Can I get that latte with a shot of existential crisis please?

I grew up a blue collar girl in a blue collar town with a blue collar family and, you guessed it, blue collar friends, but that wasn't the way I wanted to ultimately end up. Not that there's anything wrong with being blue collar, because I was always very happy with that life while I was living it. It was comfortable and it fit me like a well worn pair of Levi's. But a girl's got to have more in her closet than worn denim. A few nice pairs of heels (or twenty) and some fancy dresses was what I wanted. I also wanted more life experiences than my small hometown could offer.

But I got sidetracked. When I was old enough, at the ripe old age of 24 and not at the more customary (for my hometown) 20 or 21, or even 18, I married a blue collar boy. Then I divorced his blue collar ass soon after I got myself a job at a decidedly white collar Fortune 500 company and realized that blue collar life was just not for me. And where, to make a long story short, I met my lily white collared future second husband. A man who came from a very white collar town and can trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower. He'll be the first one to tell you that his parents were blue collar too but, hell fire, one of his ancestors even has a portrait hanging in Faneuil Hall. That makes him white collar in my book. The only place you'll find pictures of my relatives are on the walls of the local Elks Lodge, most likely with a hunting cap on their head and a hunting rifle in their hand. You'll find a cheap domestic beer in the other.

It didn't take much effort to adapt to life that was less blue, in every sense of the word. We bought the house in the 'burbs, got ourselves some Labrador Retrievers and the SUV, traveled the world a bit and then got down to the business of helping populate the world with more young Democrats.

And my new life fit just as well as that old pair of Levi's.

Until...

Until the day I became tired of my old supermarket (bear with me here), the one that rhymes with Slop and Drop, and a new fancier market opened up in one of the neighboring towns. This new market has a Starbucks(!) so that I may shop while sipping on my grande skinny decaf vanilla latte. It has pretty produce with names I can't even pronounce! It has a gourmet cheese selection! And a prepared food section for those days I don't feel like cooking with my overpriced Le Creuset cookware! I can even find my favorite $30 a bottle Italian olive oil right down the aisle from the Twinkies. It was all a suburban housewife and mother of almost two could ask for.

Hold on, stop the presses. Really? All I could ask for?

Is that really what gets me excited these days? Expensive coffee and some decent gouda cheese? Cheese, I might add, that is made five miles away from where I grew up, oh irony of ironies. And is it really any different than the days when a Super Wal-Mart opened up in a nearby town and my family and I had to be there on opening weekend?

Either way, blue collared or white, I'm starting to feel like a cliche. Okay, not feeling. I am a cliche. A foreign car driving, latte sipping, spending too much on a haircut, expensive dog food buying cliche. Maybe I need a heavy dose of reality. Maybe I need to pair down my life. Buy Natty Lite instead of Italian Brunello. Go back to my Levi's instead of Seven Jeans. Or before I know it I'll be just like Parker Posey's character in "Best in Show", freaking out because my pampered show dog lost his freaking busy bee.

Or maybe I just need to go buy myself a four dollar decaf latte and chill the fuck out. Existential crisis's shouldn't occur in the pastry section of the supermarket while I'm deciding between the petits fours or the cardamom sweet bread. The dressing room of Nordstrom's maybe, but not in the supermarket.