According to Plan

I turn 30 in six months. I’ve got this list of 30 things I’d like to accomplish before then. It’s actually around 33 things, but Thirty Before Thirty sounds better, and I’ll be honest, some of the things on the list are things like “Eat Empanadas” that aren’t exactly going to be life changing events. Anyway, it really just started out as a list of things to do around here because it’s so damned boring, and also I find lists comforting. I wish I was the kind of person who woke up spontaneously on Saturday morning and went trilling through the grass on the way to fly a kite via the farmer’s market, but I’m actually the type of person who reads a book on sustainable agriculture and then looks it up on the web and then talks about it with my husband and then puts “go to farmer’s market” on a list.

Then the list evolved, and I thought maybe I could use it to get myself out of the rut I’m in right now. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, and I’m trying to figure it out. I can’t help but notice that I’m not in fact married to JFK Jr and I’m not living in a brownstone in Tribeca and buying shoes for a living and I’m not six feet tall and I don’t have long blond straight hair and things have not gone according to plan. However I am pretty sure that whatever I’m going to love to do in life, whatever it is that I want to do forever, that I’m going to be really good at, it’s not being an underpaid glorified office temp. All I know is that the list reads:

#17. Figure out life: food, books, writing.

Because right now I am feeling lost, I have to stick with the very basics, the things I know for sure about me, the things I am most passionate about in life. Food, books, and writing. As motivation I’m going to start writing about dinners we’ve been eating, that I’ve been cooking, complete with pictures. I hope that for the most part they will be healthy and full of good things to eat and we’ll all be inspired – after all, eat more vegetables is Number Five on the list.