Freezing Your Cake

Freezing Your Cake

My grandma archives food. Her pantry contains foods which literally expired last<br>millenium. She fills her freezer chests with unlabeled takeout containers,<br>desserts from Trader Joe's, and half-full slush drinks from<br>Starbucks/Costco/Jamba/etc. I am unsure whether to consult Marie Kondo, an<br>archaeologist, or a priest.

True story: my wife once found a cat in her great aunt's refrigerator.<br>They loved that cat but couldn't find the time to cremate its remains.

Today is May 18, 2026. This is the top of my ideas.txt file, where I store one<br>project/essay/etc idea per line. It is 6,564 lines long. Entries like /scissor<br>point to external files; I'm sitting on ~2MB of unpublished plaintext notes. I<br>expect to die in ~4 decades.

I will never make a serious dent in this list, and that's not the point. It<br>fulfills me to imagine, to curate, to tinker, and to sketch. Sometimes I even<br>share my ugly little darlings with others.

Or that's what I tell myself. To publish my work is to admit "this is the best I<br>can do". It's easier to hide my mediocrity in the freezer. "It's not a failure;<br>I'm just not finished yet."

There is nothing wrong with being a chronic tinkerer nor a completionist. But it<br>is difficult to be both. You cannot freeze your cake and eat it too.