on writing in general

i got some new cookbooks last week that i am pretty excited about. i have already skimmed ad hoc at home and momofuku and gotten lots of ideas about things i want to cook. this weekend i was inspired by lots of black bananas in my freezer to make mark bittman's banana nut muffins, which were good but i think maybe i left them in the oven a minute or two too long, and by some almost withering grapes and about to turn broccoli to make a variation on this recipe for roasted broccoli/grapes/asparagus and quinoa salad in which i omitted the asparagus and arugula and substituted couscous for the quinoa.  it was tasty.

what i am spending my time reading

i'm not that inspired to write about restaurants anymore.  i think i've said before that i feel like i have said all i have to say about food in cincinnati.  i know i have said before that i am sick of being a food blog in a sea of cincinnati food blogs with (mostly) no real commitment to quality writing and with (mostly) a cutthroat desire to just rate as many places as possible for... i don't even know what purpose. there are exceptions.  just not that many.

i'm not even that inspired to eat at restaurants to be honest.  i do get excited about new places or really good old standbys or hidden gems that i discover.  but i feel like i pretty much know the lay of the land as far as cincinnati restaurant dining goes, and as lori pointed out a few months ago, it's just not that exciting or dynamic (other than hopefully a new place that may or may not be arriving on the scene this summer which i have been sworn to secrecy from talking about on this blog... oops).  plus i don't have a lot of money and don't want to spend my limited eating budget on eating out unless it's either really good or has good bang for the buck.

i do still feel the urge to write, and to be truly satisfying for me, my writing needs an audience.  i popped back up again in your google readers recently because i was needing to get my public writing fix... but as you have seen, there hasn't been much food and there has been a whole hell of a lot of rage, some of it probably misdirected.  the original intent of this blog wasn't just to spew hate, although it's not like i can pretend that wasn't part of it.  it was to write about food.  and i don't think i want to write about food that much anymore.

i'm lazy though and as any blogger knows (especially me with my boring, short lived, and totally unnoticed debt and advice blogs), your audience won't follow you somewhere else.  you're going to lose almost everyone if you go someotherrandomassortmentofletters.blogspot.com.  and i like my readers and my audience (well, some of them anyway. the anonymous assholes and creepy stalkers can, all together now, go fuck themselves).  or at least, i like that you are interested in what i have to say.

when i began writing this blog, and for a long time after that, i felt that i needed at least some level of anonymity.  i've had more than my share of internet and real life stalkers and was scared that putting myself out there on the internet would only attract more.  i'm older now and have developed a more relaxed approach because i have realized over time that the people i've had to tell to go fuck themselves in various situations because something i said or did made them uncomfortable are people that truly, i was better off without.  i also have this desire for authenticity and ownership of my self-expression that i didn't have in the past.  i want to be myself and say what i want and express my experience and put my name on it.

this is all kind of vague and i'm probably not doing the best job of saying what i mean.  what i mean is, i want to say new things on this blog that may or may not be about food, and i don't want to be constrained by my past format to say them with some type of (probably forced and cheesy) food metaphor or allegory, and i also think i want to go deeper in expressing myself and my personal experiences than i have before.

i have been spending a lot of time thinking about this desire/need to write for a public audience but not necessarily wanting to write in the same way or on the same topics as i have before, and wanting to write more personally.  on one hand, i feel constrained by my concerns about people's reactions.  if i'm writing about me and my life, i'm also writing about people i know, as in the post discussed above.  and maybe it is selfish/self absorbed... a common criticism of me by my family members (and the most recent rage filled anonymous commenter on this blog).  but most personal writing is exactly that, and i also feel that by writing about my personal experiences, i may be able to express something that others can connect to emotionally, in the same way that my food writing used to feel as though it connected people with good things to eat in cincinnati.

i don't know what's coming in the future for this blog, but that's what's going on in my head about it.