I’ve got a cupboard of excuses for why I haven’t been recipe journaling much lately, and I can either delve into them or not delve into them, but the fact would remain the same: I have not been recipe journaling much lately. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking, I have! There is a brand new six-burner cooktop that sometimes I take selfies with when I am alone, bright white counters that get scrubbed incessantly when Michael is both looking and not looking, and a fridge I have to struggle with to not fill entirely with cheese. I am also crazier than ever. Max leaned casually against the fridge one night as he watched me put elbow grease into a crusty tomato sauce splatter. “Wow,” he said. “You’re Mom.”

So, yes, I’ve been cooking, but not recipe journaling because when I’m not being a lunatic about cleaning the kitchen, I’ve been trying to enjoy the normalcy of cooking just to cook. You know, cooking like a normal person. I find that when I’m not photographing the disarray of a chopped vegetable atop my cutting board, I get to think luxuriously about other things, the first three of them being: don’t slice your finger, don’t slice your finger, don’t slice your finger. (I am very careful when it comes to my fingers.) How nice it has been to tend to a bowl of marinated chicken thighs and not think to myself: Shit, I forgot to shoot the marinade. I tend to exhaust myself for no good reason when it comes to documenting the process. And I never want to take pictures at night anymore because the light is so much better during the day. There’s a hashtag on Instagram called #postitfortheaesthetic, a collective space of creatives and wannabe creatives who are posting pictures just for the prettiness of it. They’ll post their legs on a bed amidst crumpled bedsheets drinking coffee next to a stack of magazines. They’ll post someone else's pretty hands delicately holding a bag, a book, a pear. They’ll post a pair of scissors, some ribbon, flower petals that look like they’re blowing away, so far away across a wooden table.

Life has always been beautiful, but now there are so many of us noticing it together, in public, and so, so, so often. I'm overwhelmed. Am I the only one?

Sometimes I just miss the simplicity of seeing something or doing something and no one but myself (or myself and Michael) being around to take it in.

Like that time I went to Rome and sat in a big ass window wearing one of my favorite dresses.