hk is a lazy-ass quitter!

On Saturday, I went out to find a new pair of glasses with Joiner. We found a place that takes my insurance and a very knowledgeable sales person started handing me glasses. Five pairs in, I was ready to give up.

“Oh, I'll never find a pair that fit me and that look good. I’ll just get updated lenses for these,” I told Joiner, indicating the frames I got in Seoul three years go.

“You can’t just give up now!” she exclaimed. “We’ve only looked at a couple!”

I do this all the time -- decide that I need something or other, go out looking for it, and give up about 5 seconds into the process. Glasses, jeans, shoes, suits, haircuts -- if it's not right there, right now, at the right price, I get discouraged really fast and I say, "Ah, forget it."

I am such a quitter!

I started thinking about other things I do that might be a little... weird. You know when there's nothing in the house to heat and you're hungry? A normal response might be one of any of the following:
- Calling for pizza.
- Going out to the grocery store.
- Going to a restaurant.
- Asking a loved one to bring you food.

What is probably not normal:
- Rooting through the pantry, finding a long-forgotten packet of noodles with no flavor packet, wondering if it would taste okay with some soy sauce on top, deciding it maybe would, boiling it and putting aforementioned soy sauce on it, tasting it and thinking it pretty nasty but edible, and eating it for dinner.
- Need I put another example?

Yes. I am so lazy! I am a lazy quitter. What is wrong with me? It's like I'm totally incapable of providing the basic necessities for myself. Joiner chastised me: "hk! You need to go buy some food! Do you still have enough toilet paper?" (She went with me the first day I was in my apartment to go buy some.)

"Um," I said, "J1 bought some for me."

I was telling my discovery to Fearless T today, with whom I spent the afternoon after a bagel brunch with MattSal (it was a very Upper West Side kind of day), and she thought out loud, "There must be some other factor. I mean, you didn't quit school, right?"

I wonder. A certain amount of inertia is natural, but there's inertia and then there's crazy ass inertia, to the point where I won't stop what I'm doing even when I want to do something else. It's almost debilitating. An hk at home, unless compelled by an appointment or work, tends to stay at home. An hk walking, even when a bus pulls up right beside her, tends to keep walking (all 52 streets and 7 avenues back home today from West 103rd Street). An hk at work, unless someone suggests going to get food, tends to just sit at her desk through lunch and not eat -- even when she's really hungry! Is this normal?

The food thing is probably the worst. I do need glasses, but I can get by with my contact lenses, although they are uncomfortable to wear at work for long periods of time. But I've been weird about food the past several weeks, probably starting when I was looking for apartments last month. For a couple days in a row then, I wouldn't eat until I was almost faint with hunger, around 3 in the afternoon. On Thursday of last week, the first day of work where lunch wasn't provided for us, I didn't eat until someone told me about the free food in the pantry from a meeting. On Friday, I just didn't eat lunch.

Is it laziness? Agoraphobia? Am I developing an eating disorder? Fear of ... delis?

My last shrink would probably shrug and say, "I don't know. But let's change the pattern of behavior. The next time you deny yourself food because you don't want to leave whatever place you're in, identify that action to yourself. Then go out and get food." Which is, I guess, what I will do. But ... man. I weird myself out sometimes.
(14/730)