Welcome back - for the first time.  Some of you are new, but I presume most of you are former readers of my other blog; Your Friendly Neighborhood Skeptic.  All of you, however, are probably wondering what's in store for this new project.  I don't have a definitive response to that yet.  What I can give you is a bit of back-story on this blog's conception, what I would like for it to be, and - most importantly - why it's called Waiting for My Cornbread....  I'll start with the story...



Wednesday night after walking some family members to their cars after a get-together, I went to check my mailbox, something I do with frequent irregularity.  Sitting on top of an unusually small stack of junk mail, coupon books, and opportunities to sully my stereotype-defying credit score was the familiar teal envelope from the Baltimore City Circuit Court - a jury summons. 

I pulled the envelope from the box, flashed it to the mail-retrieving neighbor standing next to me, and despondently expressed, "Ugh!  Jury duty".  The woman glanced at me with a whiff of disgust, closed her mailbox, and walked away without speaking.

Bitch.

Maybe this woman was offended that someone would be upset about jury duty.  Maybe she didn't speak English or, most likely, just didn't care.  This is irrelevant.  The fact of the matter is I hammed-up my response to receiving the summons.  I felt the reaction the woman expected from me was dismay.  Everyone hates jury duty, right?

Wrong.

I actually enjoy jury duty.  I don't enjoy it in the, "wave Old Glory on my porch/it's my civic duty" sense, but rather in the, "I get a paid day off, free lunch, and the chance to sit around and read/play on my phone/watch Meet the Parents and Happy Feet" sense.  Besides, I've found my experiences with jury duty to be rather interesting.

This leads me to the point of this story; the last blog I wrote was penned during my last jury service...way back in Ye Ole' June 2009!  For someone who had grown accustomed to writing something on an almost daily basis, I was stunned to realize that aside from the occasional mix from my soon-to-be side-hustle of DJing, I had neglected my creative impulses.

I had an epiphany: Maybe the reason I'd been so anxious, struggling to sleep, and feeling generally overwhelmed was because I was suffering from "blue brains".  I'd been nothing more than a consumer for years, reading/watching/learning/taking-in everything interesting that I could get my hands on.  What I hadn't been doing was releasing anything.

I needed creative ejaculation.

Thursday and Friday I brainstormed ideas, spending the better part of a Friday night excitedly designing the site you see before you.  I know it doesn't look like 2 days of work (with at least 1 hour of that time spent looking for the "right" cornbread picture), but believe me, I went through about 13 different designs before saying, "F*ck it, let's just keep it simple".   

*Side note: Bonus points go to the hawk-eyed readers who noticed that I said I spent a Friday night doing this.  I'm a young man, surely I have better ways to spend my Friday nights than designing a blog centered around cornbread, right?  Unfortunately, the answer to that question is "not really".  But if it makes you feel better, I did have a muted basketball game on in the background.  Let's move on.

What I tentatively (those that know me well know that you could come back to this site in 5 minutes and it could be called something else, have a different URL, or just be gone completely) decided to do with this new blog is focus more on the positive side of my personality.  I intend for the posts to be a bit more frequent (unlikely), better written (even more unlikely), shorter (impossible), and somewhat less random (HAHAHA!!!!).  Once redesigned, Neighborhood Skeptic will be reserved - just as it always has - for all the things I want to complain about.  Those of you here for the complaining, cursing, death wishes, and my homemade cynicism, don't worry - you'll get some of that here too.  I really want Cornbread to be more of an online journal of my observations - except, unlike in my personal journal, I won't be bad-mouthing anyone by name.

Speaking of cornbread, you're probably still wondering about the blog's title.

Whenever my lovely girlfriend Candi prepares one of her signature Sunday meals highlighted by cornbread, she cooks the entree, finishes up the sides, and no matter what she does to time it properly, the cornbread is always the last item ready.  She will call out to me saying, "Dinner's ready.  We're just waiting on the cornbread.".  The cornbread's stubbornness is no fault of hers (I firmly believe that if she started baking it the day before, it still wouldn't be ready in time for dinner), it just likes to be a dick.  Whatever the reason, on these occasions I find myself waiting for my cornbread.

In a way, "waiting for my cornbread" is a metaphor for life.  When you think you have everything figured out but there's that one thing holding you back, the one answer you're waiting on, aren't you waiting for your cornbread?  When you've set yourself up for success but still don't get the results you desire, maybe you're just waiting for your cornbread.  When you're down on your luck and you really need that one thing to go your way, you're just - I think you get the point.