Then I changed jobs.

That was about as much change as I needed.

One of these changes was not really my choice; things simple were not working as they stood.

The other was the result of a random job offer and a willingness to take a little leap of faith (and a huge pay cut).  My new job doesn't pay anywhere near as much as the old one, but it's a much better fit both with my personality and with my school schedule.

I admit, I'm scared out of my mind at the moment, in some ways -- but faith, like bravery, isn't so much the absence of fear as the willingness to stand up even when you're afraid.  It's the willingness to realize that God's got your back, and step out on the ledge when it's time to fly.

This does not, of course, mean I am living a life of perfect faith.  I'm still afraid a lot of the time.  Sometimes my anger gets the best of me.  Sometimes I'm short-sighted.

The truth remains, though, that I would be remiss if I didn't shake things up a bit.  I have been dissatisfied with my life for a long time now, and getting back in school was just one step in the right direction.

As a result of all these changes, I've realized that I'm still what one might call reluctant to reach out to other people.  I guess that's the next thing to work on.  I go to bike events and am afraid to talk to anyone, because I'm afraid they won't 'get' me.  Since I don't reach out and try to make friends, of course people don't 'get' me.

My logical side said says this fear of mine is totally silly.  That I will be just fine if I just get out there, stick a hand out, and make some friends.  The worried part of me -- the part that worries constantly, about everything -- has its concerns that if I try this method, it will fail, because people seem to find me a little hard to understand.

I think there's some truth to both sides, though.  Regardless -- and, in fact, likely because of how much time I've spent fighting my nature, I continue to be affected in subtle ways by my own neurology.  I'm trying now to learn to work with what I've got -- to stop rebelling against my own nature, and harness it instead.  I am trying to learn that it's okay to be my own neuro-atypical self.

Learning to work with your own nature, when you've spent your whole life struggling against that nature, is tough.  

• Combine 3/4 cup sour cream, 2 tablespoons sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.  Stir 'til well blended.  Dump on cheesecake.

Oh.  My.  GOSH.

If you haven't yet tried sour cream topping, do it -- even if you don't have anything to put it on.  Make some crepes and try it on those.  Heck, you can just eat it straight.  Nobody will mind.

Did I mention it's good?

Sour cream topping rocks my world, and it should rock yours as well.  Trust me on this.

Note: I’m just going to go ahead and apologize to my Mom for this one. Sorry, Mom. I love you, but that chicken jag back when I was about 7 or so … eeee.

Okay, here we go.

I believe that every good homemaker needs a stable of quick-n-dirty backup recipes.

You know the ones: those doozies you pull out when the in-laws stop by on a night you were planning to hit Taco Bell. Those Old Reliables you can whip out of your pocket when you discover upon arriving home from fill-in-the-all-day-activity-here at 7 PM that you have utterly forgotten to assemble anything – anything – for dinner. The ones that you call upon when all other lights have gone out (okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic). The ones that you make when you just aren’t feelin’ it.

For me, most of those recipes involve salad dressing.

It’s no giant secret that my Mom isn’t a great cook. She’s fantastic at a lot of things, and she’s actually a pretty good baker – but to give y’all an idea, my sister took over Thanksgiving dinner years ago. When she was 10.

 For years, I thought I didn’t like chicken, because my Mom went on a chicken jag when I was in second grade. I thought chicken was, by nature, always so dry as to be essentially inedible. I didn’t realize it actually had a flavor. (Sidebar: I actually also thought I didn’t like fish for many years. Turns out I just don’t like fish with lemon. In fact, while I love lemons by themselves, and lemon-flavored drinks and desserts and breads and suchlike, I generally despise lemon as a flavoring in anything warm – I don’t even like it in tea – or in iced tea. Since everyone serves fish with lemon and assumes everyone else likes it that way, for years I just thought fish was gross. Oops.).

Then, at some point, Mom discovered a magical secret: ‘Italian’ salad dressing. You could immerse just about any meat (though maybe not fish) in Italian salad dressing, and it would come out of the oven (or pan, or whatever) tender, flavorful, and (unless you forgot about it and let it cook for far, far too long) moist. Since I was, at the time, totally obsessed with ‘Zesty Italian’ dressing (I think Kraft makes it), Italian dressing was not hard to come by. Voila – dinner was saved.

Years later, I became too much of an overweening snob to actually even imagine immersing my precious chicken in salad dressing. What kind of culinary failure would I be if I didn’t tenderly assemble every marinade, every dry rub, every pan gravy myself? Heaven forfend that something so lowly as Italian dressing should touch the suppers I prepared for my friends when I wouldn’t even deign to serve it on, you know, salad.

Then, one day, Cameron served me some awesome Greek chicken … and after I’d consumed it I learned that it came from a boxed kit (which even included the unseasoned meat). And what, you may ask, was the seasoning in the box?

Greek salad dressing, my friends.

Lo, it was as if the scales fell from my eyes.

We quickly figured out that it was cheaper (and easier) to buy Greek dressing, feta cheese, and tomatoes than to buy the Greek dinner kit at Wal-Mart (not that I don’t snag one of their kits every once in a while – when I’m feeling reeeeeeeallllllly lazy, but I still want flavor). So we bit the bullet and bought the dressing.

Fact of the matter is, salad dressing is great. You can do all kinds of things with it, and someone else has already done all the work (measuring, blending, tasting). All you have to do is thaw some meat and dump some dressing on it. You don’t even have to trim the meat, if you don’t want to.

That being said, my current favorite quick-n-dirty dinner – next to Greek Dressing Chicken – involves just a little doctoring, so I figured I’d stick my recipe up here (yeah, I know – that’s a lot of words just to introduce a puny little salad-dressipe).

And so, without further ado, here we go:

Pan-Seared Thyme Chicken Thighs with Pine Nut CousCous

Chicken:

·         1 cup (or so) Red Wine Vinaigrette dressing

·         2 t whole dried Thyme (or more, to taste), divided

·         4 bone-in chicken thighs with skin (thawed)

Pine Nut Couscous:

·         One box Pine Nut Couscous (available at most grocery stores in the rice aisle)

·         1.5 c chicken broth

Directions:

·         Combine Red Wine Vinaigrette dressing and half of Thyme

·         Pour over chicken

·         Allow to marinate for 30 minutes

·         Spray or lightly oil a heavy skillet and pre-heat over high flame

·         Add chicken thighs to pan, skin-side up. Reserve remaining marinade.

·         While back side of chicken thighs sears, sprinkle the skin side with remaining thyme.

·         After 5 minutes, flip thighs. Sear skin side for 5 minutes or until crisp and brown.

·         Flip thighs again. Reduce heat to medium. Add remaining marinade to pan.

·         Cook chicken thighs another 10 – 15 minutes (more or less) until done.

During the last 10 minutes or so of cooking, prepare the couscous according to its directions, substituting chicken broth for water (trust me, it tastes even more awesome this way). Hint: extra-virgin olive oil is the best fat to use for this. The flavor is sublime.

Yield: 2 servings with no other side dishes; 4 servings if dished up with salad and bread.

See, isn’t that just ridiculously easy?

The great part is that you can substitute just about any salad dressing and any herb or spice that suits the dressing of your choice. Go on, mix it up! Have fun! You probably *can* get this wrong, but it’s also probably pretty hard to do so.  If you prefer, you can also simmer the chicken in the marinade in a covered skillet.  It's good either way.

I’ve been reading back over my LJ, and I’ve just realized something really cool:

I have made a lot – and I mean a lot! – of progress this year.

It wasn’t that long ago I was talking about how I’m a didactic, insecure little bastidge with few friends and no life. These days, I’m a surprisingly-secure (if still didactic) fellow with a growing collection of wonderful people in my much-too-busy life. For the first time in years, instead of asking myself, “How will I ever make some friends?” I’m asking myself, “Man, how am I going to schedule school and choir and bike stuff and hang out with my friends and still get my homework done and get up and go to work in the morning????”

It wasn’t that long ago I said I wasn’t ‘much of a road bike guy,’ and that I would probably never be caught dead wearing lycra. Since then – although I still enjoy off-roading it on my hybrid when I get the chance – I’ve become a lycra-wearing roadie with a very, very nice older road bike.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was totally terrified nobody could ever love me or want me. Recent experiences have led me to understand that A) that’s not true and B) the fact that I felt that way exposes a major flaw in my faith – a crisis of self-doubt, rather than of doubt in God. That’s mending now.

Every year I make note of the fact that, in many ways, I have come so very much farther than I believed I could five or even ten years ago. It seems to me that the farther I make it, the faster I run – which I guess makes sense, if you think about it. It’s like riding your bike – the more you ride, the faster and more skillful you become, and the faster and more skillful you become, the more you ride and try new things on the bike, and thus you gain skill and confidence even faster.

I’ve been shaken to the core a couple of times this year, but each time I’ve been shaken my faith has sustained me, and each time I’ve come back stronger than before, for which I can only thank God.

I know I've been quiet for a while -- my apologies for that.  I could say, 'I had a lot going on,' and it would be true, but it would also be false.

I did have a lot going on -- but that isn't why I've been quiet, really.

I've been reassessing myself; shaking out the details, trying to figure out if I'm on the right road.  Trying to get closer to who I'm supposed to be.  Trying to figure out whether I'm 'living right,' as they say.

There are some ways in which I believe I'm on the right track; others in which I think I'm totally on the wrong track.  I'm not sure I want to talk about the details here.  They're details I'd rather discuss directly with friends before I discuss them generally with the entire internet ... not that the entire internet reads my blog :)

I realized recently that I've fallen away from the life I want to lead in some ways.  I've been having a lovely time, but I haven't been listening to the still, small voice that speaks at the center of things.  What that means from here on in, I'm not sure.

I've finally gotten around to getting my school ducks in a row ... now I just need to go meet with my advisor, smile, nod, and then politely ignore her advice. 

I'll probably only take one class this semester because of work-related scheduling constraints.  I'm thinking about taking an Interpersonal Communication class, which is totally unrelated to my Biology major, but nonetheless sounds interesting and useful and might even be applicable as a psychology gen-ed (we'll see about that).  I haven't taken any psych classes yet.

Next semester, I hope to attend full time, but we'll see how it goes.  I hope that between now and then I'll figure a few more things out.

It's weird that we're officially and definitely in the back stretch of 2010, now.  Reviewing my earlier goals, I would say I've succeeded in meeting some, and failed in meeting others, but I'm happy with the year as it has gone.  I've learned a lot, and done a lot I never thought I would do.  I've done things that have turned out to be the wrong things, and they haven't killed me; I've done things that have turned out to be the right things, and they've strengthened me.

A while ago I set out on a 100-mile bicycle ride -- what the cycling world calls a 'century' -- on a very hot, humid day.  I have poor heat tolerance, and couldn't eat, so I 'bonked' after 70 miles (that's what they call it when you run out of stored glycogen and just can't go any further).  That being said, 70 miles is a good, long ride, and I was really happy that I made it 70 miles ... and I also learned that I can fail gracefully to fully accomplish a goal and still be happy with how far I managed to make it.

I'm going to try the same (non-competitive) ride again in October and a cyclocross race in September.  I don't expect to win or anything, it just sounds like fun.  I hope to acquit myself soundly in both cases, but if I don't finish one and I place dead last in the other, at least I'll have tried.

Among the most important lessons I've learned this year is that you don't regret the things you did (even when you fall short of your goal)-- you regret the things you never tried.