Hello, My Name is I HATE WALMART.

I apologize in advance if this post offends anyone [all you "Walmart is God" folk].

I severely, utterly, completely, without a doubt, to the highest degree, and with all of my heart, LOATHE Walmart.

I swear, it's like a breeding ground for stupid people. I'm not talking about "special" people (I'm not mean!), I'm talking about people who are not disabled in any way and yet can't figure out how to walk down a shopping aisle.

Honestly, how hard can it be to just SHOP?

They turn it into a claustrophic's personal hell. Compacted into five-foot-wide aisles with their ten kids (each) and a cart full of underpriced, worthless junk, I find it difficult to breathe. Or in most cases, I hold my breath because at least one person in that mess of people hasn't bathed in a week.

It's awful.

Some say that Walmart has "saved the struggling family." How? By providing you with what could possibly be the most stressful day you've had all year? By basically giving you your products and driving every other grocery store, clothing retailer, or drugstore out of business? They're not helping you, I promise. They're not helping anyone.

Sooner or later, their reign over the market will end. I'm hoping sooner rather than later.

Or else I'll be renaming my Monopoly game "The Walmart." Rawr.

~Abby

Who knew anthropology could actually have benefits?

When I signed up to take anthropology this year in school, I had no idea that it would be like this.

It's essentially a dropout class. Full of seniors who need the social studies credit to graduate. There might be three, maybe four people in that class that are actually interested in the subject of anthropology.

Including me.

It's the study of humans (cultural/evolutionary)... How much more interesting could it be? Seriously. I know people pretty well. I can read your face and I'll know what you're feeling, even quite possibly what you're thinking at that exact moment. I analyze people, their actions, their choices, and I commit it all to memory.

Take it as a warning- watch your facial expressions around me if you want to keep a secret.

But the class itself caught my eye because I've never really thought about why people think and act the way they do. Where our values and morals come from, where we get our religion, how our cultures developed, etc. Sure, I can understand your choices in the present moment, but it's a completely new accomplishment to be able to understand what ancient ethics led you to your conclusive decision. And I wanted to understand that.

For a taste of what we've learned (when we weren't painting masks or something incredibly juvenile like that), I invite you to look at my latest project. We were instructed to take at least 10 pictures or phrases from a magazine and construct a 2D model of what we would change about the human figure. As a challenge, we weren't allowed to use any of the ideas we read about in a packet in class (which were naturally all the good ideas).

So I got kind of ridiculous. I thought of ten things I hated about being human, and found ways to change them. For one, we get headaches too often. That had to go, followed shortly by the fact that our breath spends more time smelling bad than good.

After I was through, I thought about how this assignment related to the class overall (I know you're shaking your head and wondering why I bothered, but I had a lot of time on my hands and I wasn't feeling well and that combination tends to lead me toward thinking strangely for hours on end). The conclusion I came to was that if we had physically evolved better the first time around, I don't think our society would be at the intellectual level it is today.

Just think about it. If we had started out with better eyes, the eyeglasses would have never been invented. And wouldn't have had the need to learn about the eyes at all, because they would have worked fine. Or what about posture? If we were hunched forward, as found to be easier on our backs, we would have been greatly limited by height and any activity that required us to strain backward would be eliminated. And what about our throat? If our "tubes" were arranged in an anti-choking fashion, what we know of as talking would not be possible. Verbal communication would be virtually unavailable to us. Not to mention that if we had been built for hunting, I don't think weapons or any of that lot would have been created either...

Invention is the product of a need or want for easier living. Those needs and wants have to stem from problems, don't they? You can't fix what isn't broken. If we had begun perfect, our evolution would have remained stagnate and we would most definitely not be where we are today developmentally.

So it's one thing to say that our physical health would be better off if "this were like this" and "that were like that," but you can't ignore the detrimental effect that inital perfection would have had on our development of culture, religion, invention, science, language... All of it. We wouldn't be the advanced species we are today. The world would be so different; I can hardly even begin to imagine it.

I never thought I'd say it, but for once, I'm completely and utterly thankful that I'm not perfect. :]

~Abbs