I’ve been clearing out an ancient LiveJournal in preparation for deleting the account. While most of the stuff there is utter fluff, a tiny portion of the posts are worth preserving. What follows is one such post. The original was written in April of 2011.

Some time in the past, on an otherwise nondescript day, I was standing in the family planning section of the local Walgreens. I was looking to purchase condoms, because while I’m sterile, I’m not stupid.

The condom section, however, makes me feel stupid. Very, very stupid.

There is far too much variety, you see- there’s latex and lambskin and polyurethane and polyisoprene. There’s regular, large, and magnum. There’s lubricated, non-lubricated, with spermicidal lubricant, with or without a receptacle tip, ribbed for her pleasure, and spiraled for his. There are, and I’m not making this up, currently eighty-three (83) separate varieties of condoms on sale at Walgreens. As if that’s not complicated enough, you also have to figure out which boxes don’t contain condoms at all, but rather contain vibrators of various sizes and shapes.

The reason I bring this up is that there are so many varieties in so many brightly colored boxes that I was standing in front of the row reading boxes and trying to make sense of it for quite some time. After a while, just after I’d picked up a large box of Lifestyles, a small voice said, “Are you ok?”

The source of the voice was a small girl, about five or six years old. Parents nowhere in sight, although we were about twenty feet from the waiting area for the pharmacy, so I’m sure they were over there. I said something in the general vicinity of “yes, I’m ok,” and then she started to ask other questions.

Anyone who’s ever seen me with a very, very small child knows that I can only parse and understand about fourteen percent of what they say. I never developed the little C3PO kid-translation circuit that most grown-ups seem to have, so I have absolutely no idea what she was asking next.

Since I had no clue what the questions were about, I just did a lot of smiling and nodding and hoping that she would go away. After a moment, she said something which seemed like she was about to get her parents to help me- I’m still not sure why, and she toddled off toward the pharmacy to get their attention. I did not at all feel like explaining to another grown human being why I was conversing with a very small female child in the condom aisle of all places. It was at this moment that I did what any other sane human being would do.

I ran.

I ran to the opposite end of the aisle and stood with my back to the “As Seen On TV” end-cap, so that the little kid wouldn’t be able to spot me. I peered around the corner, just to make sure I wasn’t within line of sight of the kid, and then I briskly walked to the front registers, paid for my purchase, and got the hell out of there. I did manage to buy a box of condoms, but I didn’t know until I got home which type I picked up. That sort of thing happened to me the last time I bought condoms, too.

I have this horrible notion that one day, I’m going to have some sort of a heart attack or stroke during one of these rubber-purchasing events, and when they cart off my body, they’ll have to pry the box of rubbers out of my cold dead hands and explain to my family that I appear to have died over the most stressful and dangerous of all of Walgreens’ inventory, the birth control.

So stressful!