I didn’t always know how to cook. I didn’t always love cooking, either—in fact, there are many days where I don’t love cooking. It’s time-consuming and messy. Things don’t always turn out right. I will almost always forget a key ingredient.

But I do love food. I have always loved food, even back when I ate the same few things over and over again. I like to play with food, sometimes to the point of disgusting everyone around me—grapes and ranch dressing do not go together, and there is such a thing as too much garlic salt on popcorn (though I maintain that that was not actually my fault).

Part of loving food, for me, is learning how it works. So I screw up recipes weekly, buy regular ol’ Bumblebee instead of fancy Italian canned tuna, mistake anchovies for sardines. Most of the time, it turns out fine. When it doesn’t, I curse and startle the dog and eat it anyway, a lesson learned.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

It’s always been easy for me to believe in things. Too easy, most of the time; I spent a not-insignificant portion of my life afraid of inhaling spirits in graveyards and fearing that thinking “Bloody Mary” in a mirror might cause a violent ghost to appear. I don’t really believe them anymore, but sometimes I do, because it’s easy to believe things when you’re afraid or alone or uncertain. I try not to let fear impact the things I do, but it’s much harder to stop it from impacting the things I think. I keep trying, hoping I’ll do better tomorrow.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I have always loved reading descriptions of food, so much so that it was a shock to me to find out that other people didn’t like it. I’m happy to read loving descriptions of foods I’m familiar with, foods I’ve never food up, foods that don’t actually exist. More simply put: I love food, and I love descriptive writing (a thing I find myself woefully inadequate at), and I will therefore cherish your George R. R. Martin feasts, your Audrey Niffenegger meals, your Brian Jacques rations.

I don’t have anything more substantial to add here; this is simply an unpopular opinions post about how much I love food writing. Carry on.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I’ve written about blackberries more times than I can count. They’re an invasive species. They prick you and draw blood. They grow and grow, unstoppable.

And yet, I love them anyway. Not just because they produce delicious fruit, but because they are what they are—resilient, monstrous, prickly. I used them as a positive metaphor once and was told the metaphor didn’t work. I’m thinking about getting a tattoo of a blackberry bush on my forearm.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I like being an only child. I never had to compete for attention. I developed an appreciation for being alone; if I’m too social too frequently, I get this horrible craving for being alone that turns me into a monster. I don’t know if that’d be different if I had a sibling growing up. But I’ve always had this curiosity about what it’s like to have someone close-ish to you in age who was always present. Would I be better at frequent socializing, if that’s how I’d been raised?

Who knows. It’s a relationship I don’t have, and while I don’t feel at all like there’s some gaping hole in my life where a sibling ought to go, it does bother me a big that it’s an experience that I can’t ever really have. I just have to imagine, which, while not necessarily a bad thing, always feels like it misses the mark.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

I’m not a risk-taker. I’m not an adrenaline junkie. But I can tell you with certainty that most all of the supremely stupid things that I have done have happened at concerts.

I wish I could explain exactly why this is. Is it just that I find the music so invigorating that my inhibitions go out the window? Is it that I wanted to be more impressive there than anywhere else? Is it all the fond memories I have of being a kid at concerts and having older folks look out for me? I may never know.

It’s not that I turn into somebody else once loud music gets going. It’s like some part of me is freed, the meekness and hesitancy evaporating. I have gotten hurt and will likely get hurt again. And yet, I’ll keep going, letting some weird and sheltered part of me run loose.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

Sometimes the appeal of fiction is imagining things as we hope they will be someday. Utopian fiction has never really done it for me; without a series of clear steps for how to get from here to there, I just don’t find idealized visions of the future all that interesting.

I’m also notoriously uninterested in apocalyptic stories. I don’t need assurance that the world is on fire; that’s life in 2019, baby.

I like a middle ground. Stories about people who see that things are terrible and do something about it. Not just surviving, though that, too, is doing something (sorry, The Road didn’t do it for me and never will), but gritting their teeth and bloodying their knuckles and planting a tree in a desolate place, returning every day to water it despite it showing no sign of growth. This is what gets me, not the threat of eternal despair or the dangling carrot of someone else solving the problem. Let me get my hands dirty. Let us all get our hands dirty.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.