{"id":121,"date":"2008-09-24T18:40:05","date_gmt":"2008-09-25T01:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/?p=121"},"modified":"2008-09-24T18:40:05","modified_gmt":"2008-09-25T01:40:05","slug":"the-faltering-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/?p=121","title":{"rendered":"The Faltering Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What you buy at the store is what you will eat at home. I have tried from time to time to see if I could buy chips and &#8220;health&#8221; bars and other snacks and then go home and eat a three-course meal, and thus far I have always wound up with one hand in a snack bag and the other greasy hand on the mouse.<\/p>\n<p>What you don&#8217;t buy at the store you won&#8217;t eat at home. Sometimes I open the fridge looking for fresh vegetables and they aren&#8217;t there. Sometimes I open the freezer looking for beef and all I see is chicken. I don&#8217;t know if there is something wrong with my refrigerator or what because every other place I have lived you can usually find something unexpected somewhere around the place so you can at least put a twist on whatever boring thing will be for supper. It doesn&#8217;t seem to work that way around here. Once I opened a cabinet and was suprised to find it didn&#8217;t even have any beans in it. Canned beans! Please. If you can&#8217;t find a can of beans in a pinch what are you going to do?<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I should not have said that what you buy in the store is what you will eat at home. The reason I cannot find anything to eat around here is because half of the stuff I do bring home fresh&#8211;even fresh from Dad&#8217;s garden&#8211;barely even gets eaten. I have to race a half gallon of milk to its expiration date because I only use it on cereal. If I bring home one tomato and three squash, one of them will probably get a big rotten spot before I get around to it. I hate bringing home food just to throw it out. So I don&#8217;t bring home much. And then there&#8217;s nothing to eat.<\/p>\n<p>I was doing pretty good for the first nine months or so. Things weren&#8217;t perfect but I was having a pretty good time getting home and throwing something together out of whatever I had on hand. I did not bring home much snack food because I knew I would just sit there and eat it, and I did not go out much because I knew the fast food didn&#8217;t really taste that good anyway.<\/p>\n<p>I think I just got disenchanted with my own cooking. It&#8217;s not bad or anything, in fact it is still pretty good stuff if I get around to it, but it takes so much less gumption to slink over to the computer and stare at the glowing screen in search of meaning.<\/p>\n<p>So I get into this vicious cycle where I run and grab something to eat, yes, fast food, even, because there&#8217;s nothing at home and it is far too late to go shopping and cook something. And then I eat that for supper but there&#8217;s nothing for lunch because I don&#8217;t have any leftover supper and I didn&#8217;t go shopping anyway so I go out somewhere for lunch. And then there&#8217;s nothing home for supper so even though I don&#8217;t really want to it looks like I&#8217;ll be going out for supper again . . .<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t really know how often I&#8217;ve been doing that. The days kind of blur together in the particulars. Mostly what I have been noticing is the way it all either works together or fails together.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the funny thing. It takes me a long time to go shopping because I dither around in the aisles worrying about the prices. But I never worry about the price when I go to the fast food chain or the vending machine. Those are exempt from frugality.<\/p>\n<p>Cereal seems to be the most expensive thing in the store. It doesn&#8217;t spoil on me, but if it were inclined to spoil I&#8217;d still finish it in time because it is satisfying to crunch on. While you are crunching your mouth is convinced you are eating a stout meal, and if your belly doesn&#8217;t feel full afterward, why, it&#8217;s easy to do it again!<\/p>\n<p>Now let&#8217;s ponder the similarities of cold cereal and credit, because I think there&#8217;s a brilliant simile in there somewhere but I don&#8217;t feel clever enough to winkle it out just now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What you buy at the store is what you will eat at home. I have tried from time to time to see if I could buy chips and &#8220;health&#8221; bars and other snacks and then go home and eat a three-course meal, and thus far I have always wound up with one hand in a snack bag and the other <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/?p=121\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}