That’s what I feel inside me at this moment. It’s like a dead zone in my soul, and yet, not quite. It should feel eerie and possibly even unpleasant, but instead I find it… interesting. I feel like I am slowly exploring a dark, ancient mansion, suspended between fascination and fear.

I’m sure this is a transition phase of some sort. A momentary stillness between emotional states, like that moment of weightlessness at the apogee of your swing when swinging on a swing (swing) on a playground.

I was entranced by that moment as a kid. I felt like if I could part company with the swing at that exact moment, I would stay weightless and gravity would no longer apply to me.

Clearly, that’s not possible, nor does it make any sense. But kids get odd ideas in their heads.

I aired out my bedroom yesterday. Opened both the bedroom and bathroom windows as wide as they can go and left them that way most of the afternoon and into the evening, until it got too damned cold.

Really freshened up the place. Must remember to do that more often. Things can get rather stale in here.

I also attempted gingersnaps yesterday. I say “attempted” because what resulted was not gingersnaps at all. They taste like ginger and they are a decent sort of cookie overall, but they ain’t gingersnaps.

The first sign of trouble was, when I had just finished fluffing together the dry ingredients (it’s like sifting them together, but with a spoon), I suddenly realized that the recipe I was using called for Splenda Sugar Blend, the stuff that’s half sugar, instead of Splenda Granulated, which is the stuff that’s one hundred percent Splenda.

Well fuck. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I had just used up the last of my flour in assembling the dry ingredients, I would have just dumped everything and started over with a proper recipe this time. But as it was, I had to just keep going and use one hundred percent Splenda anyhow.

Then I found that I had less molasses than the recipe called for. I was sure I had the quarter cup the recipe asked for, but,not quite. I had more like… 3/8ths of a cup. So, that was a problem.

That become especially evident when I tried to pull the dough together. It was way too dry. It was so dry that I couldn’t even get all of the dry ingredients to mix into the main ball of dough. That was clearly not going to work.

And that’s when I made my third mistake. I decided that in order to moisten things up, I would add more applesauce. (My first time baking with unsweetened applesauce, by the way. )

The problem with that brainwave is that it was extremely difficult to get the applesauce to mix in with the existing (and surprisingly stiff) dough. So I ended up having to work the dough A LOT and that only made it even stiffer.

Finally, it was time to turn the dough into cookies to bake. The recipe said the cookies should start as rounded tablespoons of dough. And if my dough had not been incredibly stiff, that might have worked. But as it was, I ended up with 20 very large Godzilla cookies instead of the 50 or so dainty, crispy gingersnaps I was looking for.

Plus, the dough was better with the extra applesauce, but it still wasn’t that great, and so the dough did not come together quite right and I ended up with folds and cracks in it. So the texture of the… whatevers I ended up with is a tad uneven.

But what the heck. They’re food. They taste good, even with uneven texture, and I look forward to having them over the next few days. I won’t be baking today, as it is Sunday, but Monday is another baking day with its own challenges and rewards.

That means, though, that tonight I need to buy flour and molasses. I’m always running out of something!

And this month is going to be brutal. It’s a five week month, and of course, I only realized that after I was a week and a half in and had already spent more than I ought to have done. Add to that the fact that I have to go add more dough to my card because I forgot I had a domain name to pay to renew, and that’s not even counting the $45 it will take to renew my bus pass, and you start to see why I am feeling financially smooshed this month.

God, I wish I had a way to earn money. I would feel a heck of a lot better about myself if I could earn bucks, instead of relying entirely on the Province for everything. I have never supported myself, and so to me, the mere act of being able to pay the bills with the fruits of my own labour seems like an impossible dream lying beyond the eternal horizon.

I still feel incompetent. I know I am not, but it’s a hard mental pattern to break. I know damned well that I have strong organizational skills and a sharp intellect, and those combined can make for an effective way to deal with the world in a way closely mirroring actually being good at stuff.

The dream, of course, is still the artists’ dream of being able to do nothing but create art and have everything else taken care of by others. It would be so awesome to not have to worry about the petty details of life.

Then again, it’s not like I have a lot of them to worry about now. In theory, I already have a lot of things taken care of for me due to Joe’s awesomeness.

But I am not in control of that. It makes me feel guilty and burdensome, not empowered and free.

Some day, I swear, I will pay my own way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.