Food

So my most recent joining of TasteFresno.com made me think so much about food today, that I have to write it out to get it out of my mind so I can get back to work.

Working at a German/Russian slanted school in a Hispanic area of town, across the street from a really good Asian cuisine restaurant, I get a lot of different types of food choices. This morning I had Zwiebach with home-made jam for breakfast. Lunch was Chinese food. Dinner will most likely be Italian.

Living in America, we have TONS of different choices on what to eat. Why? Because we do. This is what makes our country so great: there are so many cultures and people groups living right within our boarders, that it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to travel to a certain place to experience what their lives are like, and eat their tasty and interesting foods.

If you stopped one person on the street and asked them their favorite restaurant, they would know exactly where it is, why the like it, and why everyone has a wrong opinion. We are very particular about our food, and this comes along because of our freedoms. We are free (due to constitutional rights as well as financial ease) to say "I would rather not eat rice." In other places throughout the world, saying that meant that you were probably going to die due to self-starvation.

I guess what I'm getting at is: America, we have all this wonderful food just waiting to be tried! My policy is not to reject something as not tasty unless I have for a fact tried it and told myself that it was unappetizing. We have the money, we have the means to travel, we have the adventurous spirits, so why don't we get out of our McDonald's Double Cheeseburger routine and go down to a small Mexican, Thai, Mediterranean, French, German, Italian, or one of many other types of restaurants instead? Let's get out of our normal, boring routine and try something that we haven't. Maybe you'll discover a new favorite food, or a new worst enemy. Either way, you found out something else that you can talk about around the water-cooler tomorrow.

Time

There are tons of things that I can do with my time. So what should I spend it on? This is a question that I constantly have to answer.

I am one of the worst at maintaining relationships. I have this thing about making so many friends that it makes keeping up with them all very difficult. I also have this thing about making friends who don’t get along with other friends of mine. This makes things “fun” to deal with sometimes, and a lot of my time is spent either helping mend relationships, or giving out advice that people really didn’t want in the first place, but they really need to hear.

Managing my time isn’t something that I do very well. I have a calendar on my phone, my iPod, and my computer at work and at home, but do you think that keeps me organized? Nope. The thing is, I don’t remember to write things down like I need to and I lose track of what I’m doing. So when I sometimes think that I have all this extra free time, a lot of the time there is something that comes up from three weeks back that I totally forgot about. This makes budgeting time pretty tricky, seeing as I plan to work on something in a time slot that is already taken.

I also seem to bite of more that I can chew - all the time! It’s a mix between my needing to be busy all the time and my need to please people. I hate letting people down, that gets me in such a bad mood. At times it would be nice to have a small “I-don’t-care” attitude for situations like that, but the thing is - I really do care! This really takes up a good chuck of time, time that I could be used to work on previous commitments. I’m constantly trying to improve in that area.

So this is where I am - in this constant “not enough time” phase. The quote “I have all the time in the world” seems so untouchable, unreachable to me. I’d love to one day know what “all the time in the world” feels like. Next weekend sounds like a good time to do that…or am I already doing something?