January 22nd, 2011. What have I been doing?

It used to be so easy for me to write on this blog because when I used to write, I was cooking. I began this blog as a side project to my culinary studies because I didn't want to lose what I viewed as talent as a writer. Culinary school, line cooking, the time it took to learn about ingredients and how to use them--I don't think I ever fully intended to use them as a profession. Though I willingly enrolled in culinary school, I hadn't fully thought through what it meant to be a chef. I just liked to cook. So I created this blog as a sort of flotation device, a reminder of who I was and where I had come from before I gave myself over to cooking full time.

Freshly returned from life in South America, I took time with my studies, learned as much as I could as quickly as possible. I surpassed most of my classmates in technique, out-cooked them when it really came time to perform and moved ahead at a much faster pace than even I had anticipated. If you look at the early posts on this blog, my mood reflected this. I wasn't writing everyday, but I was certainly taking the time to go eat, to explore, and to jot down notes about what I had consumed. I was giving myself a complete education. My second.

Along the way, though, as both school and my job cooking became more demanding, my ability to sit and focus on writing as a hobby, as an equal to cooking, lessened. The inner tube started to lose air. I almost completely stopped reading books in my spare time and when Kurt Vonnegut died I barely took notice.

For people like drug addicts, alcoholics or anyone else that has lost their life due to abuse and dependency, I know the consequences are much more dire and severe. For me, though to barely be able to sit here and eek out a few paragraphs when just five years ago I could fill page after page with prose, I feel as though I have lost a great deal of myself. And what's worse is that I was conscious the whole time.

Things have changed, though and I'm no longer cooking full time. In fact, I don't do anything full time at this point, other than worry about how I'm going to make money to pay next month's bills. In many ways I'm better off, because my time is much more open to chance now. The hardest part is rediscovering not only what it is that I used to do when I had free time, but even worse is relearning how to do those things again because it feels like so long since I've done them.

I feel that, moving forward, the writings on this blog, for those of you that may read it, will continue to revolve around food because I write about my life and my life still revolves around food. What I hope to see in the writings, though, is not simply surviving, as one might with a life preserver, but actually moving ahead as though in a boat. Whether or not my time spent in formal kitchens cooking for money is completely over, I can't say for sure. I know that cooking led me down a path that I've never truly been happy with, though one that has led to a great deal of education and awareness of the world around me. Writing, though, my first true love since childhood, will no longer take the back burner.