I used to love reading cookbooks, just as much as I enjoyed readings Obits and the Editorial. For me, every recipe written was more about looking at the way the measurements were given. Despite not understanding the ml to liter conversion or grams to tbsp, I was quite happily gazing at these recipes and their presentation until I came as far as making them. 

The beauty of being a project manager of sorts is that you do nothing on paper but yet you're responsible for everything and everyone doing their jobs. It's a notch over HR, wherein you're not responsible for the result of the floor wise Rangoli Making Competition but you're not a glorified editor either. You're somewhere in between, sending passive aggresive emails to your team and depending on how nice/anal the client is, the tone of your email changing from sweet to banal, just as much as your interest in the week of the day. 

For example, my emails on Monday are enthusiastic. They're full of hope, they mostly end with "Warmly". By Friday, I hit the standstill of dragging myself to write, "Best", truly hoping for the worst of the client. 

I digress, but to understand the making of cookbooks, you need to understand how publishing rolls. 

For most parts, publishing is like attending a birthday party at a museum with visually impaired adult guests. You can feel things, you can go as far as touching them and describing them, but every fucking interpretation is different. Nobody can really 'see' what is up but everyone has a fucking opinion, each believing that their respective version is superior. 

Making a cookbook is like having an army of visually impaired people represent you at a war front. For every blind individual, there are twenty aspects ignored and forty incorrectly listed in the pre-production stage. That one drunk General in the corner (aka me) who may be blessed with a functional eye may just know a thing or two, but is brushed off because the blind Colonel (Captain? Brigadier?) refuses to take anything from the seemingly hackneyed youngling. 

The alcohol problem (in my case, the brashness) never helps. 

I wish I could give more of my cookbook ideas words, but that would require for me to give two flying fucks towards the work I am producing now. 

Something, I am consciously stepping away from for the sake of my mental health. Also, keeping in mind that I would still like to love cookbooks by the end of this and not just give up on them, the way I gave up on the fable of 6 blind men and the elephant and reading Obits every morning.