So, in my last blog, I mentioned that I am a judge in a cookbook contest. The review process is over, the finalists were revealed, all the recipes have been tested, and now we await awards night, when we find out who the winners are.

When I told my brother that I was doing this, he said to me, “Maybe this will do something for you.” Meaning, maybe it will get my foot in the door of some job.

It won’t. I told him so.

He said, “Don’t be so negative.”

I said, “I’m just a realist.”

See, I look at the facts and come to a logical conclusion. I guess you could say that I was trained in the school of Spock (the Vulcan, not the pediatric specialist).

A positive-thinking person might look at the same facts and come to a different decision. For example, a realist will look at the numbers 2 and 2 and, based on what everyone knows about math, will conclude that together, they add up to 4; a positive thinker might look at the same numbers and say that if you have enough faith, they might add up to 6. A realist will walk into a fire-ravaged forest and accept that nothing will grow there for some time; a positive thinker might say, “Hey, you never know, a unicorn might wander over and all sorts of magic will happen.”

But I know there are no such things as unicorns. And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that 2 plus 2 equals 4.

Facts, figures, statistics—that’s what I’m about.

Yet, here I am, writing this blog while I have Lidia’s Italian Table on the Food Network, and rather than focusing on whatever point I was going to make here, I find myself wandering. Not in body but in mind. I’m suddenly not in my living room in Brooklyn, New York, but in a cliffside restaurant on some gorgeous coast in Italy, asking the waitress, in Italian, what the vegetables are stuffed with. I am holding a glass of Trebbiano wine, feeling the warm Mediterranean breeze in my hair, and for a brief moment, I’m happy.

I snap back to reality to find Lidia talking about cheese making. I watch them make huge rolls of some sort of cheese, and I realize that there are people out there who live lives that are not spent at a desk all day, entering mindless data on the computer, or otherwise pushing paper around.

And I realize that there are unicorns in the world, wandering around somewhere.

I just have to figure out how to catch one.