Too young to be old

You can be young, in terms of effective age, and look and feel very old. I know many of these people. People who lost interest in who they really are and in what the world has to offer. And then you can be old, and feel very young. Beside the typical crisis that many men face when they start to get old, making them acting out of fear of aging, which often ends up with a divorce from their current wife and a new girlfriend with half of their age (my father is a typical example of this), beside this case I was saying, there are also healthy people who are just so enthusiastic of what life has to offer, that they are very young in spirit despite their actual age.

Myself. I can't consider myself neither young or old. Not even middle age. I mean, as a actual age, the one corresponding to my birth certificate. In any case, it doesn't really matter to which age category I fit in, because in my mind, I am still young. I feel young. I feel as a young person wrapped up in a world made of a lot of responsibilities, till the day, which I know it will come sooner or later, I will feel saturated of them and break free. There are too many things I want to do and that I keep postponing because it is never the right moment to do them. And what if there will never be a right moment?

I dream to travel across Patagonia. I had this dream since probably at least 12 years old. I had this dream after reading books about Patagonia. About the strong wind, the wild environment, the km and km of nothing. And I always feel that it would be the right place to find some peace with myself. I need empty spaces. I think that this is one of the reasons why I love Holland so much. Holland is densely populated, and so it wouldn't probably come up to my mind as a place with many empty spaces. But there are. And they are just next door to big cities. They are just at a bike distance from crowded cities. This is what I love of living in Holland. Getting lost by bike in places with empty fields, water, birds, nothing. Anyway, I am digressing.

I can't say that I don't like here, or that I am not happy here. None of these things would be true. But it is not my place. It is not a place where I feel totally in peace. Maybe I should move again, work is not all. True. But work is what made me move in the first place and leave Italy. My work is my passion and large part of my life. But it is not enough. And the more I only focus on my work, the more I get the feeling that I am missing out a lot of things, and that I am growing old.

I miss sleeping on the beach to survey the nest of the turtles, as I did many years ago. I miss acting on instinct and do something totally unplanned. I miss the adrenalin shocks that make me feel alive. My life lately is quite flat and the people I know here are quite flat too. Nothing bad about that, they are happy with their life. I am just not. Not fully. I am not flat and I am too young, or I feel too young, to have a life that moves around work, eat, sleep, pay the bills, have dinners/lunch together. I need something more. I need the unknown and I need adrenaline, undoubtedly. How can I go from totally flat to less flat? have a bit more excitement???

Let me make clear an important point. I don't want to give up my work and start to travel around the world. That is not my call. I just wish my life was less flat.

I tried to hang out with younger people and even if I had some fun, they do look at me like the old one and we do really have little in common. When you go out with people that are 10 years younger than you, it is just weird.
First, they have a lot more time in their hands generally than I have. I have a job, which I want to continue to have and it is one of my priorities.
Second, the generation gap is difficult to ignore. Third, these people are exciting or they do exciting things as I did 10 years ago, but then they will grow older and they will be like most of the people of my age with whom I don't feel comfortable now. It is just a process.
It didn't work well for me. I just felt even more out of place.

People of my age, are either married to their work or married to someone, sometimes with kids. Thus, except in a few cases, they have very little in common with me. Plus, I have many interests which I want to keep alive and it is difficult to find someone to share them with. I don't know how to get out of this out of place situation in which I am since many years.

Yesterday, I had planned a meeting with a weird person who traveled a lot and contacted me sometime ago. I thought that we could have a nice chat, so I accepted to meet him.
He didn't show up.
I stood at the meeting point for half an hour waiting for him and he didn't show up. Great! There it went my attempt to meet someone that I thought he could have been interesting (please notice: he contacted me on couchsurf, not the other way around).

Finally, this morning I got an email from one of these younger people I know here. She just got back from a bike tour in Norway and Finland. I saw a few pictures. It looks like they had a lot of fun. It looks like something I would have enjoyed a lot. Of course, I wouldn't have taken two months off (one of the girls who just came back from the bike tour, left again for another two month tour in India.....).... but I would have loved to do something like that.

Here, I can't even manage to organize a bike tour of a few hours with someone of my age!!!!!

New - old addiction

I love it, I love it, I love it!

I have a new addiction.....my old addiction was to watch the episodes of the Avatar. Not the movie, the cartoon. It is so good. Good, funny, relaxing, with a good message, nice characters. I heard that the movie based on the cartoon, the last airbender, it is not minimally as good as the cartoon.

I just started to watch it from the beginning again. It is very relaxing. But the new addiction is....I am watching it in Dutch!!! and it is even nicer, because I love to listen speaking Dutch!!! I really wish I would know the language....For now, I just enjoy listening to it and understanding something here and there.

If you have never seen it, watch the episodes of the Avatar.

very bored

I just saw this movie of Woody Allen, another woman. I liked it. And the reason why I liked it is because it was about things I fear about. I fear of waking up one day to realize that I didn't live the life I wanted and I am full of regrets and it is too late.

I already have one regret in my life. Something I wish I would have done differently. Something I still can't forgive myself for. Something that still torments me. But at the same time, I also think that I am 35 and so far I have been living fully. And I am happy about that.

But there is a part of me that it is feeling like I am slowing down. Like I am not exactly doing the things I like and I enjoy doing. Part of me feels very, incredibly bored. The thing is, I think that my life have been very full and very exciting so far and it is difficult to keep up. I did many things which I consider wonderful and extra-ordinary at the same time, I have met very challenging and interesting people, I have traveled to many places and I have learned a lot of things. Lately, everything is slowing down. I pay too much attention to people telling me that I am getting old to get the job I want (thus I have to work more, harder, full time) and since last year I got into the status of mind of "I will do this once I will get this job done/position obtained/whatever along these lines".

I am too active and too energetic to live my life only about work. I need many more things. I have friends here, I can't complain about that, but I don't share any of my strong interests or passions with any of them. I miss scuba diving. I miss traveling to explore a place and get in touch with the culture of the place (I travel a lot, but I can't manage to travel the way I would like to). I seem to not find the time for any of the things I really like to do. Partly, it is also because I have to do these things always alone, and it is not the same. I am fine alone. I like to spend time alone, but I am also a social person and sometimes I would like to share the things I like to do with people I feel closed to.

I belong to a non-existing category. I am not a student, I have a full time job, and I am not a mom. I am not living with someone, nor I have someone to account for in planning my days/evenings/week ends. And I like my work and I like to dedicate time to it. Plus, even if once I am comfortable with people I am very sociable, in general I am shy, which plays against me in just jumping into something hoping to meet people with similar interests to mine.

Two years that I am here and I can't say I have met someone (and I am not talking about a man, I am talking about friends, people with common interests) with whom I clicked. I actually met someone with whom I got along very well at the beginning. A girl from Germany. Unfortunately, she left to go back to Germany a few months after we met.

I just feel that I have too much energy and I wish I could invest it in something more than just work.

...and I know that time is passing by and sometimes I feel very dark about all this....
I just want to have fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dairy-free pancakes and yogurt-lemon cake again

Being very bored this morning, I experimented some changes to the dairy-free pancake recipe that I posted some weeks ago.
It turned out that the modifications I made improved the pancakes a lot!!!

So, from the original recipe, I used 100 gr of almond flour and 50 gr of normal flour instead of 150 gr of normal flour. I also added half tea-spoon of cinnamon to the dough, used half brown sugar and half white sugar and I didn't add the oil to the mixture. So good!!!!

I also managed to find a recipe to make a good yogurt-lemon cakes, instead of this one that didn't turn out well at all!

150 gr of margarine
100 gr sugar
3 eggs
150 gr Greek yogurt (I used the sheep one, 0% fat)
juice of two big lemons (it supposed to be good also with oranges, but I didn't try it yet)
300 gr flour
2 teaspoon of baking powder

Mix everything, adding the flour and the baking powder at the end. Grease a cake pot, pour the mixture in it and cook in the oven for about 45 min at 180 C.

Enjoy it!