One of the meals I came up with while still in university was a basic spaghetti recipe. I still have it regularly to this day, and think I’ve perfected the sauce now, because it’s nice and thick but one doesn’t lose their noodles in it. I’ve never liked the process of consuming meatballs with spaghetti, so I’ve always used ground beef instead.

Ingredients:

• Approximately 500 grams of ground beef (for an even thicker sauce, use as much as 600 grams)
• Spicy Pepper Medley Seasoning by Club House
• One jar (26 oz) of tomato sauce (I usually use Fire Roasted Tomato and Garlic by Classico)
• A literal dash of sugar (Clemenza’s trick)
• 0.5 lb uncooked spaghetti

Makes:

3 generous servings

Directions:

1. Boil spaghetti in large pot. It should be al dente in roughly the same amount of time it takes to cook the sauce.
2. Brown ground beef in a medium sized pot. Drain.
3. Season ground beef liberally with Spicy Pepper Medley and continue to simmer for three minutes, stirring frequently. (This is too give the seasoning time to bring out the flavour of the beef, which wouldn’t be as prominent if the sauce was added first)
4. Turn heat to high, and stir in pasta sauce. Stir in sugar. Add more Spicy Pepper Medley to taste (I probably end up adding about 10 tablespoons to get the spiciness just right, when it doesn’t burn at the start, but gets hotter as it is consumed).
5. Continue stirring until sauce is at a boil. Remove from heat.
6. Drain spaghetti, and serve with sauce.

Variations:

• For a chunkier sauce and more complicated taste, add in a combination of mushrooms and onions right before simmering the beef in step 2.
• Use a jar of Presidents Choice Sweet Basil Pasta Sauce for an almost dessert-like spaghetti. The perfect combination of sweet and salty.

It’s convenient because all the ingredients are shelf items or can be frozen, so it can be used as a backup meal, yet still be hearty enough to be filling. It’s also fairly cheap and simple.

When I shave, I always start in the middle, then shave the left cheek, and finish with the right. It’s not that I can’t deviate this, it’s that I choose not to. The chin and lip areas are always very irritable, while the sides remain smooth and satisfying.

I have so many things on my mind, so many things I want to write about, have been planning on writing about even, but this seems to be the only thing in which I can properly express myself.

John and I parted yesterday, agreeing that we would plan to see each other over the summer. It was the first time that we parted with embraces, and up to then, we had always left each other with verbal salutations. I realized that I started asking him for advice, a line I had never crossed with him before. Our minds generally don’t match. We may get along well (one may even say famously, in the superlative sense), but we also have different levels of tolerance, different goals, different worldviews, different strengths and weaknesses.

So what has changed? What has made me trust him in this now, when I haven’t in the past? I rarely heed his advice; it’s usually so completely different from what I’m thinking, and I almost never agree on the set of thoughts on which they’re based.

Perhaps this new-found trust is due to the fact that I’m slowly starting to understand a part of his mind that has baffled me in the past: a seemingly inherent evil. I felt like I couldn’t trust him, because I felt like nobody should trust him, and it became serious enough to make me question the foundation of our friendship.

At one point I started to distance myself from him, although later on (perhaps solely) due to the fact that it showed he actually cared about this, I started to trust him again. This made it a blind trust, because it wasn’t based on a train of thought of his that I could actually understand.

Now, I can more make sense of his words, his actions. Even with a liberal dose of some seemingly heartless, coldhearted comments (very broad), which even made me feel like a moral person, I trust him more than ever.

Why do these words come so easily?

Perhaps he can be viewed as a friend in the logical sense. He sees friendship as a sort of symbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship. Although there are circumstances which he may find beneficial to disregard any sort of proper morals (such as a stab in the back for further gain), he also understands that following these morals and having strong relationships is much more beneficial in the long run.

He can’t be blamed for this approach to friendship. I’m starting to believe that there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I’d probably completely believe in it, if my mind wasn’t so hesitant about admitting that I was very, very wrong, and very, very ignorant. I had always viewed it as a being his approach as being too cold for me to be comfortable with it all, but now, I realize that as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my own approach to friendship, there’s nothing that should make me uncomfortable.

And now, trust has solved everything.

Last night I was plagued by nightmares about being drugged with sodium pentothal, held down by sniper fire in a beautifully furnished Victorian home with George Bluth. Between the clinkety-clink of the cubes in her low-ball, Mrs. Bluth said, in a moment of clarity, “If you can’t live for yourself, you might as well live for others”. The words made more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month. She gave me a clockwork wink and disappeared, leaving us alone against her hired red beams and smoke grenades.

When I stepped outside to head to work this morning, the winter chill startled me into a false sense of alertness, but it was quickly taken over by a general feeling of uneasiness. The dreams were unsettling to say the least (I haven’t slept so poorly in over a month), and the last thing that I wanted to do was start the day off with a walk on a winter morning before there was any light out. I kept waking up every two hours, and as good as it was to feel exhausted enough to fall sleep again, it felt terrible to not actually be able. It’s as if I haven’t slept at all, and tragically enough, I start work for the new year today. I was hoping to be well rested for the first day back, but that isn’t happening, so I’ll be fighting off a tremendous urge to sleep when I get home. I’ll try to burn through it, which shouldn’t be hard.

In any case, I use the words, “more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month” because John is in town. This is the person who knows me better than anyone else I know, better even than myself. Within half an hour of arriving, he helped me realize that I do require acceptance in my relationships, a need that has stemmed from childhood, that the best road to achieving my goals is not always the easiest one, and so many other countless things that I couldn’t have seen for myself. This winter break has been the worst in years, but now, John is here. I haven’t seen him in over six months. Yesterday, I couldn’t stop smiling, after finding him in the peephole of my front door.

This is my vacation.