I'm feeling really appreciative of my friends today!

That's all.

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Usually my mood noticeably improves during the spring/summer, and this year seems like no exception. I feel generally good! Like, not hugely depressed. Kind of light, with some energy. It's not every single day, but it's more days than not. This is the time of year when I'm fun and it's easy to be there for people and support them or entertain them. And it feels like it will always be that way and I've finally gotten past all the depression stuff.

But I know that's not true, of course. I mean, I've gone through this cycle a few times now, over several years. Unfortunately it seems to follow a kind of pattern where I feel good in the spring/summer, meet someone, we develop feelings for each other, and then things start to get worse in the fall as my mood drops. And then all the promises I sincerely made when I was feeling good start to fall apart. I've gotta be more careful... The last few times I thought to myself, "I'm always so cautious, I should take a risk and see if it pays off," and it didn't pay off, haha. I mean, I still learned things from those experiences, but I guess I haven't found a good midpoint between caution and risk-taking yet.

What I HAVE learned is how to identify and exit bad situations earlier. Not in an impulsive way where I have a kneejerk reaction to anything that looks "toxic" I mean, but I think a lot more about what's going on and whether it seems like healthy behavior, as well as what factors are feeding into that. In the past I would make a lot of excuses for what was going on and feel like I would stick it out until things got better, but I don't feel like I have any obligation to do that now. Things might get better in the future but I don't have to wait for that if I don't want to. I do make a distinction between taking some distance and cutting people out of my life, though. I don't think there's anybody that I've really 100% cut out of my life, but I will definitely stop putting in as much effort to maintain a friendship if I don't feel like it's going well. If the other person wants to pick up the slack and try to keep things going, that's fine. Kyle and I eventually became friends again, and I think even Trevor and I are on better terms now, although I needed about a year's worth of a break from each of them.

Not sure where I was going with this, but it got kind of rambly so I'll stop here.

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

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So I tried making a recipe from Imgur for Cacio e Pepe. I haven't failed so hard in the kitchen in quite awhile. "Easy" and "simple" were some damn dirty lies.

I have an understanding of where I went wrong in the process, but I can't really undo the mistake. My cheese wasn't grated finely enough, so instead of melting into the water to form a sauce, it instead clumped together into a large gooey mass that stuck to the bottom of the pot and fused into a thick hard brown layer under the pasta. Trying to stir the pasta/cheese around and adding more water didn't really help; the cheese just glommed onto the utensils I was using. It was like swirling a stick around a cotton candy machine, if the cotton candy was a wad of cheese.

Anyway, I stood there stirring it for... oh... probably at least fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, to try to get it to melt. It never fully melted. Eventually I just gave up. Tried eating some of it, and it was edible, but not great. The poster wasn't kidding about it being filling, though. I had maybe 3/4 cup of the pasta and then I was done for the night. Or well, done eating.

It took me well over an hour to clean the pot. :( Fifteen minutes with a scrubby sponge at first, making exactly 0% progress, before I tried finding something that was abrasive to use. All I could find was dishwasher detergent powder. Figured it wouldn't hurt to try, so I poured some of that in and scrubbed more. Still no effect. Poured some white vinegar in, because that can be a good cleaner. Nope, no dice. At that point I realized that I did not have adequate tools for the job, and so I left the pot to soak and went out to the grocery store to get some steel wool. They didn't have plain steel wool, only SOS pads, so I just got some of those. Went back to the house, scrubbed with an SOS pad for twenty minutes, made some headway! I got almost half of the hardened cheese layer off. Arm was getting tired though, and the sink was covered in blue SOS soap goop. I decided to try a different tactic and poured enough vinegar into the pot to cover the cheese layer, then put it on the stove and boiled it for awhile. That actually disintegrated the majority of the cheese that was left, which was nice. I scrubbed away the last bit with a second SOS pad afterwards.

All in all, the whole thing probably took me closer to two hours, but I shaved down my time estimate because I did spend a bit of time in the grocery store looking at other things, so I figured that didn't count towards the cleaning.

Man, though, what an ordeal. On the bright side, I felt VERY accomplished when that pot was finally clean.

After I finally went back upstairs I looked up the recipe elsewhere on the internet and it seems that a lot of people have similar troubles with it, so I felt a bit less embarrassed about how badly it went. Serious Eats (which has never let me down) ran through some good tips on how to do it right and was more specific about all the steps than that random person on Imgur. Too bad I was too lazy to do more research before attempting the recipe. T_T

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