Pleasant Valley mall-based trauma...

I now know why I spend so little time in malls - they are mazes designed for maximum confusion as well as maximum impulse spending resulting from said confusion. My mission was simple: after work I was off to our biggest "downtown" mall in Pleasant Valley, namely the Rideau Centre, to buy the last part of my sister's birthday gift (tomorrow is her b-day!). After picking up a conversational Spanish book at Chapters in about 10 seconds I was off for the second leg of my journey, into the bowels of malldom. All Christine wanted was a gift certificate from a store called "Warrens," simple enough I thought. Bah simple!

I wandered hither and thither in search of a mall directory - the place isn't huge, but three floors each with diverging floorplans (no easy stacking here), and I was up and down and side-to-side. What kept pulling my attention from the task at hand was the realization that so many people around me had DRESSED UP TO GO TO THE MALL. I swear, it was like one of those Bay commercials where all the women and men are sporting the latest Spring colours, their hair billowing behind them in pseudo-slo-mo, stupid smiles plastered across they're ruddy faces, no less than 3 big shopping bags in hand. It was all too much for this ex-Queen West junkie! I felt like the children of the corn had grown up and been issued credit cards!

Shaking off the eerie feeling that something just wasn't right I zig-zagged back and forth across floors, finding maps with big colour coded chunks, labeled with large single letters that denoted "shopping sections" in which I might find my elusive Warren, wherever he may be.

So finally after one misreading of the map - my fault - and one directional misstep - the horrible mall layouts fault - I got to "Warrens" and, huffing and puffing from my strenuous journey, approached the glossy-lipped sixteen-something behind the counter: "Do you sell gift certificates?" I earnestly asked. "Uhh...I dunno...umm...nobody ever asked me before. I gotta get someone..."

I almost walked out right then and there. But no, I decided I didn't want to disappoint my darling sister and so stayed the course, to then be served by a much more, err, "retail-capable" sixteen-something who clucked her tongue at her idiot coworker, effortlessly reached below the counter and, flashing a warm smile asked: "will that be $25 or $50?"

And it was done.

I all but ran from Warren's, retracing my steps to find myself once more at the bus platform on the Mackenzie King Bridge that would take me from this terrible place and back into the nearly exurban Greenbelt, to my parent's home and to a place far away from these consumption-drunk material-bots of mall culture.

Sigh. Pleasant Valley can be a tough nut to crack when you're used to a downtown that tends to purge the suburbanite mallrats at dusk. Give me the skateboard kids, the Queen West art brats, the condo-puppies or even the Bay Street suits any day over the mallrats of Pleasant Valley that don't know a gift certificate from a cinched gap khaki.

Happy Birthday Chris. I hope you like your gift, because next year I'm skipping the mall and making it myself.