welcome?

I'll be honest--I can't come up with anything pithy or interesting to say in terms of a welcome to my blog. I feel that any sort of grand welcome would be absurd, since I doubt that hoards of fascinated people will descend instantly on this site and eagerly read my welcome message.

So I'll stick to just explaining why I'm writing this blog.

I've recently been captivated by this idea that I sleepwalk through life. Actually the idea is that almost everyone sleepwalks through life, but seeing as I can't control anyone but myself, I'm mostly worried about my sleepwalking. How often do I do things--eat food, talk to people, etc--without thinking?

I get captivated by ideas a lot, but mostly they're silly (I must watch every episode of Monk on Netflix NOW) and sometimes just plain nerdy (why don't we have politicians like the Founding Fathers anymore?) but usually I either answer them or act on them and then they're gone. Poof. Like listening to a song that's been stuck in your head all day--once you hear it, it leaves you alone.

So when I started thinking how many things do I do without thinking about them, I sort of expected the same old routine: stew about the question, try to answer it somehow, and poof!

Instead the thought lingered. It bothered me, worried at me, itched, ached, annoyed. I couldn't find a good enough answer. I eventually tried my usual last resort when I can't get over one of these obsessions...I told myself that the answer to my question was that it was...unanswerable. Bam. How profound, right? But sometimes, it works. It's sort of like winking at yourself...even though I know I'm tricking myself, sometimes it can pacify whatever curious cat is curled up inside my brain.

But no. Not this time. Bleh.

So instead, I decided to act on it, starting this summer. (Yes, I know I'm starting the blog towards the end of summer, but I wanted to be able to write about things actually happening and hopefully real progress, not just hypothetical situations.) I've decided to, as I have so cutely named it, live consciously.

This means thinking, a lot. It means paying really close attention to what I eat, to what I say, to who I talk to, and how. To me, living consciously is all about being attentive to how I live my life. (It does not mean paying attention to every breath, every blink, every twitch. That would just be stupid.)

So this blog is kind of a like a story, albeit a long, disconnected one, made up mostly of anecdotes and snippets of my life and brain.

Also, as you can probably guess from the web address, I'm going to talk about baking/cooking/food a lot, because one of the facets of being conscious is paying more attention to what I eat and drink. Actually, I mostly just like baking and will find lots of ways to pretend that making chocolate chip cookies has some deep relevance to my life circumstances.

Anyway, thanks for reading this! Hopefully it wasn't so awful that you'll never come back. More posts coming soon!