More of this, less of everything else please.

Somebody along the way managed to convince us that shopping malls are wonderful. Vibrant, happy places filled with music, bright shiny colors, happy merchants and fresh-faced, smiling shoppers. That person is a genius. An evil genius, because the mall is none of those things. The mall is a dank, loud, sweaty, smelly living nightmare populated with just the worst human refuse imaginable. Any place where there are that many children crying at one time is obviously a place where unspeakable atrocities are being perpetrated. I spent most of Sunday in one this past weekend in spite of knowing I didn't want to be there, because a woman asked me to go with her and of course, I said yes. I'm pretty sure I complained enough throughout the course of the day that I shouldn't have to worry about being invited again.

"Would you rather be watching some sports thing? Is that it?"
"No, it's that I'd rather be doing anything else, up to and including having my eyeballs extracted through my rectum."

I like to try to paint portraits with words.
Anyway, after standing in lines of sweaty, horrible hairstyles, waiting to give money to bored and surly teenagers for stuff that will be thrown away this time next year, and taking a break for "lunch" in the "food" court consisting of congealed, deep-fried orange lumps over rice-like sodium shavings (I passed) and just spending hour upon hour of watching Americans demonstrate every single behavior that makes people hate Americans, I was wiped out.
Amazingly, it took only four minutes of YouTube therapy to turn me around, at least to the extent that I no longer wanted to lay on the floor and pour poison in my ear...