on baking cookies

This morning, I ate some of the cookies my housemates had baked. Not the cookies they’d decorated laboriously, of course, but the bastard plain ones, those misshaped and odd.

There’s more dough in the fridge that I intend to bake up into more cookies - to replace the ones I ate this morning. I’d bought the dough yesterday, you see, because someone had been reduced to tears after learning that the last of the first batch of cookies made a couple of days ago had disappeared down my gaping maw at breakfast time.
I’m trying something where I make an effort to fix the grief and heartbreak I cause in this world instead of ignoring it until it subsides. The dough for making sugar cookies sells for fewer than three dollars, which is more expensive than necessary considering one can buy a container of eight sugar cookies perfectly formed and professionally baked for only a single dollar. The extra dollar and a half, it seems, are the price one pays for adding an egg and a stick of butter and then forming and baking the dough oneself, waiting for it to rise, hovering near the oven, and being disappointed when the cookies don’t come out right.

Next time, maybe I’ll buy the cheaper cookies, microwave them for thirty-odd seconds, then announce that I baked cookies and does anyone want to help decorate them?

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

this winding road

The vapor juice tasted good, so I bought a bitter one - and therefore stopped vaping.
The snacks tasted good, so I stopped buying ready-made foods - and therefore stopped snacking.
A trip to the barber shop every two weeks would have cost me many thousands of dollars, and so I spent forty dollars on a pair of clippers and learned to cut that shit myself.
The car got me to where I was going quickly but at significant financial and ecological cost; when it broke I fixed up a bicycle that gets me there less quickly but at a thousandth of the overall cost of driving.

In order to live simply and without spending much money, make life purposefully difficult. Then adapt, learning the skills necessary to live a fairly happy and healthy life, leaving the remaining bullshit and clutter on the side of this winding road.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan