It hit me today while making coffee that it's been five years since my senior year of high school. Five years since I used to sneak out of school early on Fridays and sit in my boyfriend's grandparent's Buick and smoke a cigarette. It was easy to feel mature then, when you're baby-faced and closeted and learning how to ash a bummed Marlboro from a girl you just met. It's not so easy when you're 22 and living in California, when bills are due and you pay everything with a credit card.

It's different than I thought it would be, being an adult. I don't read as much poetry as I thought I would and I like silence and weekends to myself. I own a dog and I have a boy and I am complete in a way that isn't boastful or eager for change. Instead, I am eager to grow, to expand on the self that I have created over the last five years. In that time, I have lived ten lives. I've been a law student, a recreational drug user, a prodigal son. I've dated a model, a male stripper, and (currently) a doctor. I've lived in the rural farmland of the Laurel Highlands in Pennsylvania and the suburbs of San Diego. The most money I've ever had in my bank account at one time was six thousand and I owe it all back to the government now.

When I was unemployed and a law school drop-out, I took up cooking as a way to have some stability. I understood the delineation of a recipe gave me an end result if done correctly. I liked the idea of an attainable success when law school gave me none. I liked the idea of nourishing my small family here in San Diego. I liked the idea of creating. That opportunity doesn't exist as abundantly as it did when we were kids.

I'm learning, and I hope you all will enjoy the process as much as I do.

Best,

Brett