Lately I’ve been feeling the weight of life. Just feeling stressed about stuff I need or want to do. Feeling like that about “need to” stuff is one thing but I don’t know why I’m stressed about “want to” stuff. It’s like a bunch of my “want to” stuff has somehow started feeling like “need to” stuff. And I’m talking about legit nice, fun stuff: decorating for xmas, doing xmas baking for friends, working on the Tercel, practicing drums. I love these things but for some reason, I’m feeling like I HAVE to do this shit, and that’s making some of it not fun.
Yesterday while on a long drive with Jenn, I mentioned this, and said that of the little list I just mentioned, I think I can and should cut xmas baking out. I feel guilty because I love doing it but there just isn’t time for everything, and I don’t want to drive myself even more nuts by trying to do just one more thing that I don’t actually need to. So apologies to anyone I have given xmas baking to in the past, it won’t be happening this year.
Now that I think about it, I know why I’m so stressed. It’s because of all the legit stressful stuff going on in my life. It’s just odd because normally not much gets to me, but there’s been a bunch of very expensive stuff related to moving and none of it has been going smoothly, so I think that’s just slowly eroded my inner “whatever”-ness. It eventually just got to me. Dang. Oh well, you can’t win em all. But I’m glad I’ve recognized how I’m feeling and am taking steps to go easier until the stress dies down a bit. That’s a silver lining, at least.
Took sleeping pill last night, slept like a dream (except for some very bad dreams I had).
Had waffles and sausages for breakfast. Decadent, not sure why I did that but it was very pleasing.
Took Stella for a nice moderate walk.
Got rid of a bunch of stuff: dropped off our refundables at the bottle depot, took our recycling and garbage to the dump (what a name for a place, “the dump”), then dropped off a bunch of donations at Salvation Army. Did some shopping while there and got a few things for the travel trailer.
Had a healthy lunch to assuage my guilt over breakfast.
Cleaned the kitchen.
Did laundry.
Baked my new fave chocolate chip banana bread recipe. Shout out to Kate for this amazing recipe.
Fastened our new giant dresser mirror to the wall so it doesn’t flatten us when the next big quake hits.
That’s where I’m at so far. What else do I have planned?
Clean up the bodies in the crawlspace.
Visit Barb.
Band practice with Kate and Trenton.
Finish a horror movie Jenn and I started last night (it’s called Old, came out in 2021 — not great so far but I’ve sat through worse).
And that’s about it!! Sorry about all the exclamation points lately, I think they’re funny!!!
I think a lot of baking recipes are needlessly complex and rigid. I think this because I do a ton of baking and take shortcuts whenever I feel the recipe is getting a little persnickety, yet my baking is routinely gobbled up quickly and highly praised (usually) when I unleash it upon the masses. If it’s so important to add the eggs one at a time, to mix in the yokes first and THEN the whites, to mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and then add them to the wet ingredients, to chill your dough for 48 hrs, yada yada, why does my baking taste so good without those steps?
That’s right, Tom. I toss the eggs in all at once, I don’t put pre-mix dry ingredients in a second bowl, and I only chill dough until it’s chilled (around an hour or two). And if I need cookies stat, I won’t even chill the dough for that long. Yup, I’m a real cookie cowboy.
What made me such a lawless son of a gun when it comes to baking, you ask. Well, it’s like this. When I was just a little whippersnapper my mom thought it would be fun for me to help her bake some shit. I didn’t read the recipe thoroughly that day and mixed everything in one bowl all at once. My mom realized my grievous error, dumped the bowl out, and told me to start over. I was shocked and confused, and I wondered if it would that cake have turned out so crappy because I mixed it all at once that she was justified to toss all those ingredients in the trash? I had a hunch the answer was ‘no’ so at some point years down the road, I tested it out and confirmed my suspicion that none of that shit really matters.
This makes me wonder why so many baking recipes have needless steps and warn against any variation. I don’t doubt there may be tiny, barely perceptible differences if you are as cavalier with your baking recipes as I am, but if the difference is that minute, who gives a shit? As if every baker is a connoisseur who could taste the difference between cookies made from a carefully followed recipe vs my lazy shortcut cookies. Please. It almost makes me want to write a baking book for normal people who aren’t all weird and pretentious about their recipes. Now that I think about it, I bet there are already tons of websites devoted to this kind of thing. Good, that’s one less thing for me to do.
My point is that if you come across a recipe you like but think, “some of this seems a little over the top and anal to me,” go ahead and take some shortcuts. It’ll probably still end up being delicious.
The other day I summed myself up to a new co-worker as, “I love death metal, ugly 70’s stuff,” and something else I can’t even remember now (which just goes to show how non-integral that last element is), and afterward I thought about how that statement doesn’t do me justice. Not even close. I love TONS of things, not just those three. And I also hate tons of things, and I have strong opinions on everything else too. I actually thought about making a more comprehensive list of this kind of stuff on here to try to sum myself up, but I thought of so many things I thought would be important to include that I decided it was a dumb thing to do, to try and sum oneself up like that. If anyone is even remotely interesting, they are probably way too complex to sum up in that kind of way. General ways, like “Britt is very smart and sweet and full of energy,” that’s fine. It’s when you get down to specifics that I feel like it’s pointless.
It’s funny because it reminds me of when I used to do online dating on Plenty of Fish, way back when. On my POF profile, I tried to sum myself up, and now I really wonder now what kind of a job I did. I wish I could see that profile today. I bet I’d be not thrilled but ok with it. I used too many exclamation points back then and that kind of thing really bugs me now. But I bet the meat of the profile was fairly accurate. And I remember that I listed lots of interests like “baking” and “station wagons,” haha. Man, I don’t know what was wrong with the people who viewed my profile and didn’t reach out to me. I would love to see that kind of shit on someone’s profile.
I almost want to make myself a dating profile now, just for the fun of giving a snapshot of who I am. Gee, that’s pretty much what I was thinking about doing in the first place, which brought me to making this post. Isn’t it funny how if you take the same thing but think about it in a different way it suddenly seems like a completely different idea. Well, maybe I’ll write myself a hypothetical singles ad on here one day as an exercise to see how I would describe/sell myself now. Neato.
I haven’t been blogging much lately but it’s mostly because the stuff I want to blog about is not suitable for blogging. Too personal, too intimate. The kind of stuff I would be happy to talk about with a good friend or therapist but not here. Sorry Tom.
I think another reason for not writing much lately is that I’ve been doing lots of the same stuff over and over due to the pandemic. That’s ok, I’m still generally quite happy to gather tacky 70’s household shit, bake, exercise, listen to chillwave, watch sci fi and horror movies, and fuck around with house plants, but after a year and a half there aren’t a lot of new thoughts on those things to dig into here.
Oh, there is something I want to mention. I’m feeling really, really fucking torn on creating some art. I have a lot of feelings I want to express through weird music and words but without a band or a convenient way to record the stuff, I feel like it’s pointless to bother writing the stuff. I guess I really need to jump on the smart phone recording bandwagon, since it’s supposed to be so fragging easy. It would be a way to express some of the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph, a way to say things without people knowing what I’m actually saying. I would really like that. Ok fuck, I need to do this. Time to add “learn how to do home recording with smart phone” to my to-do list.
Man, I hate how every article on the fucking internet is written. You look up “smores cookie recipe” and find drivel like this:
These s’mores cookies don’t require a campfire. John Kanell, Founder of Preppy Kitchen, teaches us how to make this sweet recipe.
Summertime brings many family-favorite pastimes. Heading to the beach or falling asleep under the stars are great summer activities when the weather is nice, but lately, we’ve been finding unique ways to bring the dog days indoors. Whether you’re aiming to beat the heat or staying safe at home, we have a new tradition for the whole fam: S’mores Cookies!
This campfire-food-turned-baked-good comes courtesy of John Kanell, founder of the cooking blog Preppy Kitchen. “I have so many fond memories from childhood of roasting s’mores. So I thought, what a perfect flavor profile for a summertime cookie,” says John, who shared his recipe with us. And it’s true. You get a little graham cracker, melty chocolate and toasted marshmallow in each bite.
What’s more, this is a great project to get the kids involved in. John knows this firsthand. He grew up helping his mother and grandmother bake new recipes in the kitchen and aims to pass this tradition down to his children, too. “My three-year-old twins Lachlan and George love helping in the kitchen. Right now they’re old enough to add pre-measured ingredients to a bowl, whisk things together, and do things like roll the balls of cookie dough.” According to John, “Supervision is key.”
Of course, the art of cooking with kids varies depending on age and skill level. Keep older kids engaged by encouraging them to decorate each cookie for an Instagram-worthy appeal, or set up a toddler with a bag of marshmallows to tear while you measure out the rest of the ingredients.
Ready to get started? Grab a helper and follow along to bring this campfire classic indoors.
Holy guacamole, what’s with all the preamble? Why can’t people just get to the point and give me the dang recipe? I don’t give a FUCK about the history of smores, I don’t care!!!! I just want to make them, you shills! Youtube vids are the same way. I looked some shit up recently and had to skip through like 5 minutes worth of “now before we get started, let me tell you how I ended up in this position” or some other nonsense. Are the authors just making more space for ads? I use an ad blocker so maybe that’s it, and I just can’t see them. I think I remember Ben mentioning something about that when I complained about something similar on the Averie Cooks website — she not only had the useless preamble but also posted a mile of photographs of her culinary creations, and my prehistoric laptop would honestly crash every time I tried to view her site. Yeah I know, my computer was obviously a piece of shit, but a website must also be a real piece of shit if it manages to do that to ANY computer, in my infinitely humble opinion.
What a great start to this fine day. It’s raining out, btw. I don’t mind.
After writing my magnum opus over the last week or so, I want to write something chill and easy. So now I’m just going to talk about my day.
I had a pretty good day. I slept not great last night but not terribly. I heard a loud “pop” sound in the middle of the night that sounded like it came from outside but it was really hard to tell. It only happened once. Every time I hear shit like that at night, I wonder what else happens at night that we have no idea about. We must sleep through all kinds of similar unexplained sounds. I love it when I hear animals I can’t identify, like haunting screeches and moans. But this pop last night wasn’t fun or intriguing, it was just annoying and vaguely worrisome. Not enough to get up to investigate or keep me awake for long but still.
I slept in and had a slow morning. Eventually I got up and had a sensible breakfast. Cleaned the kitchen, then potted some cuttings from a few of our cacti, which I always enjoy. I just love those dang cacti. I’m excited to see them grow and maybe bloom over this spring and summer.
Then I did yoga, then weight training. Ate a sensible lunch. Had a nap. Jenn’s parents came by to drop off our propane campfire so we chatted with them for a while. I collected the eggs and cleaned the chicken coop. Did a bunch of laundry, and then had to get ready for work.
That was it. Pretty nice. If only I wasn’t working a bit too many hours this week, I’d be pleased to put a fork in this work week tomorrow but that will have to wait one more day. Bummer. Oh well though, that’s the life of a high-rolling Wall Street type, buying and selling stocks like a madman, trying to stay one step ahead of all these young hungry wolves at my door.
Ps, I tried a new no-bake peanut butter cookie recipe earlier this week and it’s really fucking good. They’re basically PB haystacks but I threw in a cup of (organic, free trade) chocolate chips as well and son of a bitch, I love these things. Wow. I’m a creature of habit who is generally content to make and eat the same stuff over and over but every now and then I try something new and am so impressed that it makes me *almost* want to change my ways and try a bunch more recipes.
Wasn’t this a change of pace from yesterday’s post. Much more pleasing to write, indeed.
I’ve written a lot of blog posts over the years. Hundreds, probably. Whoah, 811 posts, to be exact, apparently. I just looked it up.
And I like most of those posts, to varying degrees. I love a lot of them, and laugh my ass off at many too. There are some that don’t do much for me now but I don’t think there are any that I dislike. I’m happy about that.
And yet, despite having created this vast, dense body of rambling, self-indulgent works, the majority of the views my blog sees comes from passersby checking out the same dozen or so posts, and those posts are usually (scathing) reviews of products or films, or harsh condemnations of certain stars. I understand why this is, that most folks on the internet aren’t googling “what does this random blogging idiot think about life and death and the purpose of existence?” They’re looking for juicy gossip on Jon Jones and Stephen King’s made-for-TV miniseries version of The Shining — it’s highly unlikely anyone would stumble across my other posts, and even less likely that those who did so would dig my, *ahem*, ‘unique take on things.’
Still, it chaps my ass. I like my shit a lot, and feel like it’s a waste to have so much good material here when only a handful of the ‘meh’ posts see the majority of the action. I know I shouldn’t care, especially since I supposedly do this for myself, but every now and then it gets to me. What can I say, pearls before swine, I suppose.
***
Jenn and I watched Joker last night. It wasn’t great. I give it 5.5/10. Phoenix was a decent actor and his character was semi-believable but all the other actors sucked and their characters weren’t believable either. De Niro was especially disappointing, his acting was garbage and his lines in the movie were miserably, ridiculously bad. I’m not sure if the writing for his lines during the on-air convo with Joker was especially awful or if it was just his delivery but for me, De Niro was truly abysmal. A comedy show host having a candid conversation with a mentally ill killer on his live show? Fuck right off. Too stupid.
I remember when the film came out last year, it was huge. Lots of hype and interest in it, and I just can’t see why. I thought it was dull, pointless, didn’t really go anywhere or do much. I guess I’d say it felt really uninspired. Oh, and the plot exposition shit was ham-handed, particularly when the doctor was talking to Joker’s mom about her delusions and explaining how her boyfriend had beaten Joker as a child and caused brain damage. Oooooh, now I get it, because remember at the start when he showed that card to the woman that explained how he laughed inappropriately because he had a condition that can be caused by head injuries?? Puh-lease. I hate watching films that are designed for the lowest common denominator to feel smart. I’d rather watch something challenging and not fully grasp all the subtleties than be spoonfed like I’m a fucking moron.
In regards to the criticism the film received, although I feel like people saying it might inspire incel’s to lash out is technically true, that fear reminds me of people blaming Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest for violence back in the 80’s, and that makes me concerned about fear mongering and its impact on freedom of speech. However, I can get behind the other big criticism that the film is way too sympathetic towards white men who commit heinous crimes. I fully agree with that one.
Boy, I sure have seen a lot of mediocre films lately. I’ve been trying to be more diligent about watching pretty much anything that catches my attention but in doing so, I’ve become less discerning. It may sound absurd but I think I need to become a bigger snob about films and go back to only watching like one per month or something. I’m tired of wasting my time on shit that stinks.
***
Fuck it, time for some chillwave and baking. I’m trying out a recipe for xmas treats, and I’m excited about it. Wish me luck.
I used to donate blood. I did it because of the endless free cookies afterward. I stopped eventually because I think we need to let more people die. I’ve never gone back. True story.
I’m a cookie addict but there are some lines even I won’t cross.
It’s a real bummer to see friends and family do totally wack shit over and over and consistently make their lives difficult or miserable. I’m not talking about people who you can talk with about this stuff, because I think that’s normal — everyone struggles occasionally and benefits from a chin wag with a pal. I’m talking about people who have patterns of screwing things up for themselves, perpetually getting in fights with those closest to them, and blaming everyone else for it. It makes me feel awkward because, at that point, what can you do? Being friends with someone like that is a liability. I don’t really want to be connected with someone who is going to complain about weird things that don’t even make sense to me, or who might entangle me in one of these little adventures. It’s high risk, low reward.
But it’s sad to think about the history you may have had with these people, that you could have been so close at one time and created lots of great memories, only for it to turn into something so miserable.
And when you consider the possibility of mental health issues playing into it, like maybe your friend or relative is acting wack because their brain or hormones are sabotaging them, that makes it even harder. What’s the best thing to do then? Should you ask the person about their mental health? That’s a minefield. Should you pretend everything is fine but maybe distance yourself from the person a bit, say you’re really busy with work and shit lately? That’s obviously not the best approach but it seems like what most of us would do because it’s probably easiest and sort of a half-assed middle ground of keeping the person at arms length but not completely abandoning them. Of course, you absolutely could just abandon the person. Live and let die. It’s the natural order, after all.
I lean towards the last two approaches myself, although I have done the first one a few times for friends who were really struggling. Those experiences were frustrating because those friends didn’t seem to care and I became bitter about having put the effort in only to be unappreciated. Which is legit because I had put myself out for them and they didn’t give a shit, but it’s also stupid because they were busy trying to not hate their life and kill themselves. They didn’t have the bandwidth then to think about how they were making me feel. Regardless, it did make me a little more leery to put myself out there and get involved in other people’s drama in the future.
That’s probably why I’m not getting involved in any of the drama going on right now. I just don’t have the patience for it. There are times and places for it, I’m sure I’ll be an upstanding friend or relative to someone again one day, but right now Selfish Sam is in the house, and he don’t give a fuck about nothing except preserving his own happiness.
Speaking of making myself happy, yesterday I did some searching and found a recipe for some Christmas baking that I’m excited to make this upcoming holiday season. Michael and Sassy’s families both have these great treats that they make each year and give away as gifts, and I dig that so I’d like to come up with my own recipe for Jenn and I to do the same. The recipe I found yesterday looks like it will fit the bill — easy, delicious, and festive — so I’m going to start fucking with it soon so I can have it fine-tuned by xmas time. I’m really pumped about it. Even the experimenting is going to be great since failure will still mean delicious baking for me to stuff into my gaping maw. Jenn thinks I’m nuts getting excited about xmas in May but I just said to her, “I’m a Christmas guy now, deal with it!!!”
crimson highway 