Thursday: blondies, bread, mayo, new mixer arrives

I walked with M.

I had my hair colored and cut.

I made blondies, set up a sourdough, made mayo using the immersion blender (that’s a winner — much easier to deal with than the food processor). The Bosch Universal Plus arrived. I’ve washed it, but I haven’t tried using it yet. The tradeoffs of the weird bowl of the Bosch vs. the bowl-lift Kitchen-Aid are interesting to contemplate.

A. had some aura today and went to the nurse. So, that’s back. *sigh*

I’m currently contemplating the very high level of overlap of various kitchen power tools, the volume of cooking I do now / might ever do, and thinking about moving more things along.

Anxiety, Motivation, _The Worry Trick_, and _Future Tense_

If I have recommended _The Worry Trick_ to you, and you maybe even got it from the library or bought it or whatever, and you have not read it, and you feel moderately bad about that because I recommended it to you and you or someone you know is very anxious (like, in a disabling, symptom-causing sort of way) and you just can’t figure out why you haven’t read it and that, too, is adding to your anxiety, I have news for you!

No one is still here, and I am okay with that.

Anyway.

I did not finish reading _Future Tense_ because the author advocates for anxiety as a way to motivate oneself to do … everything in life that needs to be done but that isn’t insanely fun and easy to do and gamified and wtf. It’s terrible advice so I DNF’d it. And I have been fucking _haunted_ by that book, as I realize again and again how many people I know who truly _suffer_ from anxiety are in fact using anxiety to motivate themselves to do all kinds of things.

The news part: I am working on a clear, simple presentation of an alternate motivation system. And I commit to _not_ nagging at you to let go of the anxiety motivational system until I have a Good Enough replacement system to offer you. I expect that if the alternative motivational system is Good Enough, that it will be dead easy to let go of the anxiety as soon as the alternative has been adopted. If it _isn’t_ good enough, I’ll just circle back around and incremental it until it is.