This bread I made out of old fruit cups and some cranberry juice from my emergency Sex on the Beach supply is not all I'd hoped.

Today's lesson: be patient when trying to clabber pasteurized milk with lemon juice. If you don't understand the word "clabber," carry on.

Part of being a good cook seems to be knowing when things taste bad, and my sense of taste is terrible. There have been a few occasions, when, incredibly hungry, I've tasted something spectacular and marveled at what my taste buds are capable of — I once had something close to a religious experience with a Burger King chicken sandwich — but most of the time I'll eat just about anything.

Only my hearing and my sense of smell seem to be any good. My kinesthetic sense isn't so much great as enjoyable. I've got a dull sense of touch (my mom says I burned myself on a heater when I was a child) and vision poor enough to be lucrative. Colors and measurements are largely a mystery to me. As much as I'd like one, I don't have a writerly eye.

Do I have a writerly anything anymore? I worry that the program here has destroyed my confidence in my writing; maybe it's even ruined my writing itself.

That's not to say, of course, that I don't think the advice they've been giving is good. It's just that the whole 'breaking me down to the level of an infant' thing that was supposed to prepare me for a new, more analytic writing style took so long that, here at the end of the term, there's still a lot of building back up to be done.

I can't tell when I'm writing a good essay anymore. I've been warned against narrating and summarizing so often that my essays have become abrupt, choppy, and disordered. It's actually vaguely reassuring for me when an essay seems like the worst thing I've ever written, because I know I'm still tied to the old claim-support-explanation system I learned in high school, used all throughout college, taught to other students as a tutor...

Prof. Weiner has given me a packet on these new standards to read through. I don't doubt that this mindset is useful after seeing how it applies to biography, but if I'm going to learn this, I'd like to learn it and get back to making my writing something I can actually be proud of.

Really it's just good to be done with the last of them for now.

I thought I'd have more to write but there isn't much to be said about this Thanksgiving break. It was a bit boring, though Thursday night I hung out with Jenna and Adam and Adam's girlfriend. I'm pretty sure we decided that we liked her a while ago. We played pool on the snooker table and I was terrible.

I used to be good at pool, I swear. Or at least luckier.

One thing I realized is that all of my friends from Brainerd seem to be in relationships now, have been for months, actually.

It's probably happened before when I was out of touch or didn't notice. I guess should be having some sort of crisis but I'm too tired and too apathetic to get worked up. It makes me feel young, is all. Do I need to be more mature? Would that make a relationship a higher priority?

Too easily contented. I'm complacent; it's very relaxing.

Friday and Saturday seem like a waste, in retrospect. I could have started my Creative Nonfiction assignment or that final essay instead of watching TiVoed episodes of Law and Order. I can't watch reruns of that show, it's good to know that someday I'll be done with it.

Matt and I spent many hours researching the divide between naive camp and deliberate camp on TBS. They seem to pair the movies up that way.

Taking full advantage of my parents' cable, I also watched the terrible Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My dad was under the impression that few kids our age have heard of the original, much better movie, which I think we saw several times in school. For my part, I was amazed to find him crediting my factitious speculation that the book was a novelization of the first movie.

I also saw the new Harry Potter movie at the Brainerd theater with my mom. I've never read any of the books straight through, and it was very weird seeing the ten pages I once read in a dentist's office on screen. It was a pretty good movie, actually.

Getting back was a bit of an odyssey, mainly because I refused to take a cab and... I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since Friday, it's time to catch up.