Say what?

I like to think of myself as a highly evolved and even enlightened being.  It doesn't take much these days, however, to dissuade me from that view and make me feel that I am a mere cockroach on the kitchen floor of higher thinking.  All around me are wealthier, happier folks.  They are better dressed and moving at a better pace, or they are slobby but clearly tourists enjoying a vacation (vacation? meaning . . . huh what what?), or they are what we used to call hip and probably students or artists or something cool.  Any of that would be an improvement on the state in which I reside.  Not New Jersey, by the way.  I don't even think of myself as living in New Jersey since I'm ever so close to Manhattan as to be able to see all of it from the corner nearest my house.  But it certainly doesn't define me, living in New Jersey.  It's just a fact.

I am not enlightened but confused much of the time.  It really hit me at my local grocery store when I stopped by to get a few necessities.  I take a list with me to the grocery store to keep from getting overwhelmed by needing everything and wanting to eat everything and cook everything and stock up on everything I might someday use.  This does not prevent me from thinking of things in the store, and even buying said things.  But it does improve my spending-to-needing ratio dramatically.  Let me say about my neighborhood that it has a delightful mix of folks of a huge range of socio-economics but a rather limited supply of people who are not either Italian or Hispanic--largely Cuban and Dominican.  So the grocery store caters to that clientele and for the most part that suits me fine.  If I need anything outside that world, it's not far to travel to get good organics, or Jewish or Japanese or Indian or anything "exotic" by Weehawken standards.  It's just a small town really.

When we moved to Weehawken, almost twenty years ago, the local supermarket was being renovated and we were a little nervous about the Beirut-like profile of the place--tiles missing on the floor and ceiling, wiring dangling from light fixtures also dangling, and sections of the place blocked off for a week or two at a time.  But let me be clear: regardless of the fixes being undertaken in the place, the basic layout of what was where remained completely identical.  And after all these years of doing most of my shopping there, even since the Trader Joe's opened not too far away, I know the place better than my own kitchen since people who live with or visit me like to put stuff where they think it should go rather than where it does go.  That's another post.  Remind me.

Now they are renovating again.  New meat counter, new freezer sections, new stuff all over the place and they are also . . . in the process of reorganizing where everything goes.  WHAT?  I had a little tiny list--pet food (most people would say dog food or cat food or dog food and cat food but our cat will only eat dog food and the dogs will eat anything so dog food it is and I know it's not good for the cat but she won't listen to me about that since she is a cat plus she seems to get all the extra nutritional value she needs stalking and munching on birds and rodents in the neighborhood, depending on their seasonal availability), milk, toilet paper, eggs, hamster bedding (we think one of them is still alive but we can't be sure), Mio, and two or three other things.  Unbelievable.  It took me three times as long due to three times as much back-tracking in the store to find most of the things and then I gave up.  There was a time when I was so organized as to have a computer-generated list of the main things I usually get, in order by the aisle in the store where one might find the thing.

I felt so idiotic, wandering up and down every aisle in the store that toilet paper should be.  What a ridiculous statement.  I was so confused.  I was distraught.  I was in a state of despair.

Many years ago the story was told to me thus: If you take a rat in a lab, you can teach the rat to go down the third lane every time by placing a reward at the end of the third lane and repeating the exercise often enough.  Much like training a human.  But with a rat, you can also teach them that the reward is no longer in the third lane by removing the reward.  It takes them a little while to "unlearn" the third lane as a place for rewards, but eventually they do quit looking down the third lane for their reward.  This is the difference between humans and rats.  Humans will continue infinitely to go down the third lane and instead of getting their reward, they will explain why the reward is no longer there.  But they will never give up on their attachment to the third lane.  Eventually they become nostalgic for the reward, sitting in the third lane, waxing rhapsodic about the good old days when there was a reward there.

This is what happened to me at the store.  I knew the toilet paper wasn't there.  But I kept looking for it where it used to be and coming up with idiotic explanations for why it wasn't there anymore.

This is a metaphor for my life.