Shifting gears

So, several conversations, several days lacking news posts and several bouts of frustration later, I've decided to take this blog in a new direction.

This was mainly started as a bit of an experiment -- a way to get used to the informality and conversational style of blogging. I feel I've failed miserably at both and that it would be best to take this post up from the bottom-dwelling subject that is my own personal thoughts and feelings to a level less self-absorbed and boring.

I also became disenchanted with the idea of discussion through blogging. From what I can see, there is very little actual conversing and even less that is edifying. An atmosphere in which outrageous insults are thrown for merely expressing an opinion (however uneducated or naive it might be) is not a sphere in which I would like to call myself a member.

Without further ado, in the next few weeks, I'll begin posting about one of my hobbies. I like to cook.

It has always bothered me how there will be left-over ingredients from some recipe in amounts not usable for another round of whatever dish called for them in the first place. So, from time to time, I take such ingredients and try to come up with something new to do with them. Sometimes it's a surprising success, other times it's a complete wash.

Before I go much further I should say that I am wholly amateur in this cooking endeavor. I have no formal training save for the instruction provided by my mother. It's simply an enjoyment of mine to take an assortment of "castoffs" and make something entirely unexpected and tasty from them.

As this develops, I hope shortcuts and cheats will expose themselves so I can further my ability to ad lib in the kitchen. Take notes at your own risk.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

I wish those were by-and-large positive things where we said "I'm going to be more successful by the end of the year," and then it happened. But no, self-fulfilling prophecies are always these stupid little things we say that make us blog at 3 in the morning because we haven't been able to fall asleep before 5 in the morning for the past few nights.

I read about that time right around oh, the age I'm at where people go a little insane. Things aren't like we thought they'd be. This has already happened numerous times in all our lives, but this age seems to carry some sort of finality that leaves us wondering if we missed the bus.

For one, we're adults. There's no one there to cook your food, buy your clothes and pay your bills except you. And after spending the greater part of your life up to this point in school making sure you came out the other side happy and successful ... something is a bit lacking.

And all the eye-rolling clichés about the grass being greener over there, the future being brighter than the past and hindsight being 20/20 are apt but taste like corn flakes when you wanted Honey Bunches of Oats. They don't quite make it.

Anyway, I was reading the confessions of people experiencing this phenomenon known as "Saturn returning." Sadly, this was my first experience with such terminology, but it didn't seem all too unfamiliar and I'm slightly more than pissed off about it.

You see, I was under the impression that I would get to this point and I'd feel a certain amount of satisfaction about how things have gone thus far. I worked hard to get here. I paid for it in a number of ways, but I'd like to think I learned a lot along the way. And ... I do ... feel ... some satisfaction ... I think?

I mean, I haven't died yet. I'm on my own and doing fair to middling. I read the confessions and thought, "Well the problem is they're focusing on their lives like everything would be accomplished at this point."

And I get that. That's what's pissing me off. You mean we're not done? You mean I have to keep doing this and doing this over and over again for the rest of my life? I don't get to take a break and say "OK, I'm moving on to something else."

It's too expensive and too time consuming to go a different way. I'd set myself back even further from any goals I might possibly have were I to switch paths. I'm stuck. Whether or not I feel good about the decisions that got me here, I can't change those now.

The inexorable pull of anything is enough to make me rock back and forth muttering to myself incoherently while hugging my knees and scratching until I bleed. Having it in my everyday life because it's my everyday life makes me want to scream. I can't do anything. I can't make decisions. The ones I had made got me here in the first place.

I get up, go to work, come home just to get ready to do it again. There are different details every day, but it's more or less the same. It makes me feel like I'm not my own person since everything I do is driven back to "because I do." There's no point to the cyclical nature of it.

I know I'm ranting like a lunatic about how life isn't anything other than ... well, life. But this is what leaves me awake at 3 in the morning doing random crap around my apartment. I just mixed up some ingredients in a bowl. I'm about to go clean the bathroom. It's not that I don't have any other time to do these things ... I just don't have any other option.

Do the things that need doing. Do them again. And again.

I don't know. I don't exist for the purpose of existing, do I? Then again, I don't think life is about "living to the fullest" or whatever that bullshit saying is supposed to mean.

I went from "saturn returning" to the meaning of life. That's quite a leap. But if I can't figure out what my own life is about, how am I going to get any closer to figuring out what all life is about?

I'll revisit this another night ... after I do all my anal retentive stuff.

Duty calls.