Impulse shopping

Yesterday Katherine and I hit the town. The town being Brooklyn. We'd planned a trip to the Middle Eastern food stores of Atlantic Avenue, but upon reaching them, I realized I could not buy food while hungry, and that if I entered Sahadi's in my current state, I'd end up leaving with a moving truck filled with barrels of olives, dried fruit, nuts, and massive jars of tehina, which, while appealing, our apartment couldn't really store. So we headed over to Bar Tabac, which was neither bar-centric nor tobacco-centric, but which does make incredibly good hamburgers, not-bad freedom fries, one of the best salads ever to accompany a hamburger, and surprisingly dirt-like coffee. Katherine got some kind of tuna, which she says was good.

Because nothing like a hamburger makes one think, time to buy random, brightly-colored items from addictive Brazilian store Rapisarda, home of my green bag, my mother's green bag, Katherine's wallet, my wallet... Thus "addictive." And the sale bin was filled with what I had, inexplicably, been looking for for months if not years: shiny leggings. In neon pink or dark blue. Went with blue, because I try not to make the exact same choices I'd have made as a six-year-old. Katherine got some fabulous checkered tights, after asking if they had gray and getting an explanation about how the store does not stock things in such sedate colors. Yet they do stock beige tights, which is apparently a source of conflict for the sisters who run the place. It's hard to be a super-cool Brazilian boutique owner, I guess.

When we went to the register to pay, the saleswoman took note of the somewhat embarassing fact that both of us were carrying wallets distinctively from that same store. Katherine's with elephants, mine with dots. The sign on the door as we left, on the inside of the store, said "We'll be back soon!" Which, we noted, works both as a sign to indicate that the owners are gone, and as an affirmation of the obvious: anyone leaving the store will, assuming they are not suddenly deported or arrested or otherwise incapacitated, be back soon.