I, Curtis

Yesterday and earlier today I did something that I haven’t done in a few weeks, I cooked because I wanted to. Last night at about 7 PM I started one of my slow cooking pasta sauces. I started with a very basic tomato based of crushed tomatos, tomato sauce and some fresh tomatos. I followed up with a lot of other vegtables and spices. There is something very relaxing about having something cooking in a slow cooker and stiring it about once every hour or so. This evening I completed the other half of the meal, the meat and the pasta. I decided to go with my normal fried chicken component. For once my fried chicken actually came out perfectly, golden brown, done throughout and not lacking pieces of its fried shell. Normally I would cut the chicken and arrange it on the top of the pasta, but because of the way the chicken looked this time I decided to leave the chicken pieces whole and serve them on top of the pasta as-is. This is one of those times when I am glad that I only fry with whole breast meat. The final dish was the following: fettucini base, sauce on top, mozzarella cheese sprinkled about, then chicken placed on top of the hot melting cheese.
These burst of creativity when I am cooking make me very happy. I don’t have many of my hands-on hobbies left, and it is nice for me to be able to enjoy the ones I do have. I have decided that I really do need to find some additional things to cook though, I am about to the end of my availible modifications to this one dish, and now that I have had the chicken come out like it did, I feel like I have perfected it, and as such it is time for me to move on. I stick to pasta dishes too much, I need to escape from them and try something new, something I have never thought of before. Anyone have any ideas?
My biggest restrictor is my ingrediant list. I have a lot avaiible to me because my mother and I run a template kitchen, we have a base set of ingrediants which we require to be on-hand at all times. One big disadvantage to that is that we hardly ever add new ingrediants to our collection and a lot of fresh ingrediants don’t store very well for long periods of time. Perhaps I should just start going to the store when I have creative urges and pick up whatever grabs me. I have been watching Food Network for a long time and there is a lot that I could be using that I don’t. Either way, now is not a time for culinary regrets due to things not attempted, it is a time of culinary celebration for dishes (and in this case, techniques) perfected.

Sometimes in my life I take myself to a lower level of functioning than is normal for me. I do this without realizing it. I take myself from being extreamly productive to being quite slow, lazy and just not as vibrant as my personalities have the ability to be. I am realizing this through some events that occured last night, events which reintroduced me to just being sporatic and doing what feels right instead of what is determined by my very predictable pattern.
There is one major flaw in the ultimate plan of GITI – everything is planned. If events in my life are planned months in advance and there is no detail left unwritten, then I am going to become bored with my life. Each evening when I get home I look at GITI, even if I know there is nothing there that needs my immediate attention. This habbit was formed from my habbit of doing the same during the first few weeks of the semester when there were always things in GITI that needed to be attended to. Now the course work is a little less strenuous and the assignments a lot more predictable. The predictability is probably what kills my motivation. I like to have courses where instructors are dynamic and their teaching style is always adapting and doing something new. Lecture, Scantron, Lecture, Scantron may work for some people who just want to get through their courses, get their hours and go on with their lives, but as I hositily pointed out to my “peer advisor”, that just isn’t for me. I am at this university to learn material that I want to learn, in addtion to the required dulldrum material of course. I don’t care if I get out of here in 2 years, 4 years, or 5 years. I just want to do what I know is best for me, which is to persue the education that I want. I know what it is that makes me happy when in an educational environment, I need to seek that out, not become bored with it and excel as I am expected to do.
After last night I am feeling a little better about things as far as my life in general, hopefully this will hold to be the same result after a few days go by. I really want to return to feeling the same way I did in the first few weeks of the semester.

How do I always get stuck with the nuts? I admit that psychologically I am not the most normal person on earth, but the people who seem to have levitated towards me in the past few weeks are more messed up than I ever thought someone could be. The best example of this is one that just occured a few minutes ago. One of my friends from high school had an issue with her boyfriend earlier in the week and as a result decided to stay in his dorm room until he would talk to her about what was bothering her. To vent frustrations she threw a tennis ball at the wall repeatedly for a period of a few hours, this annoyed the boyfriend’s roommates. The situation escalated and ended up with the police and the Residence Advisor both being called and her being given a choice of volentary mental insitutionalization or going home until a psychological evaluation could be conducted.
In my abnormal psychology class there are several people who have one or more of the studied disorders who decide to take a liking to me. Why is this the case? I know my personality is non-threatning to people who may consider themselves to be “different”, but I just dont see why everyone around me tends to be nuts. Can I just have a few sane people once in a while please?

As I have gotten older I have began to fulfil more and more of my goals in life. Somehow each of these “accomplishments” leaves me empty in the end. I remember in 7th grade I aspired to be Microsoft cerified, and now I am and it doesn’t really mean that much to me as an accomplishment. I feel somewhat satisified with myself because I had a goal and decided to persue it. Things in my life that are out of my reach seem like such great accomplishments until they are in my reach and then they are meaningless and hold less value than they once did.
I used to want to be a beta tester for a long time, until I became one and the group membership wasn’t as special as I thought and no significant adjustment to my level of happieness occured. Now I am gradually falling off the whole beta thing and sticking with things that work. Since Microsoft has changed their beta practices and communication methods it hasn’t been the same and I no longer value my “beta rights”.
One of my past goals was to become a college student, because in my view college students were so independant and successful with things. I am now finding that as a college student I haven’t changed from my original situation. Instant changes would likely have more of an impact on me, but nothing in life is instant, everything is gradual. I expect that I will gradually mature while in college. I also expect that my independance will gradually come and will be finalized by me moving out of my parents’ house permenantly.
I can’t do anything about this problem with me achieving goals and feeling indifferent, but I must keep setting goals and accomplishing them so that I don’t become depressed and have no goals and no functional life. Any goal is better than no goal.
Interesting quote of the day (from an email list): “Men who are sensitive, caring, and good looking are never available – Because they already have boyfriends”
Aren’t sterotypes fun?