This one is just an attempt to pass the time. And, later, the pasta.

It’s good to have goals, like blogging every pasta event. But at some point the goals are no longer serving you, but mastering you.

I’ve definitely reached that point in this log series.

There’s some guy out there who does his own Pasta Pass blog and gets a pass every year, as far as I can tell. It might sound good to the outsider, but even at this rate that we have managed–roughly once a week over the course of almost 11 months–it’s almost a punishment to come to this place and eat the same food again and again. And this other dude does it like every day. For years.

In our time, if you want to get noticed, you have to push to the extremes. Nobody cares that you went to Olive Garden 50 times in a year. They’ll say, call me when you hit 500 times. This is natural, as society has gone from the 50 people who live within a few miles to encompassing the 500 million people in North America.

I realized pretty early on with this project that there was an upper limit on just how many times I could or would go to the same restaurant. Even if it was right next door, it would have been hard to maintain the pace we began with (3-4 times a week). And yet with all the people in this nation, there’s somebody out there hitting that pace without a Pasta Pass. Just by the law of averages.

No matter how much things seem to change in our lives, we’ll always float back to our median. It’s impossible to live too long in the high or the low, or to be too generous or too tight-fisted for very long. It’s too hard to be happy or sad forever, or to work too hard or relax too often for very much time at all.

So this is just to say I couldn’t have blown you all away with this project even if I’d worked at it harder. This is my median: maybe one Olive Garden trip a week.

I will not be purchasing a Pasta Pass for next year, either. Got to float back to normalcy.

Item 1: linguine, mushroom Alfredo, breaded shrimp

Breadsticks: 3

Weight: 168

Times I’ve questioned my life choices: at least 46