food

Shopping – Redux

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About a year ago I wrote about my experiences in shopping. I still struggle with this, but I thought I would write again about this difficulty after this weekend’s attempts to shop.

Since we moved to ShenZhen we have been mostly getting our groceries at the local Walmart. I am glad that we have one here. Are there other options? Yes. Have we found or experienced many? Not yet.

During the summer, we were able to go shopping mostly during the week. If you are not aware, weekend shopping can be a bit of a nightmare.

Since work is starting up again, we have to get back into the routine of shopping on the weekend, and slow down on the food delivery. In order to limit difficulties, My wife and I put our youngest into a playground nearby, and had our older daughter watch her while she drew. This way we would only have 2 of us to try to push through the crowds.

Walmart was busy. Back to school sales drew in a lot of extra people, yes. But a lot of extra on top of the regular chaos that is the weekend shopping.

I am lucky that they do not test their air fresheners or other perfumes. The entire upper floor, filled with household goods, was mostly scent free. But once we moved down to the food floor, My brain went on high alert. Loud noise and crowds do not a friend make with the autistic brain.

My wife was able to slide through the crowds easily, and I would get cut off, or have people move way to close for comfort. Aisles were filled with people, and hard to navigate. Often times I would just stand in the main Aisle, while my wife grabbed things. Unfortunately that meant I moved slowly, to not run into people and to keep distance, and stopped a lot. This meant I was prime prey for the food samplers.

I know a lot of people love the food samples at supermarkets. And I do periodically, but not often. I have texture issues with food, smell issues with food, and tast issues with food. So it is rare that I find a sample I am willing to try. On top of that, in a crowded market, all my senses are in overdrive. So for an employee to tap me on the shoulder to offer food, or to push a random thing on a stick or a cup of odd liquid into my face as I am trying to maneuver away from people can be extremely frustrating.

We had an employee rush up to my cart, and put 2 packs of shrimp right in my cart so she could take a picture. No asking, just boom there she was with things pushed into my cart. She then removed them from the cart after the photo, but it was startling.

Clear Headed issues.

Luckily, my wife was happy to lead the way through sections and Checked that I was ok multiple times. She could see it on my face. But in crowds like that, another issue that happens, is I cannot think straight.

Normally If I am shopping, I can look at products, check the expiration date, or the price and spend a bit of time deciding which one I need. If I am overstimulated, I will often grab the first thing that matches my needs. We need bacon? Great, there it is, done, I can rush out of this section. Is it our brand? is it the right amount? is it a good price? I don’t know, but I escaped that crowd for now.

Cost of groceries can be as much as 50% higher than normal because of this.

Arm space.

One of the reason My wife and I enjoy Walmart and other wester style shops, is not just number of customers. I like to have space to move around. If the aisles are too narrow, I don’t feel comfortable going down them. Even if there is no other person in the aisle, I feel like a bull in a pottery shop. I know if I turn, or look around, I will knock something off the shelf. So I have to shuffle sideways into the aisle, or head directly through.

This is especially hard since I am usually carrying a backpack that has our shopping bags and other essentials in it. (Motion sickness things for my family, tissues, etc.)

Smells

I mentioned earlier that I am glad that Walmart doesn’t spray their perfumes and things into the air. There are, however many shops that burn incense, and spray perfumes or fresheners into the air. These smells often give me headaches, but the stronger ones will actually cause my eyes to burn. A few times I had to avoid people who were wearing a lot of scents while shopping. (And sometimes at work) because I just cannot breathe, or see, and need headache meds.

Solutions vs reality.

Some of my difficulties have possible solutions, but they are not always practical.

Headphones: For my sound sensitivity, I could wear my headphones. They block out a lot of the sound. If I was alone, I would do this. But I was raised with the following “etiquette” It is rude to wear headphones when out with people. If I am with my family, or friends, it is rude to wear headphones. They need to communicate with me too, and it is difficult to do that with headphones on.

Weekday Shopping: For my spacial awareness, i could shop with my wife after school. So there will be less people. There are days I may have the energy to do this. But typically after school I have been needed to help my daughter with her homework. I also need my down time to process the day or i will not be able to fall asleep at night.

Wife Shop during weekdays: Some people have suggested that My wife shop during weekdays on her own. I am not the only one in my family with developmental difficulties. My wife suffers from extreme anxiety when she has to go out or do things on her own. She needs a comfort person with her just to leave the house. She has not found someone outside the family yet that she is that comfortable with.

Shopping List: I have several apps on my phone that keep me organized. 1 is a shopping list app. I can and often do use it to keep trak of the things I have to buy. this can include product names, and values. Yes, I may have to stand in the crowd to ge the right stuff, but having it easily visible, helps remove some processing power from me, and I can focus on staying safe.

Health Apps: Another solution I have been known to use is my Health App’s Breathing excercise. I can stand away from people and focus on the breathing, either by closing my eyes, or by focusing on the expanding and contracting bubble in the app.

The problem with moving.

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As I think forward to the concept of moving again, I reflect upon the difficulties this will present. I also think about the difficulties it has presented in the past.

My wife and I do not enjoy moving, in fact we detest it. Even if our living arrangement is not ideal, the idea of packing everything to move is more frightful. We would rather repair, and disinfect a place ourselves than to move out of an unhealthy situation. We have done exactly that in the past.

While living in ChaoYang, I had some serious difficulty with a coworker at that time. We had a mold issue near the living-room window, the apartment only had 2 bedrooms and a large living room. When we moved in there was a broken kitchen counter, and the gas range fan was caked with an inch of grease.

We repaired the counter using my tools, fixed the toilet flush. And spent nearly a whole day scrubbing the grease off the kitchen exhaust fan.

We had our routines that we loved though. There was a wet market around the corner that we could get almost anything we needed. They had seamstresses for clothing repair. There was fruit and vegetables and fresh meat on the first floor. They sold basic furniture, electronics, blankets, curtains, and everything you needed for a home. They had a pet store, and seafood. There was gardening equipment, and home-repair tools. A whole floor of stationary and decorations for festivals. We loved going there all the time.

There was a supermarket across the street. That building had food booths, and restaurants. every Canadian Thanksgiving we used to go to a certain restaurant we called “The Red Restaurant” because of the sign. They had a Tailor, and pharmacies there. We knew exactly where everything was. Unfortunately the supermarket itself shrank twice while we were there. It began as a 2 floor market, then it shrank to just the first floor. Then our last year there, it shrank to half the first floor. Piano schools, dance schools, and science academies moved in upstairs.

There were two malls that were a short walk away, and we enjoyed walking there as a family. These malls, had movie theaters, and cat-cafe’s. You could sit with your drink and pet a cat. There was a lot of things to do there, including eating, board games, VR games, a couple large playgrounds for the kids and more.

Just around the corner was a great street food culture in the evenings. If we didn’t feel like cooking, we could just walk down the street and buy a large variety of food. All of these little food carts would appear in the early evening, and some of the foods were amazing, and cheap.

After moving to the ShunYi area, we have gone to visit the malls and the wet market in ChaoYang a couple of times. But we have tried to build new routines here. It has been hard, however. ShunYi, while more spread out and suburban, has less things like home repair and tools shops. It took us a while to find good green grocers, and there isn’t a large mall nearby. Instead there is a cosmopolitan shopping plaza.

This area is more expensive than ChaoYang, and it took us a while to get used to it. There is a lot more variety in restaurants and coffee shops. The plaza has more things for the children as well. They can buy birdseed and feed pigeons at “Pigeon Plaza”. There is an outside playground surrounded by a permanent farmer’s market. The plaza has 2 trains for families to ride around on.

Unfortunately some of the difficulties in our routines that arose is change. For the first couple of years we would find a coffee shop, grocery store or restaurant we liked, and it would disappear, or get down-sized and moved. For example there was a great restaurant / cafe next to a fountain plaza. They had an amazing bakery, and excellent fried chicken. after we had been patrons for about 7 months, (Bare minimum to make it a routine), it closed and moved practically next door. Now it is 1/4 the size, has no bakery, and no restaurant. They sell coffee, ice-cream, and sandwiches now.

Our second favorite cafe did the same a few months after that, and moved to the far side of the plaza, a good 20 minutes walk through the compound.

Now My wife and I consistently go to a cafe attached to a book store. It has survived.

But now, we have given notice to our school that we plan to move after this school year. My son has graduated, and we wish to get out of Beijing. While this is exciting, it has already begun to cause fear in my family. We don’t know where we are going yet. We don’t know what type of place it will be. We don’t know how long we will be needing to get acclimate to the new area.

My wife and I are both quite nervous about this, and I we still have 6 months left at this house and school. We have both lost sleep over this, but we made a promise to ourselves that we would leave Beijing.

I feel that even if we stayed, our family dynamic is changing as my son will be a legal adult. And this in itself is a very scary point for us. While he plans to have a gap year to focus on language learning, things are different.

Can we get him a visa to stay with us next year? Can we find a language school for him? Will he have to move out to another country? Is he ready to go out on his own? Have we taught him how to handle himself and his difficulties well enough? What support will he have if he’s out on his own?

If I’m still having trouble setting up and managing myself and my difficulties, how is he going to do?

And this all causes other issues. The more I worry about things, the more I get distracted, disorganized, and lost. I have been needing my personal space, and my huggables more often.

Most people don’t realize this, but it causes me to have more indigestion and heartburn. It also causes me to have more balance issues. (Both of these will be discusses in other articles.)

So as I look forward to the next school year, I need to sit down to put on my shoes more, and rely on my akla-seltzer tablets more. I also get lost in my classroom as I move from my desk at the back to the front of the room. I tend to head back to my desk 2 or 3 times now to get papers and material I prepared and forgot about. I need my alarms more to remind me when I have to finish class, or go get the children. And I need to sit down more when I am on duty watching the children outside.

At home I feel more sluggish in making decisions, and just want to find that next job so I have an idea of where we will be going to.

Wish me luck.

Shrimp: My Best Frenemy.

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As an Autistic, food can be a difficult topic. A lot of people don’t understand how we can be so “picky”. I wish it were as simple as that. Let me start with my difficulties, and how I either get around them, or not.

Texture is important.

For many people the most important thing is that food tastes, smells, or looks good. These three senses dominate the decision of whether they will eat something or not. For me, one of the things that is foremost is texture.

Mashed food feels like mud. Thick, slimy, fresh from the sewage, mud. it is disgusting. That feeling overpowers any taste that is available. There are so many foods I just can’t force myself to eat: mashed potatoes, pumpkin, guacamole, red-bean paste, etc.

Some of these foods, I just can’t force myself to eat, like pumpkin. Others, I can if they are diluted, or mixed with something. Mashed potatoes with gravy is edible, but if I can avoid it I will.

Sweet Vegetables are an oxymoron.

Every time someone has convinced me to try a sweet vegetable, it wasn’t. Sweet potatoes, nope. and those are often cooked in a way that feels like mush. (See above). red-bean, ick; sweet-peas, yuck; sweet corn, tastes rotten. The thing is, sweet fruit tastes amazing. Every single sweet vegetable has come across as rotten in my mouth.

Mushy sweet vegetables are a no-go. No sweet potato, no red-beans, no sweet pea soup (shudder). but I can gag down sweet corn if I need to. Unless it is in that horrendous white milky sauce they always can it with…

The Eyes have it.

Anything that can look at me while I eat it, makes me shudder. My first memory of this phenomenon occurred in Korea. A friend invited me to join his family for dinner. They had fish soup. It smelled delicious, and I was looking forward to trying it. But as soon as that fish head bobbed up to the top of the pot, nope. I had nightmares of that thing for days. I believe I had everything but the soup that day, which was awkward.

Rambutans and peeled grapes look like eyeballs. Rambutans even have the eye lashes. so you can imagine these things being eaten my a monster, as they slurp down intestines and other body parts. At my old school they had rambutans for lunches sometimes. My coworkers tried to get me to eat some. I almost puked.

Bloody Bones, are for wraiths.

I love me a good fried chicken, or fried ribs. but if I ever have bones in a stew or a soup, I can’t eat it. The moisture dripping off the bones feels like I am eating a newly dead body. I cringe at the thought.

The other thing with food like this is the icky fingers. Every time I pick up wet, slimy, or sauce-covered food with my fingers, I quickly clean my hands afterward. Having sticky or wet fingers is disgusting. I dislike playing with my children’s slime in much the same way.

Ribs, or meats in sauces, I can eat if I have a lot of tissue nearby. If you put the bones in my soup, you will first see me pulling it out with my utensils. For these foods, the taste is not overpowered by the concept of death. The slimy feeling on my fingers is manageable with tissue. Alternatively, I can use one of those lime-water bowls to dip my fingers in, which removes the grease and slime.

Shrimp.

As you can imagine, shelling shrimp is horrifying for me. My hands get wet and slimy. I have to look at the eyes of the critter. Then I must behead it and rip its tiny legs off. I almost hear it squeal.

But shrimp is one of my favorite foods.

First it was fried shrimp, because I had no problems with heads, shells, or juice. Then shrimp rings with cocktail sauce, and finally boiled or souped shrimp.

Two techniques I have used to eat wet shrimp. I can either shell the guy and use a lot of tissue paper. Or just don’t shell it and eat the whole thing.

I have been known to use a whole pack of tissue during a meal with shrimp involved. I had to clean my hands every 20 seconds of shelling. This used to drive a couple of my old coworkers nuts. I’m sure it looks horrid too.

When I eat the shrimp un-shelled, I first eat the head. This way, it is not watching me. Shrimp heads hurt. They stab the inside of your mouth. Sometimes, I am lucky. I can remove the head with a spoon without making a mess on my hands or clothes. However, it is not always possible. This has gotten me weird looks at places. I mean at a restaurant, you can’t use a whole pack of tissue. My only other choice is this. When people you’re with watch you crunch down on the shell, they give you weird looks.

Routines.

My wife and I have very different thoughts on this. There are times I would love to have the same food over and over again for months straight. I have no problem with the dishes in my home that we eat. My wife, gets bored of the same old things.

Since we changed catering companies at the school I work at, I have been delighted. Everyday I can have Salad and Pasta. They offer these meals every day. When I have had a tough morning, I can sit and eat my usual food. It’s amazing. I pick up little side dishes from the daily side dish section. These add a bit of pizzazz to my meal. I still love the repetitiveness.

On the day I had my Meltdown, I know I would have stayed calmer if they had more salad. They should not have changed my pasta from the standard with bolognese sauce. Instead, they offered green noodles with bits of leaf. Food is just one of many factors that I navigate on a regular basis. When I am in completely new or overwhelming situations, certain foods (and time to enjoy properly) can help me reset.