You can probably deduce what has transpired. I have cashed La Cheque, and I am sitting in my local White Spot, eating and very slowly virtual keyboard typing to you nice folks. My food arrived like right away so I am more into eating than typing right now, but I feel like writing something while I am here is a tradition now, so I thought I would like to say hi to you nice folks while I am here.

Hi nice people!

I got out of my usual gravity well of depressive ennui via the booster rocket known as Joe. I was feeling deeply conflicted, caught between going out and staying in, when, in a moment of desperate inspiration, I remembered that Joe and Julian go to Joe’s parents’ place Saturday nights, so I asked Joe to drop me off at Money Msrt when they went

And the rest is history, or rather, mystory.

I ordered more fries, and now I am bored with fries, and I have many fries left. Fries.

Been feeling sorta crappy. I think I am somewhat dehydrated. Food tastes weird and dry, and my craving for salty stuff makes it all taste bland, too. And my appetite is Kaput. Hopefully, this episode in the Great Outside will help.

More times than not, it does.

Haven’t baked yet. Did two choco-mint cakes last night. To be honest, I feel like I am running low on inspiration on that score. Need new recipes!

Luckily, even when artistic inspiration lags, the desire for dessert does not.

And I don’t want baking to be another hobby where I go at it full steam for a while then run out of gas. I have a lot of those and it bothers me.

Well, time to pay the bill and skedaddle. See you when I get home!

Home now. I don’t know why looking around my life as seeing abandoned hobbies bothers me. I guess it makes me feel like I can’t stick with anything. And I miss the fun and excitement I got from the hobbies when they were fresh and new to me, and part of me thinks I should be able to just pick the hobby back up and have just as much fun again.

But for some reason, it doesn’t work that way with me. When I am done, I am done, and that’s it. All attempts to go back to the way things were before I got sick of it are futile. The best thing I can hope for is that I will come up with a fresh angle on he old hobby and get back to it that way.

Realistically, there is nothing wrong with going through a bunch of hobbies till you find the one that never grows old. Or for that matter, there’s nothing wrong with just trying new things periodically for the rest of your life. All that matters is that you are happy. So do what it takes to stay happy.

I guess I just can’t stand the feeling of something good and valuable slipping through my fingers for what seems like no reason. I have gone through such periods of hopeless drifting and joyless subsistence that when I find something that actually inspires me and draws me in, I want that to last forever. I find the idea that something can be fun and cool and life-affirming one day, and boring and pointless and uninspiring the next, inherently offensive. What happened? It was fine yesterday! What changed?

What changed, obviously, was me. I ran out of inspiration, and when you are talking about a solo hobby with no extrinsic reward or motivation, when the intrinsic motivation fails, that’s the end of the show. Curtains down, house lights up.

Clearly, the wise thing to do would be to just accept that this is life in my world and the world is full of awesome stuff to try and do and have fun with for a while so it’s not like I am going to run out. I don’t have to treat each hobby like a precious resource I have to hoard and ration or I will run out too soon.

Which is how I treat pretty much everything, really, which is a whole bag of snakes all by itself.

I am also afraid of seemingly flighty. I strongly dislike flighty, frivolous, irresponsible people who bounce heedlessly through life with no regard for the damage they leave behind, and so I definitely don’t want people to think I am one of those, let alone actually be one of those.

But once again, I am making things out to be more binary than they are. There’s a lot of room between “total flake” and “driven to master anything they start”. If I just decided I was done with baking for now, it would not be some sort of war crime.

Although I would miss the desserts. I need sweet things in my life. You know, that whole pleasure means reward means you are a good person and should be happy thing. I lost track of that recently when I had my financial worries and got all weird about money again, but I am hopefully out of the woods now and can go back to slowly and gently learning the fine are of making myself happy for a change.

It’s very hard to learn to search for joy when you have been trapped in the inward spiral for as long as I have been. Just falling and falling ever deeper into yourself in your mad and thoughtless flight from the real world.

The emotional isolation comes first. The social isolation comes second. The physical isolation comes third.

there is a whole big bright beautiful world filled with joy and pleasure and bliss out there, waiting for me to go find it. And I am not going to get it just letting the days go by in my lonesome grotto.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.