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I'm an only kid.

Usually when I tell someone that, they mumble something like, "that explains it."

What that explains is my creativity, for lack of a better word. It's not that I'm overly weird, I just don't think like everyone else. With all of that time alone growing up as an only kid, I had to entertain myself. Sure 'Sesame Street,' and later MTV, helped raise me in the formative hours between the time my latch key was hung by the door until my parents got home, but there's only so much Bert, Ernie and Billy Idol can teach before boredom invades solitude.

It was boredom that led me at the age of 10 to set up a nightclub in my room serving sodas, chips and spinning tunes on my Fisher-Price record player. It was boredom that led me to start a brief, but very real, fashion trend in high school when I showed up wearing rain pants one day when there was no rain.

It was boredom last week that led me to a dollar store off of Warm Springs. Dollar stores are either magical places of discontinued delight or smelly traps of expiring packaged goods. That is to say, they are really great, or really crappy and there is no middle ground.

This dollar store was truly wonderful: "Heroes of the Bible" flash cards, jumbo novelty paper clips and motivational posters featuring primates hanging precariously from a tree branch. It was boredom that led me on a scavenger hunt to find four items that I could purchase to see if I could get a rise out of the cashier. I wasn't looking for a big reaction, just some uncomfortable eye contact. I decided on latex gloves, a "Where Jesus Walked" DVD, generic aluminum foil and 100 cable ties, festively colored. I've purchased less random items at a drug store that caused some second-looks from the cashier so I was hoping for something worhty here. If nothing else, the cashier would at least have something to talk about during break.

Unfortunately for me and my shennaniganistic plan, my cashier was from New York, as a lot of people seem to be here. He scanned all four items without much of a reaction. I thought I detected a chuckle after the latex gloves, but I can't say for sure. A different checkout line, a different day perhaps? Maybe I would have gotten the reaction I wanted. But alas, victory was not mine.

However, it wasn't a total failure. I was entertained for the 35 minutes that I spent shopping for these items and I did actually need some cable ties to organize my computer cables. The latex gloves, foil and Jesus DVD were just bonuses.