2 mysteries of the human condition

I. Ever since I began my grocery-buying career, I can't get over the fact that pretty much all kinds of juice cost the same. It doesn't matter how delicious the juice is: 2 litres of my favourite juice (cranberry-grape) costs the same as 2L of apple juice. It also doesn't matter how hard the juice was to make: I mean, you can buy these 1L containers of raspberry juice at superstore that are so sweet and thick, you have to mix them with sprite or vodka to make them drinkable. They are like the juiciest juice EVER. And raspberries are tiny--it must take so many of them to make one litre of juice! And yet they cost $1.79, the same as 1L of orange juice. It's crazy. This whole juice issue brings to my attention the fact that there is a whole world of food production beyond the ken of my experience, and that what goes on in that world can't be explained by conventional reasoning. When we go to the grocery store, we are really just seeing the shadows play on the walls of our cave.

II. I was thinking last night about geometry sets. Remember in elementary school when the geometry set conflict inevitably arose during back-to-school shopping? Or was this only me? Basically, the conflict could be summed up thus: 1. The school/teacher expected me to come to school with the necessary geometry implements, usually just a compass and a protractor. 2. My parents wanted to spend as little money as possible, and reasonably assumed I could use the same compass and protractor as last year. III. I wanted a brand new geometry set, every single year, with the perfect components in their perfect case. The tiny pencil, the eraser, the ruler, the implement that looked like a compass only with two pokey ends instead of a pencil end and a pokey end. What was it even FOR??? Every year the parts I actually used got dingy, and the lid of the case got broken, and come late August, following the inevitable argument with my parents, not getting a new set could actually catapault me into despair. It was totally unreasonable, but I think it seemed like the new geometry set would represent everything new and exciting and promising about the new year. I wonder what the adult version of this feeling of longing would be.