bad habits die hard

breakfast: coffee with milk


mid-morning meal: honey nut cheerios


lunch at 3 pm: about four tablespoons of black beans, a rice bowl of honey nut cheerios


dinner: hopefully a proper meal




being busy for the past two weeks has meant that our pantry (also known as the single shelf in our miserably small kitchen) has dwindled down to opened snack food packages that i refuse to throw away, 1.5 bags of dried pearl barley, some old rice noodles and a can of tomato soup i'm saving for a real food emergency. alright, alright, we also have a small tetra-pak of coconut cream, granulated honey, a package of japanese-style curry sauce, and about a teaspoon of oatmeal in a re-sealable that i also refuse to throw away. not sure why.


i even went grocery shopping yesterday, expanding our vittles by a 2.5-kilo bag of brown rice, a can each of sardines and anchovies, dried black beans, a bottle of sesame oil and some vegetables. oh, and a small foil pack of cheddar-cheese flavored snyder's pretzel pieces that i ate out of my bike basket while waiting for a light to change on my way home. (they were out of honey mustard.) oh, and obviously, a box of cheerios.


when grocery shopping consists of me and my two feet or my two bike pedals approaching either a local chinese supermarket whose inventory strangely appears to be composed of 35 percent snack food items, OR an extremely overpriced expat imported food market that may or may not have certain staples you saw there last time, you tend to shop light. there's also a wet market two blocks away, where i can find pretty much any chinese vegetable or fungi and an assortment of live fowl in addition to nosefuls of extreme stink and filthy puddles all dimly lit in some weird, dark concrete compound. some days i just give up and eat a fried egg over rice. sometimes i get really ambitious and hit up no less than FIVE fucking markets to find a chicken breast. it all depends on how much i want a damn chicken breast (not that much, but chicken thighs are mysteriously absent in the chinese local food economy) and what my blood sugar levels are like and how much cash i stole from t's wallet that morning. so if i find some sort of employment soon, it'll be interesting to see what kind of meals we end up eating on a daily basis. 


we americans (soapbox alert) have no friggin idea how much our country is a goddamned BOUNTY of food. we have food inventory until the sun comes down. remember the last time you had to visit TWO safeways to find what you wanted? or safeway and trader joe's? remember how irritating that was? remember climbing into your car to pursue that food item?


[sidenote: if i could import one american business to china, it would be trader joe's faster than you can down a small paper cup's-worth of their latest frozen roasted-vegetable-over-quinoa entree. i miss quinoa. i miss frozen green chile and cheese tamales. i miss peanut butter without hydrogenated oil.]


ok, so i inadvertently turned this into a bitchfest, but what i really thought, initially, as i looked down at my rice bowl half-full of chinese "cheerios" that are so sugary they appear to be shellacked, was, damn. i'm so glad i bought these cheerios yesterday. i've had two servings! i feel rich!