My poor dough was left unattended for nearly 4 hours, and by the time I arrived home I had no intentions of staying up for another 2+ hours to see if I was able to salvage a loaf of bread from that tea-towel covered bowl. I decided to leave it where it was and come back to it the next day.

I came home from work this evening and checked on the dough, and it was  instantly obvious that this was never going to be a loaf of delicious whole wheat bread.

But since I hate wasting food, love goofing off in the kitchen, and don’t know when to leave well enough alone, I was determined to make something out of nothing.

Rolling out the dough.

The chips: triple chocolate chip, peanut butter, and butterscotch.

Cutting the dough into strips.

From top: Triple chocolate, peanut butter, butterscotch.

Brushed with melted butter/homemade vanilla extract and sprinkled with sugar.

Baked in an oven at 350F.

So, they didn’t come out as something that can automatically be sold in a bake shop first run, but all things considered I’m calling it a success. I didn’t have to waste any dough, they’re pretty tasty, and shit man… they’ve got chocolate in them!

I may sound like an ungrateful dick, but… this is easily the loneliest time of the year for me. Always. I know that there are people in my life that love me, or at the very least tolerate me. There’s just something about love and happiness and holiday cheer being shoved down our throats at every turn that makes me really fucking depressed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends. I am eternally grateful to them for their ceaseless patient love and tolerance. But the winter holidays always serve to remind me how despairingly single I am, and make me feel as though I always will be. My friends are all I have. Not that that’s a bad thing. My friends are pretty fucking awesome.

I just always feel like something’s… missing.

Overall, I feel pretty good. It turns out – for all my years of being a creature of the night – I actually really enjoy keeping regular hours. I’ve been cooking more, even trying to learn to bake my own bread. In the interest of full disclosure: SoberYear hasn’t been flawless. I’ve had a few cigarettes over the last 40 days, and I had a couple of pops this weekend. But, overall, I feel like I’m doing well.

Over the weekend, I flew home to Michigan for a cousin’s wedding. It was a beautiful affair, and I got to spend it with one of my absolutely favorite friends from out East. Alas, there’s nothing like squeezing into a pretty dress to remind one of their body issues.

I weighed myself at my parents house. I am not exactly thrilled to announce the results, but the point is to be honest here, right? I currently weigh nearly 250lbs: the biggest I’ve been in my life.

And that sucks.

As such, it’s time for “Phase II.” It’s time to join a gym, to get my insurance company to reimburse me for it, and to start taking my weight – and ultimately my future – more seriously.

I’ve always had issues with my weight, and with my self image as a related side effect. This won’t be easy. I’m from a hefty family. I have hypothyroidism. I really like cheese. I’m human. However, as with the same motivation that spawned SoberYear, it’s time to get serious and to start taking better care of myself.

I’ve been talking about taking better care of myself inside and out for a long while now: I try to pay attention to the quality and sourcing of food that I eat, I ride a bike, I’m in therapy, I’m slowly switching my cosmetics to Lush, I drink a ton of water. Baby steps.

I’ve always been, well, afraid to actually buckle down and tackle my weight. I could blame it on a million things, but there’s no sense in that. No more excuses. I’ve always told myself it wouldn’t get out of hand, and it has. And, again, I’m pouring my soul out onto this webspace so that I have an audience (even if it’s just me) to hold myself accountable.

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I’m not so good at making, or keeping, resolutions made in the dead of winter. However, as this is the beginning of a new year of my life, I think I’m going to try my hand at some. I’m putting them down here because a part of me feels like if I don’t keep it to myself, I’ll do better at holding myself accountable.

It’s a cute thought.

I resolve to drink more water; to take my vitamin everyday; to get off of my ass and go for a walk even when I really don’t want to. I resolve to learn to respect myself; to realize that every thing in my life is my doing – even the good stuff; to learn how to take a compliment. I resolve to take more chances; to take more pictures; to give more hugs.

As a part of diving right into this new chapter in my life, I decided the other day to take a year to detox. A year without alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, pop, and probably red meat (though I haven’t decided on that last one yet). Part of deciding to do this was months of saying I was going to quit smoking, and justifying smoking when I had a few drinks in me, and another part is just to see if I can do it. The first week will be easy, the first month pretty hard. But I’m in. It’s like I’ve challenged myself.

And I’m a pretty competitive person.

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A dear friend of mine recently told me to loosen up. “Stop thinking the world’s out to get you,” he said over late-night cookies. “Try letting yourself open up a little and maybe you won’t be so lonely all the time.”

He’s right, of course. Dear friends usually are; it’s a large part of why we hold them so dear.

I don’t trust people. (Which is weird now that I think about it, given all of the information I throw up free for the taking all over the Internet.) It’s no big secret that I don’t date. It’s not really a conscious decision, I’m just a toxic mix of incredibly undateable (or so it seems) and violently self-depreciating. I don’t really like small-talk, and I can only assume (because I haven’t done it enough to say conclusively) that spewing out the same bullshit biographical information during a series of failed first-dates is exhausting.

But what carries more weight in this situation isn’t that I don’t trust other people, it’s that I don’t trust myself. I’m lonely. I want another person in my life to be close to and snuggle with and be nerdy and weird and make sexy rumpus. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I deserve that. And, honestly, aside from the rumpus, I have found all of those things in my friends. I’ve managed through years of depression and self-abuse to convince myself that I’m not enough to have that counterpart. And I’ve been hurt in really fucked up ways by the people that I have let in. So I’ve built myself the Great Wall of Kim, and I’m really fucking picky about whom I let in.

It’s a horrible Catch-22. I want what I don’t think I’m worthy of, and will thus never have.

I am the queen of self-fulfilling prophecies.

But there is a line between empathy and stupidity.

It absolutely blows my cynical little mind how someone can discuss their thrifty-drinking tactics with any bartender–let alone one they don’t know. (I tend to be considerably more understanding with regular customers, friends, and anyone else I might go out with to practice our thrifty-drinking techniques.) And yet, people continue to do this, and none of them seem to realize just how douchey they sound.

I get where you’re coming from. Times are tough for us all, myself included. But it’s more than kind of inappropriate to barter with your server, whose livelihood is dependent on your ability to tip respectably, else I make $2.65 an hour. It’s really unfortunate, but your smiles still don’t pay my rent.

It’s bad enough to preface your order by interrogating me over the pricing on our Harpoon pours and Rolling Rock bottles. But you know what the icing on this douchebag cake is? Wrapping up your cheap interaction with this over-worked and equally broke bartender by introducing yourself, telling me that you like the bar I work at, that you want to make it “your spot,” and then posing the most absurd question I’ve been asked all month:

“So, hey, uh, I wanted to order another beer, and I’d like another draught, but that would mean I could only tip you, like, $2. Is that okay? And then I can get you back later or something? When do you work?”

At this point, I start looking for the hidden cameras. This has to be a joke. You’ve been sitting at my bar for hours, have consumed three beers and are contemplating a fourth, and you’re trying to ask for my permission to take money out of my pocket to buy another beer with? I don’t take IOUs from my own sister, let alone some stranger at a bar.

He ordered a cheaper bottle, tipped me appropriately (after some consultation by one of my waitresses about what constituted “appropriate”), and left. And then he came back an hour later.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: If you’re too broke to tip, just go to a package store. It’s much cheaper per-drink, you don’t have to tip anyone, and you get to enjoy your booze without my laser-eyes glaring at your outrageous stupidity and rudeness.

Balancing my checkbook, clipping coupons, entering free sweepstakes at the grocery store while using cloth bags… Am I 24 or 75? Screw math, love, and Dilbert cartoons, I think broke is the universal language.

Or maybe it’s Futurama.

It’s not that I’ve ever been irresponsible, per se, but I’ve been laying the adult on pretty thick the last few weeks. I’ve even been to that aforementioned grocery store TWICE this month.

I’m pretty sure that’s more than the entire winter combined.

So much love.

True to my nerd roots, I’ve started reading I’ll Scream Later, Marlee Matlin’s memoir. As a student of the Deaf community and a fan of this seemingly unstoppable woman, this was a book I knew I’d enjoy and was looking forward to reading.

What I didn’t expect was to be so motivated.

It has helped me to remember a time when I was an outgoing, energetic, head-in-the-sky-heart-on-the-moon little girl, and how badly I want that girl back. This story (and at the time of this post, I’m only in chapter eight) has helped me reload my ammo in this battle I’m fighting with depression. I want to be better, not just because I’m sick of feeling this way, but because I’m starting to remember what “better” is, what success feels like.

I’ve got a long way to go, I know that, but I’m starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m moving at no steady pace, so some days it’s brighter than others, but it’s there.

Or maybe it was the roughly three gallons or so of shitty diner coffee I drank to get me through tonight. I blame the Romaine.

Also stopped smoking again for a while. Or at least definitely stopped buying smokes. That’s $9-27 a week that I just don’t have right now.

Life is on the mend. I think. At least, it seems to be nearing that stage where it stops bleeding through the bandages. That’s when the real healing starts. That’s when things start to get itchy.

I’ve got several irons in the fire right now, I just haven’t lit it yet.

Mother Nature, this is certainly one fucked up April Fool’s joke. Make with the Spring already, woman!

I am an artist with a brain, an intellectual with no ambition.

(To be fair, I am also an artist without much ambition, but I made the wounds and I’d like not to also be the one brandishing the salt.)

I need a job that actually challenges me instead of just pissing me off. I want deadlines and expectations. I want a boss that assumes I’m actually good at what I do, instead of one that seems to be constantly looking for reasons to fire me.

I want gay women to look at me the way straight boys do. I want to figure out how to flirt back when they do.

I want to go back to the way I was when I was hopeful and dreamy, not cynical and angry. Those days aren’t so far past.

I don’t want to be sad any more.

I want to know what it’s like to like myself… to feel like I’m worthy of anything on this list.

A list that goes on and on.