, figured I would be able to walk around and find the rest of the groceries I needed. Good thing I didnt write down the address of the place I was looking for, and couldn't remember the location.   I found a natural food store and decided to start there. I got about half the items I needed there, figured that I would happen across a butcher at somepoint. Nope.  I must have walked in fifteen different concentric circles when eventually the bags started to weigh me down, leading to settling on some grocery store that looked pretty big, gracious and fresh and mentioned something about carrying natural foods. It's pretty much a typical Brooklyn grocery store, vaguely hispanic but holding a few more natural and organic products. Cool, I get the rest of the shit I needed home, including a 5.5 lb deboned pork shoulder (my neighboorhood only had bone in and I refused to ever try that again without a deboning knife). Ok, I think I can handle carrying these groceries, but I had forgotten how far I walked from the train. "Naw man!" I tell myself, "Every day is a work out!" I slugged back to the train, took a small break and tried to get myself together. Figured there had to have been a place that sold those old lady grocery cart things around. Still ambling, I found a hardware store and the lady said she has them, however, none happened to be assembled. My new BFF then tells me that it is easy to assemble a cart made of plastic and poles, and, desperate at this point, I buy it (massively overpriced I might add). I start trying to put it together in the store, and it happened to be as easy as putting together a piece of Ikea furniture, which I am a miserable failure at. Getting more pissed off by the minute, I'm about to tell the nice clerk to "take this fucking piece of shit back and give me back my money.  I will take a cab" Here enters the very nice employee, trodding over to my pile of bags and offers to put it together for me. He does it in about five minutes flat.  Thanking him, I head out the door to the Sicilian Bakery.

I get to the train and carry my heavy-ass cart down the two flights of stairs and try to fit my cart through the metrocard entry. That was an embarrassing failure, as I almost got myself stuck between, in and around the revolving bars. Realizing that there is no attendant existent to open the gate for me, it hits me that I will have to sludge to the other subway enterance.  Aggressively grabbing my heavy, awkwardly shaped, mediocrely crafted, expenisve cart back up two flights of stairs, down two blocks, down two more flights of stairs, I get to the bottom of the platform and the attendee tries to tell me he doesn't let people through the gate to go upstairs and cross the street. I almost cry and he must feel bad for me because he gets up and goes through the exhausting process of unlocking the door with his keys instead of staying in his glass office and pushing a button. I am kidding. I appreciate this guy not making me carry the cart back up and down. I only have one more flight down and three flights up when I get back to my stop. Awesome! Why do these carts exist? They dont float up and down stairs. They don't carry themselves. They only work well when if where you are going is in walking distance, and if that was the case, I would've been able to carry it by myself. I guess that is why you only see old ladies and fat people with them. A co-worker of mine once said her life was "like a slow motion epiode of Benny Hill." Never has that line applied to my life as much as it did today, and that shit would have been even more hilarious if I could have sped it up for you, and you and you.