Shout out to Mitch

Things are much clearer and more confusing to me since I discovered Mitch Hedberg. It only seems right to name a blog with Mitch as inspiration, since both subscribe to the same mission: attempt to make sense of the world, impart personal discoveries, and tell everyone what they already know but didn't know that they knew. All three of those are optimistic goals on my part.

The pancake joke
The name for this blog comes from one of Mitch's jokes about pancakes, and I chose it because 1) I agree with him on the pitfalls of pancakes, and 2) for me, life is like a stack of pancakes.

"You can't be like pancakes - all exciting at first, but by the end you're fucking sick of 'em!"

A lot of things to me are "all exciting at first", but the excitement quickly fades as I realize that eating pancakes is a lot of work, and while I'm pretty damn good at the eating the first one or two, enjoyment decreases inversely proportional to commitment required for every pancake after that. Guitar, snowboarding, knitting, blogging - all have fallen prey to my pancake mentality.

I'm not really denouncing pancake mentality. I told someone the other day that I'm too much of a dabbler, and he said that wasn't necessarily a bad thing - those kinds of people can have a lot of fun and get a lot out of life because they like and can do so many things. I replied that those people probably don't win the Nobel prize, and he agreed, but hey, I don't need to win a Nobel prize. I'm super ok with not winning a Nobel prize. At this point in my life, I just want to do things that are fulfilling, and it just so happens that those things are small and many.

So the title of this blog may be a bit of a misnomer. You CAN be like pancakes. Just don't count on winning the Nobel prize.