everything's coming up millhouse

i've been all giddy and giggly all day, even when i had to work through lunch again to tie up loose ends at work before skipping off on vacay. maybe it's a sign of my essential kids incorporated nature that using phrases like "tying up loose ends" make me feel impossibly grown-up. other phrases with that effect are: "variable rate mortgages" and "yes, i authorize a credit check." i finished the last two big projects at work and i'm officially in the clear! things are coming up so millhouse right now that i'm stupidly, superstitiously worried that my joie de vivre is a harbinger of some kind of bad stuff lurking right around the corner. perhaps the bad stuff is that i was such a laughing-out-loud-at-private-jokes-and-jokes-past goof all day that i submitted draft memos to my supervisor that were ridden with typos. you know, difficult stuff like periods at the ends of sentences and inconsequential things of that nature.

here's what's kind of bumming me out right now (for the benefit of the fates):
- yoga yesterday effed up my shoulders like you wouldn't believe AND i somehow effed up my achilles tendon
- my dodgeball skills seem to have left me completely. they've flown away! far, far away!
- i'm missing my niece's dance recital and birthday. this is breaking my heart because i'm her favorite aunt and i love going to stuff like that with my sister and talking smack about all the other moms. this also means i won't be able to see my sis and her family for an extra month, which bites the big one. she put my nephew on the phone the other night and he can actually call me m***y!!! he said it clear as day! and he also said "clock" and "woof" and his pronunciation is much better now. even if he wasn't progressing at an exponential rate it's been too long since i've seen the happy little fat chinaman.

in other news, i'm THRILLED that the tyranny of skinny jeans seems to have broken its hold on the world and it's all about trouser cut pants and raver-y flares and wide-legs. my giant calves and bow legs love love love it! i also love all the big, loud, splashy prints because as we all know, i aspire to dress like a beguiling mix of mrs. roper and peter pan. there are no better style icons for the summer.

yesterday we saw a documentary called "milosevic on trial." it was a fascinating look at the war crimes tribunal of the former serbian president on charges of genocide. milosevic refused counsel and represented himself, repeatedly claiming that the court was a farce and that he represented the serbian people. the movie touched on the larger issues surrounding these war crimes tribunals and the conflicting and frequently contradictory motivations and agendas at play. on the one hand, they are meant to serve as a record of the horrors of war, so that there is a legal testament of what happened and so that the stories of the witnesses can be heard and codified for the annals of history, and so that a measure of healing can be produced in the telling and documentation. on the other hand, you're trying to say that one man is responsible for x and y, which in a legal sense is much more difficult to prove. because the record of the war should be as complete as can be, because you want to give everyone their chance to tell their story and to speak, and hear the reverberations of their speech, the prosecutors cast the net as wide as possible, but in doing so, make it very difficult to make the charges stick. trying to encapsulate 3 1/2 wars in a 10 year span is a logisticial and symbolic nightmare. in a legal sense, is our legal structure established to hold an individual accountable for war crimes? you can't hold gun manufacturers responsible for what happens when their guns result in random acts of senseless violence. i don't believe for an instant that slobodan milosevic wasn't aware of what was happening, and indeed, probably played an active role in ordering the ethnic cleansing. but at the same time, barring any concrete evidence (and as the documentary points out, even low level criminals rarely talk about their activities without code), how do we link it to the head of state? to a certain degree, milosevic is right in that he DID represent the serbian people...do we hold him solely accountable for the will of everyone else? where do we start to delineate between degrees of culpability?

i was thoroughly captivated by what i saw to be (once again) a problem with classification. the law is a series of metrics - x amount of y equals this amount of prison time, puts you in this category of felony, etc. how do you design a measurement that can capture the injustices of war? of what happened in srebrenica? how many bodies will equal a genocide? how do we determine the definition of that term? how do we move past the cognitive safeguards that turn 8,373 into a number? what is hidden in the space between the number and the bodies, lives, history, grief it represents? i've referred to this space as representational entropy...in some aspects, like when you're talking about market research and the aggregate composite "karl lagerfeld" that sits in the books of some actuarial scientist based on my spending and buying habits, the insurmountable chasm of that semiotic space works in our favour. when you're tallying the people in bosnia, in palestine, on native reserves in canada, that symbolic gap becomes the catch-all for our own impotence.

the most captivating things about classification and definition issues, the things with the most imaginative and theoretical torque, are never discussed in library school. that's why i'll always love my "surveillance and identity" course that i took and the professor who taught it. that's where i first read "sorting things out: classification and its consequences" which i recommend with reservations even if you're not necessarily preoccupied with the ramifications of classification and sorting and stuff of that nature. maybe you'll find it boring...i found it endlessly engaging.

here are some shots of last night's dinner. it was a simple nacho affair, with home-fried tortilla chips and guac and bought salsa and sour cream. nachos is one of those things that you can't stop eating, even if your body says you're full. other things that fall into the same category are: fries and gravy, pringles, freshly baked warm chocolate chip cookies, caramel corn, and pork fat.

i made churros because as aforementioned, bwong likes things deep-fried, and we already had the fryer going for the chips. i served them with this ultra-bitter chocolate sauce, whiskey toffee sauce, and the remaining amount of last week's pastry cream. they were delicious! i love love love churros and i ate an ungodly amount of them and then passed out on the couch like a beached whale while the dotytron took unflattering shots of my bad side and my ten billion chins to practice on the camera. another thing that is mildly stressing me out is the fact that i'm getting uglier with age. my bad side is pretty hideous and i look haggard as a mofo. i basically look like wendell from the simpsons. but the chinese form. the chinese form with crazy horse hair. lol!

we're almost done season 4 of "the wire." it's breaking my heart into a million little pieces. i love those kids. i love dookie and randy and michael. i have very little love for naiman, but it's mostly because his mom is such a horrible woman.

finally, i'd like to leave you with this: this is bernini's apollo and daphne. i first came across it watching simon schama's "the power of art" (previously reviewed on this blog). i don't know if it's the lighting techniques used by the bbc, or simon schama's patrician voice or masterful narration, but i got goosebumps. THAT'S A PIECE OF STONE. look at the detail! look at the filigree of leaves sprouting from her fingertips! look at the tree trunk creeping inexorably up her legs! it's impossible to find a picture that captures the luminosity of the sculpture. if for no other reason you should watch "the power of art" to see the indentations of apollo's fingers on daphne's thigh. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm going in for a half day of work tomorrow (i have to be frugal with my vacation time) and then it's off to the airport and italia bound! i'm making us nicoise sammies for the plane. the three little bears definitely deserve better than airplane food.

nothing is more apt than me going to the land of my nemesis. i wonder if i can successfully avoid chinotto the entire time i'm there?

posting will probably be intermittent. but expect a blog-vomit update of gargantuan proportions pon my return.

fin.

hi life! you rule!

yesterday i went for a long run and then i did some paperwork stuff and then the roomie and i went to the "knitters frolic" which is run by the toronto downtown knit collective. it's like knitter-con. it was an old lady fest, but it was kind of cool and they had tonnes of yarn and odds and bobs to buy. i quite enjoyed it and i bought this beautiful japanese swift (i'll post pictures later) and a ball winder which made me the happiest, most self-satisfied little cat you've ever seen. a ball winder and swift basically allow you to wind skeins of yarn into chubby little cakes, that stay put when you knit from them. it doesn't sound like a big deal but it kinda is. the swift is this gorgeous, spindly, orange chrome and steel contraption that has a lovely sculptural quality. i want to paint the walls a clear, turquoise blue just to set up a little vignette.

i was wearing my army shorts and my guns'n'roses t-shirt and i was busy negotiating the purchase of the swift when i felt a hand lifting up my ponytail. i turn around to see this little, frail, wizened old lady with the whitest, fluffiest hair, who told me that she had just bought her grandson a "pirate" t-shirt and that it said blah blah blah on the back of it and she wanted to see what my shirt said on the back (for those of you who haven't seen it, it says "appetite for destruction"). as she turned away, she said, "but the front of your shirt is so beautiful...the colours!" i found this pretty hilarious.

then the dotytron and i went out for a semi-nice meal in the neighbourhood to celebrate my being done school and the fact that we like to go out to eat. we went to "citizen" on queen east. it's owned by the same guy who owns "rosebud" on queen west. i enjoyed citizen much more. the price point is a little lower, but it's still pretty slightly-upscale homey, rustic cooking. which is good, because i can justify paying citizen prices for that style, but i couldn't justify paying rosebud prices for the same thing. the room is pretty and spacious. we started with a bowl of warm mixed olives which was VERY plentiful and generous for $4. there were some pretty under-cured, green, raw-tasting olives...so i thing i like them a little more ripe than the large, verdant buggers you see up there.

then we shared a quail salad appetizer which saw a roasted, seared quail (deboned!!!!) sitting atop a mess of greens dressed with a mustard vinaigrette. it was simple and quite tasty.

we shared our mains. i had wiener schnitzel in brown butter with capers and lemon and a fried egg. bliss. pure, unadulterated blissful eating. i got a side herbed spaetzle, which was tasty and crispy browned, but needed a touch of salt. the dotytron had a gnocchi in a braised shortrib ragu. it was delicious, although also a touch underseasoned. it could have used the barest kiss of salt and it would have been topnotch.

for dessert i had a vanilla creme brulee which was quite tasty and vanilla-y but just a bit too runny for my liking (and i likes me a loose brulee) and the dotytron had this chocolate brownie napolean thing which was layered with a white chocolate cream cheese thing. i think if they had just layered the brownie with whipped cream, or a cream cheese filling it would have been perfect...the white chocolate made it a trifle cloying and tacky for my taste. all in all, it was really good, and it came to under $100 total (not including tip), 1 beer.

i would definitely go back. then we met up with bwong to see another documentary, "planet b-boy" it was AWESOME! the south korean and japanese teams were so hot cuz they were so fly. the choreography was top notch and the moves were slick. it was definitely one of the more entertaining hot docs i've seen and definitely well worth the late (midnight!) screening. i enjoyed it immensely. the german a**hole who runs the world b-boying championships is scheisty as all get-out. the attendance since the event has started (in 1990) has risen to 10,000 from 800. the prize money is 3,500 euros SPLIT BETWEEN THE TOP THREE TEAMS. wtf?!? where is all the money going?!?

today i went for a run and went to a yoga class and now i'm going to eat some dippy eggs and toast, work on mulching the garden (we went cedar this year instead of cocoa shells) go play dodgeball, and see the last documentary of 2008 hot docs. this one is called "milosevic on trial" about the war crimes trial of slobodan milosevic and how he chose to defend himself at the tribunal. then nachos for dinner and "the wire" and two more sleeps til italy!

brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrup!

fin.

it's a new jack city

we got a new camera yesterday. the nikon coolpix p5100. i spent a good part of last night trash-talking it and staunchly defending my beloved kodak easyshare, but that's mostly because the new camera has too many bells and whistles and i'm resistant to change AND i tend to be fiercely loyal (keep in mind: kodak easyshare came back from the dead after taking a dive into the cats' water. also keep in mind that when you support kodak, you're supporting rochester, ny).

anyway, here are some pics from the garden. i'm a little sad that i might miss the garden going buck...but we're only gone for 12 days or so...so it should be aight. the stuff i really look forward to are the peonies and the alliums and the delphiniums, the butterfly bush and the bee balm. and my hollyhocks. the garden bugs the dotytron because of it's haphazard, motley crew, bad news bears disorganization. i like it. it's like a scrappy little misfit.

my brother and the dotytron's buddy A came over last night. we went for jean's for dinner and then came home and chilled. i was thinking of going out dancing with them but the bro said the party wasn't that much fun and i was tired and wanted to pack and sort myself out for italy and play with my new camera.

the roomie and i had a semi-tense discussion. it wasn't that tense, but i got to voice some of the stuff that's been bothering me over the last little while. one of them is when she cherry-picks what she likes to eat and what she doesn't like to eat. so, if there's leftovers she's not into, she'll just let us eat them and eat the newer leftovers that she is into. this kind of drives me mildly crazy. then, last weekend, i had two pies: a key lime pie, and the peanut butter pie. we had the key lime pie on saturday and on sunday, we had bwong and dr. rei over for peanut butter pie. as dr. rei is serving it up, the roomie says, "oh, i don't want the peanut butter pie...it's too salty and heavy for me right now. can i have a half-slice?" so i'm not big on slicing up the half slices, but anyway, then she changes her mind and says, "is there still key lime pie left?" and i say yes, and then she goes and cuts herself a slice and a half out of that. THAT drove me bonkers. there are few things i loathe more than when people make requests. or, there's a certain way of making requests that makes me feel like ass. like i'm SERVING you instead of the food coming out of my own generosity and love. the montreal friend I, does this. "i like my hollandaise REALLY lemony" (when i'm in the process of making eggs benny). or, "you know what i REALLY feel like right now? ____" it makes me feel like a short-order cook.

ACTUALLY, what it really makes me feel like is someone who is being disenfranchised and alienated from their labour (yet another way that karl marx was the rightest person ever). it turns it from something that **i** choose to do, out of my love for my friends, into something that becomes unpleasant and feels like a chore. and it's not like i'm completely oblivious to the desires and wants of people i know and love. i know what my friends like. i know that dr. rei loves creme brulee (the chai spiced one) and the sweet potato pecan pie. i know that bwong likes things deep fried. i know that my friend D is too polite to ever criticize anything i make and i also know that the devil's food cupcakes with brown sugar buttercream always go down like gangbusters.

that's the smaller quibble i had though. the dotytron brought the camera home and he had also bought a 4 gig memory card, forgetting that we already have a couple of existing memory cards that total 1 gig. so i go, "you idiot! we already had one" (in a really off-hand, conversational kind of way). then the roomie pipes in: "i think you should put a quarter in a jar every time you call the dotytron an idiot" and i was like, "lady, PLEASE. i think you should let the dotytron be a grown man and put me in my place when and if he feels like it". and it kind of rankled. so later in the evening we had a big conversation about it. and she's like, "well, i just want to try to make you aware of how you sound sometimes" and i'm like, "it's not like the dotytron is a CHILD. he's fully capable of telling me to shut up and calling me a moron when i'm acting like one." which is true. and one of the reasons we've probably been together forever is PRECISELY because we're pretty equally matched and he can put me in my place and i actually listen (as compared to other boyfriends, where i was all, "EFF YOU" and rode roughshod over their poor asses). the roomie: "well in my house, we never were allowed to call each other that" blah blah blah. in my house, my family is always calling each other stuff. it's just part of the jokes.

is it a matter of nomenclature? because there are definitely times when i hear my parents or the dotytron's parents getting persnickety with each other where they may not be saying "idiot" but it's in their tone of voice. or when my sister calls my outlaw bro an "assjack."

i think i was feeling put upon because the roomie felt the need to talk about how i don't have any "compassion" last night and all the other stuff she trots out when there's an audience. so i was like, dude, honestly...i'm fine if you're gong to go down this road...but KNOW YOU THIS: you're setting a very dangerous precedent for when you're in a relationship. i just don't think it's the roommate's place to weigh in on someone else's relationship. ESPECIALLY when it's so one-sided (ie. the dotytron is the poor, defenseless, schlub and i'm the harpy). especially when the roomie has a tendency to consistently mis-read me and the dotytron. like, obviously dr. rei can do it because i feel like she knows and understands us both well enough to mediate and negotiate. i don't think the roomie shares the same world-view enough to give her a platform.

anyway, it was good just to get it all out in the open and there's no hard feelings. inevitably when you're sharing space with people, things are going to come to a head and you get it out and carry on your merry way. say what you will: i may be a one-woman army, but the fact that i live in a perpetual present means i rarely hold on to anger. it's a vicious storm that blows through leaving nary a disturbance in its' wake.

jean's was a bit of a gong show. we got into a big discussion about china and tibet and me and my bro were kind of team china and A was trotting out the usual human rights stuff. the restaurant was full of the white-haired, older, privileged hippie contingent (the kind who WOULD eat at a vegetarian thai restaurant in riverdale) and some of them were obviously listening into the conversation and getting a little perturbed by what me and my bro were saying. essentially, we were like, SHUT UP WORLD. this is not to say that cracking down on tibet isn't a terrible thing. it is. the problem is, the lack of nuance. buddhist monks (and the dalai lama) are really hard to depict as anything OTHER than the innocent lambs and the media and the world contribute to a very uni-dimensional (i would say racist) painting of the situation.

you can't ever say ANYTHING bad about the dalai lama, ever. (even though dr. rei's dad thinks he's a tool of imperialism. me and dr. rei's dad are kind of the same person...politically...ha). because it's an issue that's easy to paint with very broad strokes and the beastie boys get involved and support them and so do celebrities and now they're going to make a stink about the beijing olympics...when the olympics were held in NAZI GERMANY. so, here are my problems:

a) it's curiously telling that tibet becomes the flashpoint issue and NOT the fact that china oppresses it's own people.
b) no one would ever get THAT upset about sudan or something equally heinous in countries populated by a people that don't get the same level of pr as the tibetans (ie. the fact that china is buying so much oil from sudan is crazy...but that's the lesser issue in the media). as numerous scholars have noted...there's a colour spectrum of people we privilege and people we don't...and brown and black are always near the bottom.
c) china is propping up the economy right now and that makes our facile attempts at outrage pretty thin. so...we'll take the money and the cheap goods, but feebly yap our mouths? (yes, i'm talking to you old lady hippie).
d) A's arguments on behalf of tibet were also particularly unstable because he's gone on that israel homeland trip, taken a photo of the 10 foot tall wall in his aunt's backyard, and then will take up the tibetan cause.

so, allow me to say for people with low-level reading comprehension skills - I AM NOT CONDONING CHINA'S ACTIONS. i'm making an argument for a more fully realized contextual understanding of the complexities of why it is that tibet can always be discursively recuperated and other people can't. which is ALSO not to say that i'm excusing my culpability. we're all guilty, we're all stained. we all lack in a critical engagement because there's a cognitive saturation point that allows us to live our lives. however! it is equally dangerous to allow western benevolence (as gayatri spivak would say) to wash away the hypocritical stench of our sins.

ultimately, what interests me is the selectivity in discourse construction for the moral consumption of the west (this is my post-colonial studies training coming in). it is all abhorrent. so why tibet? what is it about the content of tibet and buddhism as a signifier that has allowed it to lend itself to the benevolence of the western gaze?

what makes it okay that michael pollan can write something like this (from his article entitled, "why bother?" in the "new york times"):

"Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?"

yet another clipping for the "blame china" chronicles (there's also a folder for the "blame india" chronicles). i can't decide if he's being tongue-in-cheek, but if he is, i read an unsavoury element of latent racism there.

today i'm packing and doing errands and reading and then trying to wrap my head around the ttc strike and figuring out how i'm going to get to dr. rei's birthday thingy and to my documentary tonight.

fin.

done in by greg's part deux

not to be confused with "hot shots part deux." you can tell the two apart because this entry will contain about 60% less saddam hussein. (maybe). (actually, probably not).

work is a buckshot massacre right now. i've skipped lunch two days in a row! worked straight through!!! and since my lunch usually consists of a couple of grapefruits and an apple (stuff that's fairly easy to cram down my maw while typing) that's saying something. i don't like it. i've also been getting up insanely early. like, senior citizen early. 6:30 in the morning. i also don't like that because i'm starting to look haggard. the lack of sleep, the work stress, and the insane amounts of tacos and ice cream i've eaten the last few days, plus the not getting a chance to run is making me feel like a chubby chicken. or maybe i'm pmsing. my hand is also getting all michael jackson-y again with some hyper-pigmentation spots. i don't get it. if i'm supposed to be a nubian princess, i'd rather have it over and done with. you'll be happy to know that i'm not aggressively treating it with some strange concoction of my own devise consisting of equal parts old steroid cream dug out from the moldy depths of the bathroom cupboard and pepto bismol and crushed up cat allergy medicine tablets (belonging to my brother...he leaves it here). i did make an appointment with my dermatologist. i feel like it's related to this sunscreen i slathered on a few days ago (also dug out from the moldy depths of bathroom cupboard).

yesterday i took dr. rei for a pedicure. somehow, i ended up choosing the only "spa" in all of toronto that gears itself to black people. it was maaaaad irie inside the ride. it was kind of funny. and the lady who did my feet was putting about negative 20 quid worth of love into the job. if she could have spent the whole time kissing her teeth, i think she would have.

then we went to el trompo, where i somehow convinced dr. rei to get fat with me when we turn 50. el trompo was so so. i think i still like tacos el asador better. we had the tacos al pastor (i think)...chunks of pork with pineapple and onion (?) in soft, mealy, corn tortillas. we also had a guac (okay...but not as good as mine). the best thing we had was queso fundido, which is a small gratin dish filled with melted cheese (we had ours with crumbled mexican chorizo) and served with some flour tortillas, so you can kind of build your own quesadilla. that was amazing. but, really...it's melted cheese. that's like a no brainer. that's like trying to get me to fall in love with an old chinese man holding a fat kid. you have to put a *little* effort in, you know?

so today i got coaxed into a tacos el asador mission with bwong and dr. rei because we're family and we can't get enough of each other. i don't understand the point of hanging with people you don't really like. i don't have very many friends, but the ones i have i adore and they're the BEST, so i'd rather hang out by myself, then chill with peeps that aren't completely my people. then we went to greg's for ice cream, and even though i was really really really full, i still got two scoops. not only did i get two scoops, i kvetched about the tit-face ice cream scooper chick giving out chintzy portions. call me sexist, but i don't believe women should scoop ice cream...at the very least, the women hired in ice cream parlours should look like they eat a lot of ice cream themselves.

while we were eating the ice cream we saw someone walking down the street with a weimaraner puppy. "awwww," says dr. rei, "look at how cute that dog is!" "no way!" says bwong, "that dog looks moldy" ahahahahahahahahahaha. i honestly can't think of a better description for a weimaraner than moldy. hahahaha. i'm still laughing about it.

i'm supposed to be skyping my friend in b.c. tonight. i'm not sure how i feel about turning into a cyborg. i'm also not sure how i feel about the inevitable delay. i also hate hearing myself on long distance calls. i'd probably be a lot more patient with the poor lady named "cynthia" calling from bangladesh to sell me an upgrade on my home phone line if i didn't have to hear my voice echoing down the line.

tomorrow is friday! that means 5 more sleeps to italia!

fin.

about alice

i started and finished reading calvin trillin's "about alice" in a couple of hours last night (i can take no credit for freakish speed-reading skills...it's a slim volume with lots of breathing room on the page). calvin trillin was introduced to me by way of my friend evilhomer and for that i am eternally grateful. he's probably my favorite food writer. witty and sly, with an honest-to-goodness, full-bellied, gusto for the pleasures of the table and gustatory indulgences that hint at his "aw shucks" upbringing in kansas city, missouri. it is to the credit of his essential decency that his yale education and subsequent career as a staff writer for the "new yorker" didn't manage to mar his midwestern sensibilities and companionable writing style with pastoral irony. alice trillin was his beloved wife and muse, who passed away in 2001. she made frequent and consistent appearances in his food writing and his love for her and the comforts of their home suffused each page with a humanity and life that belied the sitcom-esque stylings of the vignettes that featured their day to day movements in time.

the degree to which calvin trillin was (is) so unabashedly smitten with his wife made me cry while i read this paean to the alice faithful readers didn't know, the alice who existed off the page, and indeed - is making me cry (maybe i'm pmsing) as i type these words. in his writings she was stuck playing the straight-man to his soft, clumsy, mildly shlubby everyman. rebecca traister, writing in salon to entreat people to read the short piece from which this longer book was expanded, says this:

"For anyone who has known a George-and-Gracie couple, or has been half of one, it should be abundantly clear that the prudent partner has chosen a life with the "marginally goofy" mate for a reason -- presumably, a marginal goofiness of their own -- and that the marginally goofy person chooses a rudder because he or she wants, on many levels, some light steering."

for someone like me, a product of a broken (subsequently mended) home, beset and impressed upon by a (mostly) happy pack of unconventional relationships, the sweetness and tenderness of this portrait makes a compelling case for reveling in those quiet moments between the storms of life, when gazing into the eyes of a loved one and seeing the tacit understanding and off-handed acceptance that resides therein can represent in totality all the grace the world has to offer. to know and be known, completely, is a solace and buffer against the impassiveness of time. calvin trillin knew alice and this book is a testament to her legacy.

read it.

i think i'm going to take dr. rei to el trompo for dinner tonight. i've been craving tacos like crazy and my marathon session with the dotytron at tacos el asador last friday did little to assuage the hunger for carnitas, crema, and chorizo. i'll post a review soon.

fin.

done in by greg's

first things first - here is that hilarious series of pics from sunday.

picture #1 (deemed unacceptable because me and dr. rei weren't looking tough enough)

picture #2 (again unacceptable because i wasn't being tough)

picture #3 (camera takes a dive)

picture #4 the one the diet coke stealing lady took (!!!!!)

picture #5 all of us looking suitably tough (i like the smiley ones better, though)

we hot docs'ed it largetime tonight. we saw two, back to back. first, i had dinnie with my friend k from work. we went to mcdonald's. i had my usual (big mac combo) but switched up the chaser because i saw they had a new chicken sandwich and i thought to myself, "life is all about change, let's give it a go!" it was a terrible mistake (i still ate it, but i should have gone with the filet-o-fish). they serve it on a "ciabatta" type bun (read: square-shaped, but underbaked and tasteless), and it's a heavily seasoned breaded chicken filet (okay taste, i guess) with lettuce, tomato, and a meagre swish of mayo. it's also kind of pricey ($4.69). so somehow i spent $11 at mcdonald's. but i was really hungry!

the first doc we saw was called "tehran has no more pomegranates." i thought i'd come out and represent seeing as how my bfffff is from iran and iran never gets any love. it's supposed to show the side of iran that we in the west never get to see (ie. the fact that it's a fully-functioning country with a major metropolis filled with the usual major metropolis type stuff - skyscrapers, serpentine knots of multi-lane highways, and a booming middle class at the expense of the poor). it was not an entirely successful film. it dragged and the filmmaker took a self-consciously wry and tongue-in-cheek tone that was overplayed at the expense of a thesis that translates to an audience not steeped in the ins and outs of iranian culture. so i didn't particularly feel like i got the joke, per se. there was also a shameless overuse of schlocky time-lapse and jittery edits and cuts for no reason. it's definitely important to have a counterpoint to the barrage of uni-dimensional depictions of iran that we get here in the west (ie. something that's NOT a dusty street demonstration of bearded men raising their fists in menacing anger), however i think the filmmaker could have made a stronger, more succinct point and lost his way a bit.

the other film we saw was called "blast!" it's actually an acronym for "balloon-borne large aperture sub-millimetre telescope" it's about a group of nasa funded canadian and american astrophysicists who build this telescope and launch it into the air with a balloon. the telescope is specially designed to measure sub-millimetre light, which (from my understanding based on the film) is a type of light particle that's easily absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere, so that's why you need the balloon, to get the telescope 30-40km in the air. it's also the type of light (i think) that can be captured through the obscuring miasma of dust particles that usually hides nascent stars and forming galaxies from view. because light takes so long to travel, we can see into the past of the beginning of the lives of galaxies that are 8 billion light years away, and from that, glean a better understanding of how the matter of our universe was formed. stuff like this blows my mind (this didn't stop me from taking a little cat nap during a boring part). when they finally get the data and map it, they come to the conclusion that there's literally hundreds and hundreds of galaxies out there. it's the romantic sublime again! (note to self: brush up on william blake this summer). i love the romantic sublime as a theoretical paradigm. the film was pretty entertaining, with only some mildly questionable forays into human interest territory (boo-hoo, one of the physicists came thisclose to missing christmas with his kids) and some dodgy musical choices (stealing the calypso theme from "commando" being one, and throwing in zephyr and his pipes of pan near the end being the other). i'd recommend this film.

in between we stopped for greg's ice cream and i was a piggy and got two scoops and now i'm grossly full and flirting dangerously with heartburn. i'm going to hit some water and a shot of pepto and hope that takes care of business.

tomorrow i'm at work all day and then i'm taking dr. rei to get a pedicure for her birthday. i'm not usually one for that kind of business but i thought it would be nice to get a foot and calf massage and have my feet looking semi-presentable before i unleash them on an unsuspecting italian populace. then i think we're going to go for dinner in kensington and then home to rest.

fin.

why are all the good love songs

written about white girls? case in point: the rolling stones' "she's a rainbow":

She comes in colors ev'rywhere;
when She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming, colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

i want to dance into the room like a refraction of light through a prism, casting a spectrum of summery colour over walls and feet. i want to dazzle. instead, my lot in life is to be a swarthy, brazen, dense, ball. like the ball in the opening sequence of "raiders of the lost ark" (more of a ginormous boulder, really), decimating everything in my path and trampling all that is good, tender, and sweetly innocent.

despite this small quibble about the shortage of rolling stones' songs that i feel can accurately be said to encapsulate my life, the combination of summery weather conditions, good food, good friends, family, and being done school is an exceptionally magical elixir. how do people live in countries without spring? what does it feel like to be bereft of that moment when the sun's rays turn from being thin and waspishly cruel to warm and full and fat and jolly? to not know the benediction of turning your face up to the sun and feeling the heat suffuse your skin? to loll around underneath the sun's rays like a fat seal on a warm rock? i feel badly for them, i do. i wouldn't give up all four seasons for anything.

i'm happily working on the italy trip stuff (and to truly approximate the degree of "happily" i entreat you to picture a big, rotund pig, snuffling around in mud for tender shoots and leaves, with its' ears flopping over its' eyes. THAT kind of "happily"). only a week to go! i can't believe it. it went from being a joke bandied about between myself and dr. rei, to this spectre in the back of my mind as i was buzzing about with work and school, to a full-fledged, real, live TRIP! upon which i'm ACTUALLY embarking! how did THAT happen?!? oh oh oh the things we'll see, the history to be steeped in, the pork to consume. is there anything better than setting off on an adventure with your favorite people in the world? i'm almost beside myself. but that's starting to verge dangerously close to "tempting the fates" territory so i'll only admit to a mild twinge of anticipation. a mosquito bite, really.

as much as i'm an avowed fan of winter, i can't help but welcome the tidings of spring and summer. sleepy days spent sprawled on big brown (the couch) lazily working my way through some pleasure reading (!!!!!) while the heat filters its way through the screen and mixes with the smells of stale, brassy, height-of-summer torpor and the keening whine of bugs and lawn movers. when the days seems to hang suspended in the density of heat-induced immobility. when you yearn for the sound of ice clinking in a glass and the feel of fresh water lapping at your feet. the sweet, deep sleep of a sun-drunk day.

i grabbed the new michael ondaatje book from the library - "divisadero" it's going to be my plane reading. i'm going to bring a non-fiction work, too. two books. that's IT! (plus my assorted guidebooks and notebooks and restaurant recommendation books). there's something about the ceylon-steeped, sepia tones of ondaatje's writing that screams summer to me, even as the heaviness of the subject matter suggests the steeliness of winter. i feel such a connection with his style of prose, more so than almost any other canadian author i've ever read. maybe he calls to my post-colonial soul? the imagery he chooses, the poetry of his descriptions, the disregard for temporal constraints and narrative conventions...i haven't read a piece of his that i haven't loved. i'm excited. it's nice to be jonesing for fiction again, after my long tryst with comic books and non-fiction.

we saw "forgetting sarah marshall" on the weekend. i love jason segel so this one is a no-brainer. i kind of like kristen bell, but i think what i REALLY love is "veronica mars." it was a touch long, but russell brand is hilarious in it, the writing is quite sweet and touching, the characters are fairly well-drawn, and the musical/puppet element helps to make it a winner (for people like me for whom jim henson embodied all that is good and noble about the world). that and mila kunis is the butteriest love interest ever. i like her more than kristen bell (i never was one for blondes). the movie loses its' focus at certain points, and some of the apatow stable have a problem with really inhabiting their roles...but overall, i quite liked it. probably more than "superbad." we saw a preview for "the pineapple express" and james franco is trying really hard to win me over with his portrayal of lovable stoners and doing really well at it. to think i thought he was all "spiderman" and "anapolis"!!!! when really he's "freaks and geeks" and "pineapple express" and hilarious skits on funny or die!

yesterday was hilarious. me and dr. rei were tooling around downtown, under the auspices of trying to find me some respectable work clothes that don't make me look like a kid in king arthur's court. invariably, it turned into a giant gab-fest where i had the opportunity to be-smirch aidan o'connor's name all over town. to wit: we were in urban outfitters buying undies. and as usual i was running my mouth off about aidan o'connor. so we're standing at the cash and i say to dr. rei:

"aidan o'connor is THE WORST"
*dr. rei continues laughing*
cashier kind of gives this knowing look and says, "i know aidan o'connor"
me: "yeah, well he has scabies"
cashier: "ummm, he's my boyfriend's BEST FRIEND"
me: "well...tell your boyfriend to watch out because he has scabies"
other cashier who's standing behind tit-face cashier and laughing: "just because you have scabies doesn't make you a bad person!"
lol!!!

so we basically wandered around queen west like the tribe of issachah and got all hot and thirsty and picked up bwong en route. then we went to my dodgeball game where i had to iron-man it and i basically turned into a giant, sweaty, puffy, tomato-head. it was very unbecoming. and i didn't play all that well, so i was le pissed at myself. then me, the dotytron, bwong and dr. rei went to harbord fish'n'chips. this of course resulted in an attempt to take a picture in front of the wu-tang mural. we tried like 10 billion times but we didn't have anything to balance the camera on (we had knapsacks, a can of coke, and a can of diet coke). one of the pictures resulted in the camera tumbling off the precarious contraption we had rigged up and landing on the ground with a troubling sound, which stressed dr. rei out. then a kind lady (or so we thought) offered to take a picture FOR US! so nice, right?! so we got all posed up (this involves giving me about 10 minutes to arrange my fingers into the "blood" gang-sign that bwong taught me how to do this weekend. if i ever go to south central, i'm screwed, because it'll take me so long to show my affiliations that i'll get capped in the meantime) and the lady takes a picture, and then goes, "okay, that's good, let's take another one" so she does. then we thank her PROFUSELY and she goes on her merry way. and we're all excited so we run up the camera to check out the pictures. ummm....THEY WERE BLURRY AS S**T. we were all aghast, to say the least. our mouths dropped open. she somehow managed to take TWO of the blurriest pictures i've ever seen! and she totally didn't fess up about it! it was one of the funniest things that's happened to us in a long time. we almost died laughing. the ones we took turned out better. when dr. rei gives me the pics i'll throw them up on here because the transition from our jerry-rigged shots to the ones that she took are so astounding. AND after she left, dr. rei's DIET COKE WENT MISSING. who does that???

okay, this post has been epic. so i'll just do a quick food rundown. the top picture is this spanish-influenced bean and pork stew thing i made in the slow cooker. it consists of beans cooked with saffron, bay leaves and smoked paprika, featuring a pork smorgasbord of: smoked pork hock, pork belly, chorizo, and blood sausage. i cribbed it from my old supervisor, who i'm realizing can cook the pants off of me. hers was much better, but this version was still pretty fly. then there's a pic of sunday breakkie. we had the usual juice, alongside challah french toast with spiced plum compote, vanilla pastry cream, and mennonite sausage. then there's a peanut butter pie. then tonight's dinnie, which was pappardelle, tossed with sauteed leeks, radicchio, toasted pine nuts, chili paste, garlic and parm. served with a caesar salad, eaten outside, because everything tastes better outside. then there's a slice of key lime pie, featuring regular limes, because juicing key limes is a fool's mission (there's no juice!).

fin.

WHOOOSH

that my friends, is the sound of all (read: most) of my cares, worries, and troubles being swept away through the magic of the interwebs at the exact same moment that i pressed "send" on the email carrying my last essay of grad school to my prof. the paper turned out pretty good in the end...i thought it was going to be absolute dogbarf, but i pulled it together and i'm actually pretty proud of it. it was looking grim for a bit (ie. before i started writing and researching - when the thought of having to produce a paper on anything related to my topic seemed like goliath to my david)...and i had resigned myself to shooting low on the "15 pages" length guideline. i was going to go for 12!!! in the end, it came in at a respectable 14 pages and i had more to say than i thought. so now i'm living the hakuna matata life.

it was kind of anticlimatic being done, actually. the other final papers for my other courses were greeted with skipping, ear-to-ear grins, and a general rush of euphoria. this just felt like business as usual. when i woke up this morning (my first morning as a real, honest-to-goodness librarian), it just felt like another saturday i would spend procrastinating from homework. BUT IT ISN'T! i'm free from homework! now all i have to focus and worry about is how sucky i am at my job! and how the deadlines are coming fast and furious! and how clients aren't returning my calls! yay!

last night we saw our first hotdocs. it was a double-screening. a short one called "virtuoso" which is about playing the theremin. the film was only 9 minutes, but about 5 minutes could have been cut. it actually made the theremin seem incredibly boring. which it isn't! and there were a lot of schlocky camera techniques and amateurish fades and the subjects were depicted as simultaneously creepy/freaky/boring, which is kind of a puzzling feat. the next feature, was called "as slow as possible". here's a synopsis from the film's website:

"On his 18th birthday, Ryan Knighton was told he would slowly go blind. It’s taken fifteen years, and as Ryan prepares to let go of his last sliver of sight, he sets out to Germany to hear one note give away to another in the notorious 639 year long organ performance of the John Cage composition, As Slow As Possible."

this was actually a lovely film. it's about loss, time, mortality, and change. the central figure (ryan) is a great, reflexive, thoughtful, and funny subject. it's about legacies and the existential quest of knowing that you've touched people and that your life means something as you move within time. about being heard. it was fantastic. after the note change, the filmmaker is talking to ryan and ryan says something along the lines of: "when i heard the note change, i could tell that something different was happening, and it was profound, but after about five minutes, i started having difficulty remembering the note that had come before it." which seemed like such an apt summation for ryan's transition from sighted to blind.

from there we went to meet up with dr. rei at one of her friend's apartment for a pre-hang before going out dancing. this gathering reiterated to me again why i hate house parties. or maybe i just hate young people? it seemed like a lot of people there were very, very young and i made a new nemesis! his name is aidan o'connor. i loathe him. he basically spent the time at the place either a) in front of the mirror, switching from his toque to various hats and staring at himself intently or b) texting people on his cell phone. it was completely obnoxious and thoroughly objectionable. i wanted to bottle both the toque and the cell phone. me and the dotytron and bwong ended up bailing on the dancing festivities. it's too bad. i think under different circumstances i would have quite liked going out dancing to that night (the music sounds promising) but the peeps left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and i knew that i wouldn't have a good time throwing my lot in with them. next time! instead, we went and got gelato and whooped it up for a bit before heading home.

today i'm doing some house cleaning, and yoga, and baking, and then maybe going for a bike ride, and then working on our italy food list. soooooooo relaxing! i love that this is what my days are now going to consist of! we're having bwong over for dinner. i'm making this spanish bean stew in the slowcooker, that has a generous amount of smoked paprika, some saffron, pork belly, chorizo, smoked pork hock and blood sausage in it. mmmmmmmmm. we're going to be having this with beans topped with romesco...and a key lime pie for dessert.

yay!

fin.

things have been a soupcon quiet round here

it's because i'm in the last, thrashing, twitching throes of this infernal degree. it feels weird to be on the cusp of being done. on the one hand, it's like every particle in my being is straining against the forces of physics to be free...i can almost feel myself trying to leap out of my own skin with the anticipation of that rush of exhilaration that's going to accompany handing in my last paper.

on the other hand, there's that little, niggling, what now? voice that's whispering just beneath the relief and joy. it's like post-partum depression or something. you spend two years of your life moving towards something and when you get there, i have no illusions about how anti-climatic it's going to feel. i think because i've been working full-time the difference in life style won't feel as great. i'll still have to go to bed a decent time during the week and wake up early. i'll still have a full day of work occupying my plate and i'll still be trying to squeeze in the stuff of life in that sliver of post-work/post-dinner time. i don't think the quarter-life crisis will be as great as when i finished undergrad. then, the gaping chasm of opportunities and the portent weight of every decision seemed so much more infinitely awful and REAL. i don't think i've changed much in the past two years, whereas from the day i set foot on campus in first year university to the day i packed up my belongings and moved home after fourth year was like living a few lifetimes.

my last paper is coming along nicely. i'm kind of liking it. just a little. it won't be my best work, but it won't be something i have to run and hide from. i'm about halfway through and that's just setting up the theory. i haven't gotten to the analysis yet.

these past few days i've been cooking by the seat of my pants. veering off the menu plan and cobbling together meals based on what we have on hand and what would require a minimum of supplementing from the grocery store to execute. last night we had beef stroganoff, with the extra ribeye that couldn't be forced into monday's steak sarnie. i simmered slices of the beef with sauteed leeks and garlic, and a tonne of cremini and white button mushrooms, sliced. deglazed with beer, added whipping cream and sour cream, and finished with salt and pepper and a liberal shower of chopped dill and parsley. i served it over extra broad egg noodles, which i love for their chubby, slippery, eggy heft. sided it with some broccoli tossed in butter.

tonight we had BLT's. it was a make your own affair. i cooked off the bacon and had mine with lettuce, tomato (natch), roasted garlic mayo, and an over-easy fried egg on toast. served it with a baby spinach salad dressed with caesar dressing and replete with chunks of avocado and a fairly fine dice of red onion.

can you believe i'm almost done? what is this summer going to look like, i wonder? can you believe i'm going to italy in T-minus 13 days?!??!?? talk about not feeling real. i want to get this paper done so that i can turn my attention to completing my italy "to-do" list.

hopefully by the next time i post...this degree will be done-zo. i wonder what this little blog is going to look like minus the library school component? although, now that i think of it, it's never really strictly been school-dependent for content anyway.

fin.

testament to the human spirit

that's me, to a T. so, one of the things that start to happen when you hang around me enough, is that gradually, little hints are dropped, that indicate my fundamental belief that i can do anything. i may not be able to do it well, but i certainly believe that i can do anything (see previous blog posts re: my ability to luge, fly planes, etc.). one time the dotytron and i were driving through the country and in between singing along to steely dan, he randomly pointed at one of those giant hay bales (the circular ones) and said offhand, "do you think you could lift that" and i immediately responded, "yeah." i didn't even bat an eye or skip a beat. it made him laugh.

on friday night, we were talking at A's house, and i mentioned that my coworker g's husband doesn't believe that i can eat three baconators (i haven't tested this theory, but i'm pretty sure i can), and is willing to pay for the baconators and throw in $10 on top if i can do it. i'm not the biggest person for bet-eating...but i mean, i just don't see what the big deal is. i would certainly feel sick after, but i think i would get tired of the taste before i puked or anything (not for nothing do i call myself "iron stomach lee"). then A started telling this story about the time he broke his shoulder or arm and how there was a trucker in the hospital emergency room, who was in there because he had eaten a bread clip by mistake while making a sandwich in the rig (the bread clip is the little square plastic jobbie that holds the twisted edges of the bread bag together). and i was all like, as if you would go to emergency for that. that's so not a big deal. and everyone was all like, "it's going to tear up your intestines or tear up your butt" but i held fast to the belief that i'm fairly certain i could pass a bread clip through my butt with minimal fuss. at which point, my friend A (my male doppelganger) turns to me and says, "you're just a little tough guy aren't you? you can eat three baconators, crap out a bread clip..." hahahaha...it's so true. i AM such a little tough guy (in my head).

in other news: my sociology prof gave me a one week extension on the paper! unasked!!! argh!!! why would he do that!!! i don't want to be writing all next week!!! i think i'll be okay, i want to have it done by friday, but if i take saturday to write, it'll still be cool. i can't believe italy is in t-minus 15 days (two weeks!) and i don't even have a working itinerary. it's kind of stressing me out, but not really, because the three little bears (dotytron, dr. rei and myself) will be having so much fun just terrorizing a different country.

tonight for dinner i made a steak sarnie with arugala, sliced tomatoes, seared, sliced ribeye, and roasted garlic mayo on toasted ace bakery roasted garlic loaf. we had it with a caesar salad. and i might have banana cake for dessert.

fin.

wowz0rz

i really dug the tunes last night and had a fantastic time dancing, but the dotytron - not so much. we have this old sort-of crew of jungle cohorts how are basically the most disgusting pig-face drunkards imaginable. like, picture the worst possible, stinky, unwashed, booze-seeping-from-your-pores disgusting boozehound with no prospects, and that's the crew. i've been against these peeps and their notorious after parties, pretty much from the get-go, when i realized they were the human equivalent of motley crue's butt-wiping sock. but there was a time, when the dotytron was swept up in the spirit of the rave and getting messy, that he would go to the afterparties and whoop it up. this set a DANGEROUS precedent. basically, the odd time we go out and cross paths with these ne'er do wells, they leave me well enough alone, because i make it VERY clear that i'm not interested in having beer spilled on me/someone spitting into my mouth/someone invading my space and talking way to close (it's almost hilarious the amount of cirque-du-soleil limbo-esque back-bending contortion i can do to move myself away from the onslaught of booze-induced close-talking)/and otherwise pandering to people who are so far gone that they're not making ANY sense. so i just go, find myself a spot, and dance. the dotytron, because he didn't set boundaries, is ACCOSTED because everyone expects him to be party-time slop-face guy. it got kind of ugly. like, wicked ugly.

i'm not going to go into *too* many details to protect the innocent (which isn't really anyone but me and the dotytron, actually), but i will say that fanu showed up wearing a brand new alice in chains t-shirt that was kind of sad and heartbreaking at the same time in that "clueless finnish immigrant" kind of way. but then i still hate his face. so it was a tough call. apparently he thinks the dotytron looks like tony hawk. lol! what a crazy finnish immigrant.

in other news, i didn't make steak sandwiches because i spent all day with h, baby deliah, friend m, and that guy...i made the t-shirt pictured at left, which in retrospect, i should have worn out last night. but it's handy to have this t-shirt on hand so that when i go out all summer, it's saves me time from yelling into some random bozo's ear as they're trying to get all up in my grill.

oh, but instead of making steak sarnies...we ate at popeye's. it was kind of a debacle, because there's a popeye's that's closer to us (in the delivery respect) but they're always a**holes and the food isn't as good. so i called my regular popeye's and he was all like, "there's one closer to you, why don't you try them first because it might be quicker." so i was like, you know what? i'm all about second chances, let's DO IT! but then the dude at s**ttier popeye's was saying that i needed a TWENTY DOLLAR MINIMUM order, which isn't true, because i've ordered from o.g. popeye's and we always get by with a $15 minimum. so i talked to the manager, and i was like, "how about instead of me buying all this extra food i'm NOT GOING TO EAT, i just make it up in tips" and he's all like, "it's the principle of the matter, blah blah blah" so i got all fed up and called o.g. popeye's, and i was at $18 and the person on the phone didn't even give me a second thought. it was all like, "your total is $18.23 ma'am, it'll be there in 45 minutes." this is how we DO. no more non-o.g. popeye's ever again!

anyway, the point of that rambling interlude is to show you that popeye's is amazing because they STILL SELL DEEP FRIED APPLE PIES. i realized this fairly recently. it's AMAZING. i haven't had a deep-fried fast food apple pie since 1992, when mcdonald's made the highly regrettable decision to switch to a baked format. it was a horrible, horrible mistake. it's nice to see that popeye's understands just how delicious a crispy, blistered, tube of apple pie filling is, and how it speaks to the very core of you.

today is a day of some small tidying, then meeting up with dr. rei to regale her with tales from last night, and then dodgeball, wings and home for the wire. i'm going to try to do a soupcon of homework before that too.

fin.

one more to go!

i finished my second-last paper at work on thursday during lunch (i CRANKED out 8 [read: 4] pages of stuff in an hour) so i only have one more to do before i'm a free free free bird with a master's degree (albeit a half-cocked one). weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

in other news: i love love love my kitchener-waterloo-guelph (and the toronto division) crew so much! it's always guaranteed fun times and a million laughs a minute a' plenty. the only thing that gets me bummed is that i don't get to see them nearly enough and it makes me cry a little in my sleep.

i totally got my a-game on this morning and i've done a crapload. i packed up all my winter clothes and re-organized the closet and got rid of 2+ garbage bags FULL of stuff i don't wear (i don't know how i manage to produce two garbage bags full of clothes i don't wear every few months...i haven't even been buying many new clothes lately) and shoes and whatnot. and i mopped the floor. i'm feeling mighty foine right about now.

i'm headed off shortly to visit my friend h and m and h's little wee bebe deliah. i think we're going to make t-shirts and do other crafty things so i'm bringing my knitting too. then tonight is fanu. i don't know what's in the air, but i'm kinda readying myself to go a little bit bucktown tonight. i'm so so hype! i think summertime always screams jungle to me and the fact that i'm nearly done school is just adding to the heady mix of crunk shimmering in the atmosphere. anyway, if you click the link and check out fanu's "digital tunes" section (lower left hand side of the screen) and listen to naphta's "soundclash 1" - that's kind of how i'm feeling right now. that "terrorist"-style bassline! the amens! the rudebwoy samples! the feel of that tune is everything i love about dancing...say what you will about jungle...but nothing captures the spirit of e'd out rhythmic exhilaration quite like it.

tonight for dinner i think i'm going to make us steak sarnies...hollowed out ace bakery roasted garlic loaf, roasted garlic mayo, arugala, sliced tomatoes, medium-rare ribeye thinly sliced. with a big ol' caesar salad and a slice of that caramel-pecan banana upside down cake for dessert.

yum!

fin.

race against the clock

by tomorrow morning i have to finish another paper, which leaves me with just one more to go before this infernal degree is a thing of the distant past. there's so much to do before then! and it's so hard to do it when the sun is calling me and there are birthdays to celebrate and socialness to conduct and a trip to italy to nail down.

i tried doing some work last night but i was pretty pooped and only got one page done (one page that through the creative use of "negative space" [read: double, and sometimes triple spacing between lines/paragraphs/headings] i've managed to transform into 2.5 pages of "material"). i think i was put off by wrasslin' with making dinner last night. the dinner ended up turning out splendidly, but it was a battle to get there.

i made a sandwich consisting of an ace bakery roasted garlic loaf, split and toasted in the oven. i then slathered it with roasted garlic mayonnaise, arugala, thinly sliced tomatoes, and a head of portobello mushrooms i had sliced thickly and quickly sauteed in a little butter with salt and pepper. topped with the lid of the loaf slathered again with roasted garlic mayo. the roasted garlic mayo almost killed me. i made it from scratch and the damned thing broke (aka didn't emulsify) THREE TIMES! three times!!! i've never had that happen to me...and i used to make 4 L pails of chili mayo all the time at bymark. it was tragic and frustrating and involved using all these various gadgets and implements (i went from hand blender, to food processor) and a lot of wasted oil and eggs. in the end though, the resulting mayo was so delicious, that i've scrapped the previous menu plans in favour of meals centring around roasted garlic mayo. blts! steak sarnies! mmmmm!!!

i sided it with a salad based loosely on the persian one dr. rei made last weekend. it's very simple and light and crunchy, though i was missing the dried mint that dr. rei added. i just seeded and chopped some tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped cucumbers, and added some diced red onion together in a bowl with salt and pepper.

i also made rice krispie treats. i've made a HUGE breakthrough in rice krispe square hegemony. MICROWAVE THE BUTTER/MARSHMALLOW MIXTURE. it's incredible! it took all of 2 minutes and everything was goopy and smooth with nary a burned piece of sugar encrusting a steel pot to be seen. magical! it's taken rice krispie square production down from a 15 minute ordeal to a 5 minute one. huzzah!

tonight is leftover night. i'm also making devilled eggs and devil's food cupcakes with brown sugar buttercream for my buddy a's birthday hoo-ha tomorrow. this weekend is busy busy. tomorrow i'm meeting a friend for sushi lunch near my work, then a's birthday hoo-ha. then on saturday i'm visiting my friend h and her babe and doing crafts and then going to a drum'n'bass party (yes, you read that right...no, we haven't time travelled back to 1999) featuring this dj named fanu. fanu is basically a jerk who sometimes makes good tunes (when they're don't devolve into noodley, indiscriminate, drum-funk wankery). i kind of seriously dislike him. because he's an idiot. he's basically what would happen if uter from the simpsons grew up and made drum'n'bass. see! annoying!

fin.

i feel shame

confession time folks: while i was procrastinating on saturday (this was during the point when i was somehow still delusional and half-heartedly convinced that i was going to sit in the basement and work on a paper all day), i noodled around on the internet. and by "noodled around" i mean "watched the oprah show on the pregnant man. on the internet. in 5 minutes segments. that took forever to load" lol! THAT my friends, is dedication to the salacious details of a pregnant man.

in other news, i've somehow convinced myself that i coined the joke: "jamaican me horny" and i find it BEYOND funny. i basically laughed myself to sleep about it last night, and these were not laughs of the "demure, inward chuckle" variety. these were side-splitting belly-achers. i think this is a sign that my synapses and psyche are at a particularly vulnerable state. by the end of today, i should have 1 more assignment in the can and another well on its way. *crosses fingers*

the dotytron got wait-listed at york u for teacher's college. it was purely a numbers game...with 6000 applicants for 700 spots. he's a little bummed about it, but the person he spoke to said his application was really strong...the people who got in had SIX HUNDRED HOURS of teaching experience and his 170+ just didn't stack up (he's on the first tier waiting list though). so it's back to the drawing board...with buffalo, and maybe moving away to london or kingston a possibility for him for a year to get this shiz done. it's completely irrational of me, but i blame the roomie, because she was being VERY jinxy and constantly saying, "i know you got it." and then i'd say, "STOP JINXING IT" but she'd PERSIST and say, "it doesn't matter, he got in." so i'm kind of peeved at her for jinxing it...because **i** would never willfully and REPEATEDLY tempt the fates, thus.

last night's dinner was courtesy of the dotytron. whole wheat penne with pancetta and cauliflower and parm. delicious! he did an amazing job because the cauliflower stayed crunchy-crisp. we also had a boring salad of romaine with tomatoes and cucumber in an indiscriminate lemon dressing.

tonight we're having pan-seared portabello mushrooms with roasted garlic and thyme mayo on a crusty bun with arugala and sliced tomatoes. probably with a caesar salad on the side.

fin.

the weekend that was

somewhat predictably, given the fact that i polished off two assignments in one day (though i can't attest to their quality), and given the fact that this past weekend in toronto was of the warm and sunshine-filled variety, perfect for lolly-gagging and strolling...i didn't do a single damned school-related thing all weekend. instead i sat outside and had people over and talked to the neighbours and watched episodes of "big love" season 1 (nicolette, i hate you!) and knit and watched people flip houses and pretended to be the kind of person in the financial position to be flipping houses. it was lovely.

on saturday night, dr. rei made us a lovely dinner and invited her new man friend over. that's the dinner pictured above. she made us rice studded with persian currant-type things and cooked with saffron and grated carrots. the thing at the top of the plate (12 o'clock) jutting up like a big brown iceberg is a piece of the crunchy bit that's formed at the bottom of the rice pot by laying down pita and oil and settling the rice down for the second cooking. i covet the crunchy stuff like nothing else, and all semblance of propriety goes out the window...i'd probably snatch the last piece of crunchy bit from the hands of the elderly with nary a moral twinge to ruffle the feathers of my insatiable greed. there was also chicken simmered in a tumeric-lashed sauce, yoghurt mixed with cucumber, and a bracingly fresh salad of cucumber, red onion, and tomato and mint. my contribution to the meal was a chocolate cake with a mascarpone frosting which i topped with candied hazelnuts. the urge to do some playing with sugar struck (although this urge was at odds with the humidity of the air) and so i skewered and dragged some hazelnuts through sugar and let them cool and harden, resulting in the sputnik-like jerry-rigging in the second picture above. i wasn't overly happy with the chocolate cake...it wasn't moist and fudgy enough for me and it was kind of plain, overall...i should have pulled out the stops more.

on sunday we played dodgeball against my boyfriend's team. those were the semi-finals. we lost, and this week we're playing for last or second-last place. we're not a last place team so i hope we hold it together. it's very frustrating playing with the team right now because it's like the whole team has forgotten how to play/think/strategize dodgeball. we've decided to disband until the fall, but my boyfriend's team is playing in the spring and they need girls so i think i'm going to continue playing with them. i just love love love playing dodgeball and i think i'm getting pretty good at it.

we had dinnie at the dotytron's parents' place. it was roast boeuf. with creamed onions, which i've never had before but promptly fell in love with. i made a caramel pecan banana upside down cake. the caramel was supposed to get all gooey and drippy, but instead, it was kind of hard and crumbly. it was a pretty serendipitous accident as the crunchiness was a nice textural counterpoint to the tender cake and swoosh of whipped cream.

tonight was leftovers for dinner...we've still got a mountain of ham and split pea soup to make our way through so i didn't want to make anything new...and now i'm working on the homework i should have been doing all weekend. ugh. sorry it's been pretty dry 'round these parts lately...i'm sure once i have more going on than school, procrastinating from school, and eating dinner things will pick up...i have some things that i want to say that i've dog-eared for the time being.

fin.