And yet another piece of my soul just died

So I'm driving around Suburban Wasteland with my sister the other day. We've been--shudder--shopping, a necessary evil that I can only accomplish with my sister to drag me around. My sister, I might mention, is my dearest friend, but I find it hard to believe that we came from the same womb. She's a 0-on-the-Kinsey-scale, blond, tanned, Laguna-Beach-watching, Kelly-Clarkson-listening jock who's always resplendent in pink. She is clearly a native of Suburban Wasteland, where the only thing to do is buy shit and burn gasoline. I think I must have been a changeling. At the words "shopping" and "mall" I turn into Mary Krull, the loud genderqueer radical theorist dyke in The Hours. I start twitching and practically break out into hives; I must be allergic to capitalism (why not, I'm allergic to everything else).
The point is, we've finished our little torture expedition, so I'm already in a cranky mood. We're driving down one of the main strips, and we're passing by the wealthy neighborhoods we don't live in. One of them has a big sign at the entrance that declares it to be the Walden Pond subdivision. I. shit. you. not.
I think we can safely state that the 10th Circle of Hell is officially located on the west bank of the Mississippi. Seriously, where do they dig up these cretins with such a brilliantly inspired sense of depravity? They named a subdivision of SUV riddled McMansions Walden Pond??? ::sputter:: I'm just speechless.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! (er, well...)
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

I don't know why I'm shocked, really. These are the people who raze a hillside full of 100 year old trees and name the resulting asphalted nightmare Arbor Oaks Condominiums. If you asked them if they've read Thoreau they'd probably sneer and say they don't read latte-drinking French queers.

A life of quiet desperation indeed.

I was so depressed I had to make an emergency run to the library sale table. I made quite a haul: Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander, a collection of some Aristophanes, Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad, Gulliver's Travels, and The Canterbury Tales (now I can finally mend that gaping hole in my English education. I've never read them! I know! It's tragic.) Not that I'll manage to read any of them before I leave the country, but it's comforting just to know I have them.