An empty stomach makes any food look good!

Now I very much want to eat shiruko. I have azuki beans, plenty of sugar and can probably manage a half-decent mochi if I try, so maybe I'll make some for myself next week, when Rei's at work and won't be around if I happen to fail.

Looking through Web Japan's food section makes me hungry for all sorts of things. Tamagoyaki sounds really good right about now, and I find myself wondering if fiddleheads might be good to use for takikomi gohan. Seems like you can't really go wrong with ingredients for takikomi gohan, really, and it will give me a good excuse to go and pick any fiddleheads that are growing already. (Let's hear it for foraging to stretch the grocery budget that much further!)

I think I might see if I can convince Rei to spring for some smoked salmon today, and we can make onigiri tomorrow. This will probably be easier if I also convince him to buy some ground pork and cabbage so we can make gyoza again, since he's been craving gyoza for over a week now.

Can't tell that Japanese food is a big hit here, can you? I ask as I have another mouthful of green tea.

If I want to go through with this plan, I ought to spend some time today taking stock of what we already have in, and cleaning up the kitchen further. I have a few hours before I need to go uptown to meet Rei after work, so that's plenty of time.

The problem now is that my bowl of cornflakes seems really unappetizing compared to all this delicious food I've been looking at!

[Edit] - Didn't pick up gyoza ingredients or smoked salmon. Instead, we ate ice cream while walking home and enjoying the nice weather. Now I'm reading shounen-ai manga while waiting for the predicted thunderstorm to hit.

I just had a terrifying thought.

In an article I just read, I once again came across the old concept of parental role-models, how females will take after their mothers and males will take after their fathers. I scoffed, and almost said aloud how thankful I am that I'm not like my mother, because then I'd be a spineless twit without an original thought in my head.

I then paused. That, sadly, isn't too far off the mark.

I am, when it comes right down to it, rather spineless. Thanks to wonderful social anxiety, some days I'm scared to go beyond my front door. I don't like to talk to people, because I'm afraid of what they might think of me, what they might do. I spent the majority of my life being unable to stand up for myself, and I have low self-esteem.

I can be a sheep. Many of my opinions are based upon the opinions of those I admire, as though by sharing that opinion I might consequently get them to think more highly of me, perhaps even admire me some day for the insights I merely parrot back to them. True, we all base some of our opinions on those of others, and we're more inclined to agree with the opinions of the people we admire, or else we wouldn't admire them so, but sometimes I feel I take this too far. Even if I disagree with them, I try to find something in there I can agree with. At least I'll say, "I don't agree because x, but you're right that y happens." In this way, I'm also rather cowardly.

Ye gods, have I actually turned into my mother? Do I despise her because I see so much of myself in her? Do her negative traits bother me because they're merely reflections of the negativity inside myself?

And that's where the thought-train stopped. Reflections. I think that's a good way to describe what my mother does. She reflects. She reflects the opinions of whoever she's with at the time, regardless of whether she admires them or agrees with them or hates their guts and thinks they should burn in hell. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she hides her true self within, but in truth and from experience, I'm not sure she's deep enough for that. Scratch her surface and you'll just find another mirror.

I reflect, but my surface is wonky, uneven, and has bits of myself showing that have worn through the reflective coating over time. I've got -- dare I say it? -- character. I may sometimes be too anxious to leave the house, but my spine has grown and I'm no longer living under the thumb of people who find it a great source of joy to oppress me and beat me down. I may parrot back the thoughts of those whom I admire, but more often than not not I realise that I do this because the people I admire are people who already have opinions and thoughts that match my own. In them, I see what I want to become, or at least aspects of what I want to become.

I used to get upset that I could surround myself with interesting people and yet they would never pay attention to me. It took me a while to understand that before I could become a minor part of somebody else's life, I had to become a major part of my own. It was useless to just wait for people to notice me when I did nothing worth noticing. I started learning more about myself.

This is something my mother has not done, and it shows.

I have done it, and now I've experienced people saying, "I don't know about x, but you do, so could you explain it to me?" People I admire have said that to me. At some point along the way, I stopped reflecting them and started showing myself, and what I showed was impressive enough for people to take note.

My mother, I suspect, will end up a lonely and unhappy woman. She has friends, but all of them fairweather, and she takes them all for granted and then complains that they ignore her calls when she spent the last month going out of her way to avoid them. Her solution to problems is to run away from them and to hope they don't find her again, and then she runs away from running away when it becomes too difficult to keep hiding. Whenever she's asked her opinion, she says she doesn't have one, until the strongest debater puts for their view and only then does she voice any agreement.

I'm thankful that although I have my problems, I'm not that bad.

I am like my mother in some ways. I can't deny that. But when I scratch my own surface and see what's underneath, I learn more and more that in the ways that count, we're very different. We started with similar personalities, but took them in very different directions.

This doesn't change my opinion of her. I still think she's a selfish cowardly idiot who hasn't amounted to much and seems to only get by on luck and pity. But I can, at least, see her for what she is, see the parts of me that match, and handle them accordingly. Sharing traits with her doesn't mean I am her, or that I will become her.

(I'm aware that this entry is very harsh toward my mother, and I make no apology for it. It is because of my parents and their neglectful raising of me that I sometimes stop and marvel at the fact that I'm still alive and with fewer psychological issues than I could have had. I can only get along with them for short periods of time, and only then superficially. I call them my parents, but it's really only for lack of anything better to call them. I could call them M and A, but to talk about them and how they affect me, I would have to incorporate the fact that they raised me, and so calling them parents is easiest. I see little reason to treat them more respectfully than any other person I just barely get along with, just because they couldn't be arsed to use condoms when they were dating.)