a food blog?

I love cooking for friends and family. I also love baking. Mostly because I love sharing my culinary creations with people. This was a side effect of the pandemic when I started my sourdough starter like many others on the internet. I also indulged in cooking channels on YouTube. Bon Appétit, America’s Test Kitchen among others. This gave me a head start in baking and cooking, experience as I cooked and baked a ton to my mom’s despise (jk, she was just not happy with the mess I made in her kitchen). So I realized I’m very into creating food! Most often, when I lived with my sister, I’d cook things she liked or things I liked cooking and she didn’t very eagerly eat. She did eat a great deal, she had to.

So, this whole thing comes down to one factor: I love making things to share with friends and loved ones. And food, being a stable on its own, is a great venue to share things in. Since I started living on my own some two years ago, I have only cooked healthy and experimental stuff at a minimum bare, because I didn’t have many people to share my creations with.

I did bake and cook a ton of food for my friends and colleagues but it’s not been the same as it once was when I was working from home. To not complicate things any further, I want to get into cooking and baking for real. Trying out recipes on ATK, Brad’s and Claire’s new YouTube channels. Maybe to this end, I should start a food blog? If there was a food blog, I’d document my progress (if any) and showcase the horrible doings in my kitchen. Maybe I could do one her eon this blog or on Instagram, with a new account dedicated to cooking and baking!

Fact of the matter is, I don’t even know if I have the time or dedication, but what would I lose if I only tried?

why can’t I stay motivated

This one bothers me a ton. I’m a very curious person, no wonder in that. I dig and dig and just dig even deeper at times and it all becomes too convoluted. Why make it so in the first place? Just download a to-do app and follow along a stupid lines of ticks. Or, maybe, a pomodoro timer app that has a cheap in-app purchase option, so that my lizard brain can feel good about it.

I’m either too focused on things totally uncalled for, or just lost, left in limbo. That’s my doing, of course. I can’t stay focussed or motivated on things that matter for me as a person. I wanna research a topic but end up reading random history or weird, niche grammar of a language that’s just not gonna provide for me, or seek my company. Feeling lonely. This bothers me a chunk much. If that makes sense. Why can’t I stay motivated? I mean, I want to. I try to. What’s the deal with me? Too many questions always get things going, like a good research article. But does it work for self-improvement? I mean, does anything work for it? What do we do? Or what should we not do? Is it something to undo or do further more and ahead? Maybe just stop with it, and carry on with what there is to do. I’m just too confused and it bother me a lot.

the urge to pen down

Way too often this urge emerges, and I fail to act on it. I don’t caress myself into writing but the urge only remains. It remains only so subtle that it will not vanish out of existence, nor will it make me act.

Writing does require hoards of research hours, countless readings and unsatisfied state of mind, which follows the two others gladly. But maybe, I should, only, act on the urge and let it emerge on, and on and let it take its course through me and find its rightful place where it is to reign with no interregnum of any sort, nor any opposition to it. Just write feels like a motto for the rest to follow and for the rest of my life.

Maybe I should just write.

I can’t just keep up

Honestly, I have created way too many blogs for any one’s taste. It all began when I was in middle school. I wanted to publish stories about our class and school, which I did with friends, and most teachers seemed to love following that blog. As a young twenty-something, this soul searching for blogging found its way when I created genage.me as a personal blog. I was and have always been very infatuated with The New Yorker whose publishing has always inspired me to write essays of a similar fashion in my own words. I did write several pieces on genage.me but I couldn’t keep up.

Enes.life as a personal blog where quick notes and reviews of things I watched and read came as a quick solution to keep up with blogging and publishing. I would only have to write real quick articles on enes.life and genage.me would preserve its the New Yorker like quality. Enes.life would just roll around my life and as such, it reflected my tastes in things to watch and read. But I failed to pay for the damn hosting service, which brought an abrupt end to both of my lovely blogs. Then I somehow revived enes.life as a general purpose blog for all things. But I couldn’t keep up with it, either.

Then, this blog you’re on came to fruition, suddenly, as all things with me generally do. And I spent so many months sitting idly and scratching, oh, I do have many things, either striking, or absolutely boredom inflicting. Will I just be able to keep up? Maybe I should write something to keep up, I mean, about keeping up.

Too Many Blogs to Keep Track of

Long story short, I began my blogging career back in middle school in two thousand and seven when I was just eleven years old. Back then, I started a blog for our class to publish ‘news’ using a blogging service called Azbuz in Turkey. Even though the service provider is long gone from the face of Internet, you can still find bits and pieces of 6bninolaylari using the Internet Archive here. This is the earliest snapshot from the amateur blog that I created as a teen-ager. I was joined by like-minded friends of mine, popyularmerve (who later changed her use name to Miss Fairy Merve) and badboys414, who contributed to the site with their investigative journalism. The blog was full of gossip and school-related talk but unfortunately, not all pieces were captured by the Internet Archive so most of its content is lost to the darkness. Reading through what’s left, you can only smile as you scroll through an eleven year old’s bad spelling in Turkish and childishly written content.

I also had other endeavours where I took on the responsibility of several web forums as an admin, namely, ForumAyna and ProgramAlani.com among others. My pursuit of keeping a blog or a website came to a pause when I was in high school, when I was dealing mostly with coding and web design. My first personal blog appeared in two thousand and seventeen as my Erasmus exchange was nearing its end. I wrote a long essay about studying in Germany and published it on genage.me. I aimed to write in-depth stories about my life at the time, and I did, to a certain level. I might re-publish some of the essays from genage.me.

Some time later, I created yet another blog on enes.life, which I, at the time, aimed to be a space where I posted ‘quick notes’ from my life and about the media that I consumed, be it books or TV shows. At some point, genage.me and enes.life were both gone simultaneously as I failed to pay the hosting fee. It wasn’t that I did not have the money at the time but I only forgot to pay. How improtant these two blogs were for me! To my surprise, I could save some of the old posts from either one of them. Then I revived enes.life as a stand-alone blog, but it, too, shared the same fate. And now, here I am, with yet another (personal) blog, and yet again giving a brief history of my blog keeping (or my attempt at it). This one, inmywords, is another attempt, and hopefully, the last and a successful one.

I plan to touch on things that are important and dear to me. There is only one thing I know for sure: I have a never-satisfied appetite to write and I will write on and on!