Trying to make a soup

School begins on Monday. Well, it technically begins this Saturday, but happily I am teaching no Saturday classes. As such, today is my last weekday off. Bobby is working, and I am home alone, trying to make a soup.

I say trying to make a soup instead of just making a soup because I am not a good cook, for one, and for reason the second, I've been having issues with said soup. The first, and most pernicious, issue I've been having is that I don't know how to cook. Okay, so I looked up recipes online. The difficulty with this is that I did not find one that I liked, I found several, so this leads me to issue number two I'm having, which is that I'm combining several different recipes, oh! And the third? I'm using different amounts of ingredients than any of the recipes call for. Plus I added too much cayenne.

Okay. So, now you see my struggle with the soup? It's been interesting. It smells good, and I think it's possible that it tastes good, but I'm not sure. I've tasted it too many times to be able to tell.

I need to make this soup because Bobby is sick. I also want to make the soup to prove to Bobby that I can make the soup (there has lately been some questioning of my soup making abilities). Another reason I'm making the soup (today is a day of lists of reasons, apparently) is that it's my last real day off, like I said, and making soup is so opposite teaching that it seemed appropriate. It is also something that I would not have even been able to conceive of doing ten years ago.

Ah, yes, here we come to the drive of this blog for today. It's tiny, pulsing heart, if you will. Never, ever did I expect to be where I am today ten years ago. To be completely frank, I was an entirely different person then. And I think (this is actually something I've thought about a lot, so it's probably more true than you might believe) that if I had been going for my life right now as a goal ten years ago, I would have failed and failed and failed.

What I mean is, if I had had this career and life in mind, I would not have been able to achieve it. Ten years ago I would have totally messed up my chances for it, somehow; this is the kind of girl I was. I'm happy to say that I have morphed or changed or perhaps transformed into someone who isn't constantly shooting herself in her own feet, tripping over her own idealism, and generally working on failing at life. That sounds harsh, maybe, but I think a lot of people go through that phase.

In fact, I see it in my kids all the time. Really smart young people who seem to do everything in their power to fail. I've even talked to them about it before. But then, I think when someone is at that place in life, there is really no talking them out of it. They have to want to change.

So, for what it's worth, my soup (whether it actually tastes good or not, I'm just working on actually getting the soup finished here) is evidence of my own butterflyness or however you would rather imagine this whole transformational thing that happens to people, and which has happily happened to me.