Life as Crisis Management: Going to the Grocery Store

Life is, like everything else, a double edged sword. On the one hand, living offers one the opportunity to learn and keep on learning throughout one’s life course. One can learn, for example, how to think critically, which books or newspapers to read so to expand one’s knowledge, how to critically observe life going on around one,  and that one cannot escape, at least in the core nation world, bureaucratic institutions that are the kissing cousins of high schools with their petty paternalisms, their socialisation for conformity, their petty gossip mongering, their petty rules, and their never ending lowest common denominator banalities.

Amongst the several things I have learned over the course of my life is that life is Sisyphean. Life is, in other words Sisyphean. It is about managing crises that never seem to end. It is about managing the proverbial stones that always seem to rolling downhill and threatening to crush us. 

This, the fact that life is crisis management,  is a lesson I relearn every week. This week I learned it after going to the grocery store. A bit of backstory first. A couple of years ago I stopped eating gluten. I had a negative reaction to a home made gluten pizza crust that caused me immense stomach and abdomen pain and the feeling that this might be it sending me scurrying to the emergency room at a local hospital. And while these stomach and abdomen pains and bowel movement issues continue I do think that stopping eating gluten has helped. It has, I think, diminished the pain in my knees, for instance.

Not eating gluten is difficult to say the least given that so many cereals, so much pasta, so many snack foods, and so many meat alternatives like Field Roast, for example, all things I have been eating for years, are made, at least in part, out of gluten. This meant that I had to find gluten free alternatives. So, I, for example, upped my consumption of gluten Beyond Meat and gluten free fake fish, increased my intake of vegetables, particularly kimchi, and fruits, found a non-gluten pizza crust, and looked for gluten free buns for Beyond Meat "burgers". The best gluten free buns I have found thus far are Schar’s multigrain ciabatta buns.

The problem with Schar’s multigrain ciabatta buns is that they are not as readily available as the less tasty white ciabatta buns. I initially found them when I went over to Pittsfield, Mass at Big Y. Later I found them at a Price Chopper that was about five miles away and a Price Chopper close to me. Then I found them at the Coop.

I prefer to buy the Schar Multigrain ciabatta at the Coop for a number of reasons. They are more than a dollar cheaper at the Coop compared to Price Chopper and I get an additional discount on them when I go to elderly discount Wednesday’s at the Coop. There is—I am shocked, shocked—a problem in buying the ciabatta from the Coop: they are often not in stock on Wednesdays when I go to shop at the Coop even when they are on sale as I learned to my annoyance last week. Given this I decided to special order a box of the buns, something one can do quite easily at Honest Weight. 

This Wednesday when I asked if they had come in. They had so I bought a box of five. When I got home and opened the box later that day, however, I found that the label saying they were the multigrain chiabatta was wrong. They were instead Schar white ciabatta. So, I had to get in the car and drive back to the Coop for the second time that day. Thankfully, I was able to get the two packages of the multigrains that were on the shelves so I have some breathing space before I have to get more. 

I had managed yet another Sisyphean crisis in my life. And while I am not a prophet I can offer this full-proof prophecy: there will be more boulders rolling down the mountain that I will have to deal with. There always are.