what doesn’t kill you makes your nervous system more sensitive for the rest of your life

btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.

at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly

at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.

at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.

At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.

once my friend made a drink he called turpentine that tasted like every worst college night out rolled into one and felt like getting whacked in the head with a hammer, and I woke up in my own apartment with my phone wallet keys clothes and absolutely zero memory of the night before, and when I checked my watch I'd walked over 60k steps.

60k steps in the middle of the night in heels for reasons entirely unknown to me. what was I doing. where did I go. where did I come from. cotton eye joe. or whatever.

OP went dancing with the 12 dancing princesses pass it on

everyone go home this guy solved it

Realizing the change in American food culture in my life time is largely due to the fact that nearly a third of adults smoked cigarettes at the year of my birth and that number has dropped to about 10% is something that is deeply obvious in retrospect but I also needed someone else to point out to me. Like, the nightmarish 50s cookbooks existed because nearly half of everyone regularly consumed an appetite suppressant that made you unable to taste or smell for shit. I remember some comedian saying that it was easy to be skinny in the 80s because everything tasted like shit. Or course it did. 40% of your restaurant clientele could't fucking taste it which greatly decreased the potential profitability of any eating establishment that was actually trying, thus affecting the standards even of people who COULD taste. Even if you didn't smoke, odds were someone in your household did and everything tasted like ash. It all makes sense now.

Another reason why trains would be good is that most people are not good at driving