Yes, Wiglaf and Chalantly need to have their pizza and go to bed

I swung by Kro-GRR tonight after a meet-and-greet for Rice's new president. I ran out of milk this morning, plus I needed some fruit and frozen delights for lunch this week. (I also bought a turkey, but that's neither here nor there.) I was standing in the typically long check-out line, idly flipping through Time and observing that there are far too few blue states on the map of the U.S. right now. I noticed a couple behind me. The woman was in her early forties, holding a squash of some sort, bossing around a man of the same age holding an 8-oz. package of sliced mushrooms. They were trying to find a shorter line, but in that store it's like looking for a polar bear in a blizzard.

"Is that all you have?" I asked. "Would you like to go ahead of me?"
The man looked surprised. "Oh, that's just so nice of you. Are you sure?"
"Oh, yeah, no problem. Plenty of people have done it for me before. Go ahead." I waved them ahead of me with the magazine.
"Well, that is just so sweet," the woman said. "Especially since your children are probably waiting at home for you."

I had to mentally check myself to keep my jaw from dropping on the spot.

I don't have kids! Do I look like I have kids? I'm 23 years old, and I look it. I had my hair up tonight and I was wearing slacks, so maybe you could add a couple of years at most, but I'm certainly not at that age where people can assume that I have children. Am I?

I don't ever even want to have children. But I realize there will come a point when people may just take as given that I have, as Tex put it earlier today, "cursed the earth with [my] seed." I just didn't realize that point was now. Maybe I need to get some hipper clothing, something like the screaming yellow translucent blouse and black mini-skirt worn by the med student trolling for dates at the alumni gathering I attended tonight. Evidently my tan slacks and maroon sleeveless shirt aren't getting it done.

Or maybe it was the fact that I had a frozen pizza and multiple half-gallons of milk in my cart, I don't know. I don't have any idea what it was that made this woman assume that I had children. I smiled at her and said in a lame, "Yes, my non-existent children. My cats."

I think I should probably just be glad she didn't ask when the baby was due.