I have an hour for lunch between Differential Equations and Assembly Language, and after a pretty alright first day so far, I felt like cooking a little. I'm mostly happy because I didn't take so long that I had no time to eat, but I'm excited enough now to be writing a blog, so who knows.

Just to share:

- one potato
- one cheapo Bar-S hot dog
- onion
- seasoning... or soy sauce
- Adam's crunchy peanut butter?

First I followed this WikiHow to remind myself how to microwave a potato so I didn't have to wait for it to cook in the pan. By the time I got to the kitchen I forgot the times, but I popped my fairly small potato in there for 3:30, which worked fine. Less might have been better--it was incredibly soft and flaky.

While it was in there I chopped up a slice from my onion and got the pan ready. When it was warm I dropped in the onion and let it sizzle, and I quickly chopped and added the hot dog. I had no spatula so I used a plastic spoon/handle of my paring knife to move things around. The potato came out and it had cooled enough to handle, so I mutilated it a bit and threw it in too. They weren't moving around in the pan very well because of a lack of oil, and I slightly panicked because I didn't have any in my possession. I turned down the heat and fetched the peanut butter from my room added a dollop to the pan, and it made things stick in clumps, while some of the peanut butter just burned on the pan. But I did the best I could to mix it up with my paring knife handle and quickly moved on. I felt weird to add soy sauce just after the peanut butter, but I sprinkled some in. It sizzled satisfyingly. I shook the frying pan around a bit and I was done.



I was a bit afraid to taste it, but I figured the worst it could taste like was potatoes and cheap meat covered in peanut butter and soy sauce. Indeed, that is what it tasted like, and it was not that bad. It was actually kind of good, and the crunch provided by the undercooked onions and peanut butter was fun. I glanced at the clock and saw I had only taken 20 minutes to prepare and cook the whole thing.

This is only my first self-cooked meal at school (ramen doesn't count) and I am glad to not be scarred. I know it's dirt simple but it's a first step, and I want to chronicle my progression.

Time for Assembly!

It'd be some sort of infinitely huge building with a billion lounges/soundproofed rooms, and you can plop down on a cushy chair and access any music you want to. You can say the name of an artist or a name of an album or just a genre, and a sexy robot will bring you a tray of albums. If you wanted to though, you can look at the Top 10 charts posted on the walls, or look through the lovingly arranged scrapbooks placed on bookshelves around the room.

Of course you might see people in the same room, even looking at the same things you are, but everyone would politely and quietly share--you are all there for the same reason: music. You see people writing comments on a post-it on an album. You see people listening carefully to music through high end headphones to confirm the quality. You see people opening their backpacks or duffel bags of CDs and vinyls and registering them with the robot.

But if you want to socialize with these other people, then the giant dining hall/courtyard is the place to go. There are clubs, discussion tables, and help desks. Some people even settle down and play music for passerby. This is also where bulletin boards are placed for people to post want ads for albums.

This massive, bustling community--any old outsider can't see it. There's some sort of entrance, maybe, but the rest is a mirage.

Out of the last 10 blog posts, I've only published 3 of them. That's a lot of drafts. That's just how it's been recently. I have a thought, an idea, then poof. Something goes awry and nothing happens.

I really miss writing, and I wish I had the energy for it like I used to. I still get lots of words sometimes, particularly when I'm tired so that language part of my brain ripens like wine. But I splatter this wine through speech (me? being social at work?!) or through text on the internet (I've found some people on Facebook don't appreciate my comments). Discourse, that's good, but there's something to be said about writing for myself. Journaling. Or writing essays, articles, reviews; writing pieces of that nature, for posting on here or anywhere. Things that maybe others could find useful, something I can take a little pride in creating. Of course it's more of the latter than the former, but I'm convinced it's still a good thing. But it takes energy.

Where has my energy gone? It's probably tangled and soaked by the messes I've got everywhere else. That's both literal and metaphorical. I'm a slob, and the task of cleaning my room has been pending for the last three months, or since whenever I moved back from school. I take slight relief in moving out for school again, to be forced to shove everything in boxes again to remove from this war zone of a bedroom. Halfway-started projects lie waiting for a better day everywhere I look. This is another reason I cannot clean my room. This computer taking up most of the table space? I need to buy a wireless card/wifi dongle for it. I also want to buy a bigger hard drive for it, but I'm not sure what brand to trust for it. CDs are scattered across that desk waiting to be ripped or scanned, but I have not plugged my scanner in yet because the cord for it is somewhere I've forgotten. Documents, letters, and to-do lists tangle among the clothes, electronics, and other random objects on my bed. My laptop, resting on my pillow, has been running for 312 hours at this time. I feel like my karma is wearing thin with every day I go without contacting the friends and family I've been wanting to contact.

Multitasking. That's what I think I'm doing, and sometimes I even fancy myself good at it, but I'm not. All these unfinished projects are a result of my badly trained working memory. This brings me to an article I saw the other day on Lifehacker which felt all too true for me. So I need to get back to doing one thing at a time, right? At least when it matters. Or, I could go the evolutionarily dominant route, and give up. Just drop my little projects. Yeah, just close Firefox, close these 25 tabs acting as 25 reminders of little tasks I for some reason feel like I need to get done.

Scrap it.