Another Long Day

UPDATE: This recipe for southwest pork chops & rice turned out well - easy and pretty tasty. I cut the meat off the bone (I had 3 large chops) and just mixed it together with the rest of the ingredients after cooking rather than serving the whole chop. I sprinkled the cheese on top after reheating a serving in the microwave tonight. I am a sucker for spicy, brown-rice-based one-dish-meals and am happy I now have lunches ready for M-W this week.

It's weird how moving to a different part of the country, you have to get accustomed to different local chains. While you can expect Wal-Mart, Target, McDonalds, Subway, etc., to be everywhere (and they are here in NC), I've been boggling a bit about things like grocery stores (Food Lion, Lowe's Foods) and fast food restaurants (Bojangles - fried chicken & biscuits, Jersey Mike's - sub sandwiches) that are totally unfamiliar.

Yesterday I woke up finally sick of my longer hair and decided to get it cut. I typically use Super (Cheap) Cuts, since my "style" is about as easy as it gets, but googling it for W-S, there wasn't one at all near me, and it appeared that there were only two for the entire city. But looking in the phone book, I discovered a bunch of entries for a chain called Great Clips and found that there were about 3 of them within ~3 miles of my apartment. It turned out that the easiest one to get to, navigation-wise, was also only about 1 block from the Wal-Mart I wanted to go to for decongestant and various supplies anyway.

There was only about a 5 minute wait for my haircut (which I got on the too-short side) but my luck ran out at Wal-Mart where (1) for the second week in a row they did not have my desired brand, style, color, and size of underwear and (2) I got in a line that was short (too short) but took forever to get out of.

It feels funny, in a way, that I get this sense of complaint about them not having precisely the type of underwear I want, given that my preferences were so terribly specific. (They had a pack that fit the bill except for having a multi-color combination rather than white.) It makes me remember my dad talking about teaching and coaching in a small town in Nebraska where all the boys in the locker room would have underwear in different weird colors because that was what the town's general store would stock. On the other hand, I was at a store on Hanes Mill Road (not to be confused with Hanes Mall Road or all the other X Mill Roads) but was unable to secure my desired type of Hanes underwear. (It occurs to me on preview that it is inaccurate to say this is the second week in a row I couldn't get my desired type; last week, I purchased the last remaining package, but I have wanted to purchase about 3 packages total.)

The experience at the check-out was strange. (It definitely provoked counterfactual thinking while I stood there - "I should have known this line was too short, that a woman buying plants would have problems, I should found another line," etc.) All went well until the checker was presented with a giant gourd - giant as in a 12 pound gourd. A 12 pound gourd with no price tag. After much discussion between the clerk, the customer, and a guy in the produce department, they elected to sell it to her as though it were a pumpkin. (I say "much" but it probably took all of 5 minutes; it just felt like longer as I stood there, getting hungry, alternating between looking at the King Size Reese's Cups on one side and a women's magazine promising that you absolutely will lose weight following these tips, one of which no doubt should have been not to eat anything at all like the world's best macaroni and cheese proudly depicted on the cover.)

I spent most of the afternoon reading articles about self-regulation and persuasion. I enjoyed these quotes from Baumeister & Vohs (2007), Self-regulation, ego depletion, and motivation, Social and Personality Psychology Compass:

In the "it shouldn't surprise me someone has studied this but" category: "Nonetheless, not only do priests masturbate more than nuns (Sipe, 1995)...."

"At the height of passionate love, partners might be willing to sacrifice their lives for each other, whereas several years down the road they might not even bother to bring the partner the remote control."

"Choosing the lesser of two evils is thus apparently a stressful dilemma, even for rats."

This week I was able to make myself stay on in my office and continue working to good effect, and I place at least some of the credit for that with whoever stocked the student lounge with a large bowl of pink lady apples. When I felt myself flagging about 3:00 p.m., having an apple (thereby replenishing my supply of sugar) did make it a lot easier to keep going.

Oh, and Robert will perhaps be amused to know that I finally made the pork chop recipe on the back of the empty shredded cheese package that has been sitting on my counter for several weeks now. It looks tasty. Of course, the package is still sitting there, awaiting my decision to type up the recipe for future use or to discard the recipe forever.