WHAT!?!

I was heading into Wal-Mart today with my eco-friendly shopping bags and my shopping list. All of a sudden there it was in front of me. A used Q-tip. Now I have seen many things left in parking lots and probably left a few things myself, so I don't know why this bothered me so much. I found it so disturbing that I had to turn around and walk back to take a picture of it. (Trust me that got some looks.) I've seen many nauseating sights from dirty diapers to used condoms, but my brain could compute their purpose for being there even if I didn't really want to contemplate it. But who needs a Q-tip in a Wal-Mart parking lot and then just throws it on the ground? And it wasn't even the brand with the biodegradeable center. It was one of the cheap ones with the plastic center. It will be here in our Wal-Mart lot for years after the cotton ends have rotted away. So now I'm back to how it got there. Was someone trying to take care of some last minute personal hygiene? Trust me when I say that with some of the people I have run into at Wal-Mart or at work for that matter, it wasn't their ears I wish they had spent more time on. The other possibility is that it fell out of their car. So that leaves me to think about the condition of the car that is so filthy that when you open the doors dirty cotton swabs fall out. And why would they be in the car in the first place? I've ate, put on make-up, nursed a baby even scrapbooked (not all while driving of course) in a car, but I have NEVER cleaned my ears. There are many things I have grabbed at the last minute out the door on my way somewhere to do in the car, but I can honestly tell you that a Q-tip never entered my mind. So I guess for now the mystery of the parking lot cotton swab remains. I doubt the real story is nearly as interesting as all the possibilities I could come up with, but sometimes it's good to let your imagination run free rather than focus on the sorry state of the society that shows so little respect for one another.