Given Two Choices, Where I'd Go to Pick Up Women

The last two days have found me in Bloomington working the kid-friendly habitats. Eryn starts school five days a week in just two weeks, and I'm feeling a little guilty about her losing some of her at-home time because she enjoys it so much. To compensate, and to get her away from the television in all this rain, I offered her an evening at Ikea and an evening at the Mall of America. One day at each has underlined a very important piece of information for me - if I'm ever single again, I will be trying to pick up women at Ikea, not the Mall. Now, it could just be that I was at the amusement park, and I might have noticed more eye candy at Sak's Fifth, but that doesn't change the fact that if you venture toward the center of the Mall, everyone just looks sort of skanky. I know - I was there, so what does that say about me? I untucked my shirt to fit in a little more as I seemed out of place in my semi-dress shoes and no tank top (excuse me..."tag"), so having to purposefully dress down probably underlines how out of place I feel there. Eryn, however, had a cotton candy Kemp's ice cream cone, and a blast, despite sitting in the administrative office for 35 minutes trying to get her season pass (thanks, Uncle Andrew!) fixed because it had inexplicably expired.

Ikea, on the other hand, was sixty minutes of Eryn playing all by herself in the ball pit/Smaland area - meaning without me, there were other kids, while I wandered off to think about getting Pooteewheet a present, followed by 45 minutes on a comfortable couch editing some creative writing (although I could have read a book just as easily) and drinking a soda. The whole time, attractive twenty-year old women and their not-so-unattractive mothers swirled around, purchasing college dorm paraphernalia. Afterwards, we had a perfectly pleasant dinner of kid's macaroni and blueberry pie. Perhaps it's the reality that most people who are at Ikea are there to buy $100+ worth of shelving that upscales the place compared to the Mall. I just know it's much more pleasant, although the Mall does have a better cup of coffee.