Day 37: Cuchina Italiana!

So today my two friends and I set out to make pizza from scratch. When I say scratch, i mean no pre-made doughs already formed into a perfect circle and delicately wrapped in plastic. I'm talking active dry yeast, messy flour, and three people who don't really knead dough on a regular basis. We started out by using Betty Crocker's one crust dough recipe, only to realize the end result wasn't large enough to make a pizza for the three of us. While CB was kneading the dough for the one crust dough, i got to work sturring up the two crust recipe. CB let hers rise in the kitchen, which was moderately warm, and i let mine rise in my step sisters room, which has no air conditioning in it whatsoever. by the end of the 2-2o minute waiting periods combined, her dough had risen to normal size, and mine had started to become a bleached flour blob on a plate.
Without really thinking about how my blob would expand on a cookie sheet, we decided to use only half of my blob and CB's blob. I cut my dough, froze one half, and we put both in the fridge for about an hour and 30 minutes.
To kill time, we watched a free horror movie on demand. this time we watch Urban Legends/Bloody Mary. I never understood the point of watching horror films until i met jessica and CB. most of my friends at king lab watched them expecting to be scared. we watch them to critique the plot lines and wonder why is it that the white protagonist prevails in the end when they seem to have the least common sense. I love our random comments throughout the movie where we try and figure out why the main characters didn't do another sequence over the course of action taken in the movie.

After the movie. we decided to try and make the pizza dough work. We just decided to combine them to make the ideal thick and large pizza crust we wanted.

the lesson to be learned from this: Betty Crocker doesn't know how to make decent sized pizza!

after my friends left i went upstairs to talk to my mother. big mistake!
all i wanted to accomplish was talking to her about my fears, instead the conversation warped into how she has little faith in me when it comes to managing money. she constantly harps on me about how much money i spend buying groceries and what she calls "shit", or my leisure purchases. she asked me "well if you don't like my comments on your financial situation, what do you want me to do?"
i told her i want her to think about what she wants to say before she does, and ask herself whether it would really benefit me to say it, would it really help the situation. in the end, i wound up telling her "i beat up on myself for my mistakes enough for an army, i don't need additional help!"
i could see the tears in her eyes, because every time i get like this, every time i loose myself in my emotions, she sees herself. she sees the emotional cutter she was as a child, which eventually manifested itself into physical cutting. she remembers how hard she was on herself, how she couldn't appreciate her own talents, and tended to focus on her short comings. she sees herself in me, and despite all her efforts to do things differently than her mother, i still turned out the same way. i still turned out to be the person who fixates on the fact that i'm not good at math, science, test taking, essentially academic things which will dissipate eventually. she's watched as its destroyed me over the years, been the cause for mental breakdowns, the reason i took mental health days in high school. it reminds me of the time i was diagnosed with clinical depression before going into high school. like most parents, she was torn between being happy there was a name for my persistent dark state of mind, but at the same time she blamed herself. she blamed herself for passing her mental problems down to me.
i don't know how to tell her one day i'm going to figure out how to manage money. personally i don't know anybody my age who manages money very well, even the people who do have jobs and wealthier parents than me seem to be perpetually broke but "ballin!" when i get a job in college, i feel like i'm going to be so busy i'll just let my work study money pile up in a corner of my dorm. since my dorm building will have a cafeteria, i won't have to pay for food with my work study money. i'll be able to save it for whatever i want. i'll probably buy some bonds for the future, because the best way for me to save money is to put it somewhere, forget about it, and let it grow over a long period of time. that way, i'll have some money to pay off graduate school loans, and possibly buy a house.
as for my emotions, I'm spending my time figuring out ways i can be better at things i'm not good at, with the exception of math and science. i stink at languages, but I'm exploring a way to learn french and japanese in a way that works for me, so when i do have to take a class at Hampshire, i know how to teach myself if the classroom atmosphere isn't right.
i think my biggest accomplishment is accepting that i'm a writer, and there's nothing wrong with being a writer over a mathematician/scientist, despite what they tell you in middle and high school. its like i told one of my good art friends "whats the point of having the knowledge of making a great discovery, if you articulation of said discovering......well stinks!"