I’m sitting here, eating dinner and nervously watching returns come in from Ohio and Texas, having made myself some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and treating myself to a Pepsi. I’ve tried to take advantage of the opportunities that a major change in life offers, including eating better: healthier and more environmentally friendly, buying organic, cutting junk food and soda almost entirely, and cutting out meat as much as I’m able to force myself to.

As such, Pepsi has gone from a daily and almost exclusive drink of choice to a rare – weekly, if that – treat to be savored. It’s been at least as long since my last, longer even, I’m fairly certain. Even so, I’ve been drinking Pepsi and soda religiously for as long as I can remember – well into childhood – and yet it surprised me how foreign the liquid tasted on my tongue. For a drink I’ve lived on since a small child, a mere two weeks doesn’t seem like enough time to forget the taste of it. And yet, it didn’t taste…well, like sweet nectar. It tasted odd, quite frankly, and not really all that appetizing.

And yet, after just a few sips, the familiar taste had fully returned  and it took certain will power to keep from quickly finishing the can. Is that what addiction is? If so, all the more reason to never pick up a cigarette.

Elsewhere on the habits front, the campaign to finally let my nails grow out (another bad habit from childhood)  has proved more difficult. Maybe it’s the “out of sight, out of mind” principle, since it’s relatively easy to tuck the Pepsi away in the refrigerator, while it’s harder to keep your fingernails out of sight for long, especially on such a nail biter of a night.

On other fronts, I’ve finally dug back into both editing and writing. I’m fairly close to being finished the basic cut on “The Martians” and I’ve started back on a feature screenplay that I started working on in the early days of film school. I’m thirty-one pages in and about a thousand from a final product, but nevertheless, it’s still a dozen pages more than before, so that’s something.