Happiness Is Good Spaghetti

I’ve spent today fighting with MS Word 2007, cleaning, spending time with my daughter, being frustrated by her mother, and basically the usual stuff.

But last night, I cooked.

I like to cook, I really do. I don’t do it often because I don’t like to cook in a dirty kitchen, and I don’t like cleaning up behind other people (unless, of course, I love them and we share cleaning duties. That’s entirely different). But last night, I really wanted to cook, really wanted to make spaghetti and meatballs (yeah, I know, I get weird cravings sometimes), so I spent over three hours cleaning up the kitchen enough that I could feel comfortable cooking in it.

And I made my spaghetti and meatballs.

And they were good. The sauce wasn’t anything special, just tomato sauce with garlic salt, parsley flakes, basil, and something else I can’t remember right now, heated on the stovetop. The meatballs were roughly a pound of ground beef, an egg, half a packet of Lipton Onion Soup Mix, soy sauce, and a little tomato sauce. The spaghetti was just plain, store-bought spaghetti.

It’s not a major recipe. Not even hard to make. Just good and filling and I was glad I did it. It felt good to cook; even the fact that the kitchen was a bit messy again today so my hours of work were about half undone didn’t diminish my enjoyment of that moment.

On an episode of CSI (which I have been watching a lot lately, and not just because I think Marg Helgenberger is hot), Gil Grissom tells Nick Stokes that “the people that are great at what they do, do it for their own approval, not the approval of others.”

Not ever having been much of one for making myself happy, I understand that a little more now, having eaten some damn good spaghetti. (”My name is Pandem, and I approved this spaghetti.”)

I’m going to work on making myself happy and garnering my own approval more often.

It’s a long road. . .