Back at it again. Procrastinating.

I’m so behind on my writing projects that one of these days I’ll just have to suck it up and write at night at the Starbucks or just get off my ass and focus on the writing. I need to write, the plan, and make a damn dent on the project. So behind. So so behind.

Today is not one of those days that I will focus on my writing. Today is a finger tapping day. Me and my empty void, clearing my mind and honestly, I don’t think I have anything to say.

* * *

Going gray. Not naturally, but on purpose.

It seems to be a craze right now; girls are dyeing their hair gray. I saw this a few years ago when one of the Wong Fu crew dyed his hair gray, but thought really nothing of it, but then I saw it coming back with a force, now with girls.

It really struck me when I first saw my doppelganger at work with it. pvo had done it a few times and now it seems that the Hurry Curry girl did it.

It really seems like it is an Asian girl thing. Or maybe it is an all-girl thing and it just so happens that the only people that I saw doing it are Asian. I think that is more likely.

It’s a weird trend. I probably will not understand it, but that’s me not being a part of the zeitgeist and just not being cool. It is what it is.

* * *

Baking.

That’s where my focus has been. Baking bread to be exact.

Instead of doing commercial yeast baking, my thing now is using my own cultured yeast – sourdough starter, in which I named Cleofis, to help the bread rise.

I’ve been baking a lot, experiment, trying to get a confident feel of how to make bread and it definitely have been error after error.

I’ve tried rustic loaves, to baguettes, to white sandwich breads.

They all come with certain amount of success and many disappointments.

It’s very nuanced and requires a lot of time and I’m a little too impatient about it. The thing is, I don’t like the sour taste, so I want a fast rapid rise, but sometimes my apartment isn’t warm enough, so it isn’t conducive to a good rise, so I just rush it and just say fuck it and bake and it just turns out not so well.

Another thing I’m trying to learn is how to gauge my dough. I don’t know when it is too wet, too dry, or just right.

I follow the recipe, but to no avail, all the time it just seems too wet for me.

A high hydration dough is very tough to work with and I’m afraid to add more flour to it, which can throw off the consistency of the bread. The more flour, the denser the bread is.

What I learned is that the higher the hydration, the bigger the air holes are in the bread. But with higher hydrated dough, the tougher it is to form and knead the dough.

It’s a fine nuanced balance and I guess it is one of those things that just requires patience and doing and experimenting to get a good hand at it.

I honestly don’t understand why I have this high fascination with baking now, or more specifically bread baking. It just seems very random and out of nowhere.

I know I like to cook from scratch, mainly for health reasons, knowing specifically what goes into my body, but why bread?

Before, I don’t eat much bread. It isn’t a part of my diet. I’ll get bread when I want bread or if it goes well with what I’m cooking. It had never been a staple in my apartment or my diet.

But I guess I just needed something else to focus on and I think I can do it. There’s such a high learning curve to it that I’m just fascinated by it. It’s hard and challenging, and I’m guessing that is why my sudden interest in it.

I had a few successes and now it is time to be more proficient at it.

I think more than anything, that’s the biggest thing that I want to accomplish this year. Be better at baking. Have a better understanding about the whole process of baking bread and what happens when I do things this way and that way. I want to know all.

It has gotten to a point where I stopped writing to do research on videos on how to bake bread. I want to learn.

Learning and improving is key.