healthy train de-railed

everything was going well yesterday, and then we somehow got it into our heads to make rice krispie treats, which was the beginning of the end. we made a batch of regular rice krispie treats, and peanut butter rice krispie treats, and we each ate about 4 big squares each. they go down so easy! like shooters! like marshmallow and cereal shooters!

i'm cutting class like a mofo today. i don't feel like sitting through one of those aimless stats lectures. the prof is probably one of the worst lecturers i've ever had the misfortune of experiencing. he basically belabours the most BASIC points OVER AND OVER again, while speedily glossing over the more complicated terminology and statistical constructs. the fact that we're not actually required to DO any of the equations makes things much, much worse. it's like we're learning a bunch of terms without any framework or relationship to each other, they're a bunch of floating signifiers. it's like someone trying to teach someone french by handing them a french-english dictionary, and that's it. brutal! it's such a colossal waste of time. and if there's one thing i detest, it's a time-waster...i got too much other s**t to do. although i just found out that the t.a. marking the first assignment is offering a help session today...which means i should probably get my ass to school anyway. crikey!

also, i got called back for a full time job at tpl that i applied for. it's 35 hours a week and the pay is $43,000 - $46,000, which would probably double the most amount of money that i've ever made in my LIFE, ever. the thing is, i just applied so that i could go through the interview process, i didn't think i'd get called back...that's a lot of money to walk away from when you're a student...we'll see how it goes...if i get it, my choice is to a) say no and keep working myself into debt or b) do it, drop down to part-time school, and post-pone the point where i graduate and then start making librarian money (assuming there's even full time librarian jobs in tpl). ah well...we'll see how i do on the interview bit, first.

for dinner tonight we're having lentil soup, with grilled cheddar and white onion sandwiches on focaccia. and a rice krispie treat (A rice krispie treat. singular) for dessert.

fin.

failure of representation

we got some bad news last night, so we spent the evening bunkered down in our apartment, just the family, it wasn't the right time to be socializing.

it's hard to know what to say, everything seems so frivolous. the human ability to mentally and physically cope is astounding though.

woke up after a 11 hour sleep, and we're all feeling renewed and re-born and refreshed. we're back on the healthy train: started our morning off with a bowl of oatmeal, and an apple-beet-carrot-lime-ginger juice. going to do some serious yoga and tonight for dinner we're having a spinach salad with baby spinach, red onion, grape tomatoes, and lemon vinaigrette, with a pasta of chickpeas, spinach, and chorizo.

fin.

octopus dj did it again!

dude LOVES to make me mad. absolutely loves it. there's no other possible explanation. he'll go from bringing the crowd up with 6 or 7 ace reggae tunes, and then, completely ignoring the crowd's reaction, play 5 disco tunes. it's so annoying. or he'll go from dropping biggie, to cheese-ball michael jackson's "don't stop til you get enough". now, don't get me wrong, i LOVE michael jackson as much as the next person (circa 1987, not now), BUT "don't stop til you get enough" is PLAYED OUT AT THE CLUB, SON. it's like the "brown eyed girl" of this particular club scene. just don't do it. please.

my mind is kind of curdled right now, so i don't have much to say. what i DO know is that tonight i'm going to be maxing and relaxing on the couch, stuffing my face in a big, big way. for dinner, i think we're going to order mama's pizza and eat dill pickle chips and drink rootbeer (me), wine and beerski (the family and our friend). for dessert, i'm going to make a pecan bread pudding with challah, and serve it with the bourbon caramel sauce.

fin.

karl lagerfeld, esquire...world's biggest sucker?

the other day i hopped on the bus to make my way home from a library shift. somewhere before the subway, an old man stepped on, and he was visibly shaken. he turned to the woman seated one away from him, and said (through a very thick accent) something like: "my wife died". tears came to his eyes. the woman, who had been in the process of putting her earphones in, paused and said: "i'm sorry, i don't understand you", and the man, probably not understanding her, just shook his head and wiped at his eyes.

i watched the whole proceeding and then started feeling really guilty so i walked over, sat next to him, and said, "i'm really sorry about that". he mumbled something about, "my wife died. sri lanka, no money to go home for the funeral". his accent was rather thick so it was difficult to understand him, i repeated "i'm sorry". then i smelled the booze. or rather, since my ace training working for public libraries has honed my alcohol-related olfactory skills, i smelled what was more like rubbing alcohol or listerine. then he asked me for $20. i (politely) said no. the bus had pulled up to the subway at this point, and i told him that i hoped things get better and to take care, he followed me for a bit and reduced the price to $10, then $1.

so i'm kind of torn. my sappy side feels for the poor dude, but at the same time, i can't help thinking that it was a right proper scam, and that i'm a foolio. should i have given him some money? i don't know. i feel that working at my branch has inured me to my (possibly romanticized) notions of the poor and poverty. i kind of think that there's laziness at every stratum of society. so it's kind of a matter of luck whether you happen to be born lazy poor or lazy rich. at the same time, my experience working in restaurants, where we had dishwashers who had just come from sri lanka, working three jobs to support their families (both here and abroad), and getting paid cash under the table, makes me feel slightly less sympathetic to some of the poor and disenfranchised who come and hang out at my branch. does that make me an a**hole? i don't know. i just see some of the regular welfare recipients at my branch and i'm like, dude, you're not even trying. and you're what gives our social support system a bad name, meanwhile, suthan at canoe works 15 hours at two jobs with some crazy work ethic, to send money back to his home. i have way more sympathy for suthan, and generally very little sympathy for able-bodied people bilking the government for work-free cash (situational contingencies obviously apply here).

topic change alert: today should be semi-fun. i'm meeting my friend for our semi-regular lunch date at st. lawrence for some of those awesome eggplant sammies (fun!). then coming home and devoting a big chunk of time to stats (not fun!). then we're probably going out for dinner with some of the roomie's friends (fun!) and going dancing at octopus (very fun!!!). or, i might meet some of my friends here, and rendezvous with roomie et al at the octopus. so i'm not sure at all what i'm having for dinner, it's in someone else's hands! how exciting/terrifying. if i do stay home, it'll be leftovers.

fin.

pide for me-day

last night's dinner plans got shuffled around due to the very exciting prospect of us having a car for a fleeting amount of time (the boy had to do label-related errands). so, we seized the day and pounced on the opportunity to try this turkish pizza place at gerrard and pape (normally easily within walking distance from our house, but due to inclement weather and sluggish ambitions, dependent on the comfort of a vehicle). the place is called pizza pide (pronounced pee-day), and the pies are fantastic! that's what they look like, they're really thin-crusted and shaped like extremely elongated footballs,
some are sharply tapered at the end, and some are just long ovals. the one on the far left is ground lamb and veggies. the one in the middle was my favorite, it was turkish sausage and mozzarella. right before baking they crack two eggs into it, so they come out with the yolks just barely cooked...it's like the ultimate breakfast pizza. the one on the right is ground beef and veggies. we could barely get them home fast enough. and there was more than enough for 3 people, at only $30! the meal also comes with a paper plate of "salad". the salad was a little conceptually lacking for me, it's basically a plate consisting of a bunch of parsley, 1 hungarian chili pepper chopped into 3 pieces, thick pieces of white onion, and hunks of extremely anemic looking winter tomatoes. no dressing. i think it's just meant to be eaten in between bites of pizza to cut the "cookedness" of the pizza flavour. not my style, really.

in other news: i got my marks back! i'm a solidly a- student. which is good enough for me, considering i wrote all my major assignments the night before or morning of their due date, and put in maybe 15% of my effort.

in other other news: i might be throwing a party in may, but i'm feeling reluctant. i'm so hooked on throwing jams, i love organizing and putting it all together, but i'm sceptical as to whether i really want to take on another event (this one is going to be super-expensive) for the spoiled and ungrateful toronto drum'n'bass community. i DID just get a bursary though, so who knows, maybe i'll blow it on obscure, left-field, drum-heavy artists from the united kingdom. sounds like fun, doesn't it?

i have my first assignment for stats due in three weeks, and i haven't even started. eek-city. i'm strangely not TOO worried at the moment, and i'm also stacking my calendar with mad social engagements, so i think i'm sublimating my latent anxiety by being reckless and bold. i can deal with that level of freudian analysis.

i'm really digging the four tet remix of sia's "breathe me". it's the exact kind of breathy, girly vocal atmo digibeats that i love. and yes, fine, maybe it WAS featured on veronica mars.

today is long day. after school there's a slim slim chance that i'm going to go to the victory cafe to see the boy's friend's band play...but i'm not sure. the singer-songwriter scene isn't really my bag. i have a problem with earnestness as a performance aesthetic. i either like jokes, swaggering posturing, dance-friendliness, or to be blinded by the sheer maelstrom of talent (ie. when i go to see say, brad mehldau or something). middle of the road songs about love and heartbreak based on the one relationship you had when you were 15 don't really cut it. in other news...i think i like that akon tune, with the charming name, "smack that".

i'm packing a dinner of split pea and ham soup, and a nicoise sandwich: canned tuna, olives, roasted peppers, basil leaves and tomato, drenched in olive oil and bagna cauda on an ace bakery ciabatta bun.

fin.

lost in translation

i read yoshihiro tatsumi's "abandon the old in tokyo" yesterday. it's a collection of short comics collected together and edited by adrian tomine for drawn and quarterly. tatsumi created the manga sub-genre gekiga, which is a darker more realistic style of cartooning. and boy, oh boy, were they dark. one of the stories culiminated in an old, unemployed man, the former president of a company who'd written a bad cheque and consequently went bankrupt and lost his business, finding sexual fulfillment with a dog. i understand the point, but it was still pretty uncomfortable subway reading (i'm always paranoid that people are reading over my shoulder).

i also finished reading richard sala's "peculia", a collection of comics featuring the title plucky heroine, meandering her way through sala's particularly macabre world, populated by creeping monsters, masked villians, and other things with questionable intents. the characters are all very unique and quirky (peculia starts every day with a bowl of cereal, fetched by her faithful and extremely capable butler, ambrose) and i adore the drawing style, which has been compared to edward gorey. it's a slightly simplified and more stark edward gorey, with a blockier composition.

i'm also still fighting my way through "discipine and punish". it's much more readable than "the history of sexuality", but i'm confused why the prof had us read the two books in this particular order, as "discipline and punish" is a much more tidy and well enunciated examination of foucault's power-knowledge theorem. i'm also confused why the prof has us reading so much of the text, as you can really get the gist from selected sections, and cut out a lot of the historical examples, in my opinion.

dinner tonight is roasted beet pasta. i roast the beets in the oven until they're cooked through, let them cool enough to handle and then grate them on the box grater. saute some onions and garlic, and mix in the beets, toss them with some candied, spicy walnuts, goats cheese, the hot, cooked pasta and some of the pasta cooking water, finished with a shot or two of olive oil. alongside a salad of baby spinach, roasted figs, grape tomatoes, and sliced red onion with a red wine vinaigrette.

fin.

but i like it

i just finished reading this collection of comics by joe sacco. i'm kind of in love with joe sacco. reading "palestine" and his series on bosnia and serbia pretty much changed my life. he also has this comic in "notes from a defeatist" about working in a library, which is the truest depiction of library page drudgery that i've ever seen, and a perspicacious comment on the client base. this particular book is a collection of pieces loosely based around rock and roll. so it includes a previously published collection documenting a time when he sold t-shirts for his friend's band on their european tour, an homage to the rolling stones, an homage to the blues, various grunge and alt-rock posters and ephemera.

i'm also all kinds of in love with this strawberry lime jam i made this past summer. it's aces!

today is all about reading foucault's "discipline and punish". and yes, i'm taking notes again thankyouverymuch. so i grabbed a bunch of this ghostface killah album "fishscale". it's the lick. a bunch of peeps do the beats: madlib, jay d, i think premier, and it's awesome listening. i also grabbed some goldfrapp, which is very much NOT the lick. it's brutes to the extreme. i was playing some and the boy (we share a room/office space) was reaming me out for it...but i atoned with my ghostface discovery. additionally, i've upped my nerdbomberness by compiling a mix of tunes featured on veronica mars, one of which is regina spektor's fidelity. it's pretty cheesy and a little too girlishly fervent for my liking, but it's a SUPREMELY guilty pleasure (as opposed to just mildly embarrassing guilty pleasures like kelly clarkson, which are borderline completely NOT guilty).

finally, hearing dwight talk about battlestar galactica on the office makes me so happy. last night was an episode where he talks about his love for starbuck. i love when my favorite tv shows get all meta on me!

tonight for dinner we're having seared calves liver, with caramelized onions, mashed potatoes, baked maple-glazed acorn squash, and steamed cauliflower with garlic-brown butter breadcrumbs.

fin.

woe is me

geeksquad alert: according to my ever-reliable brother, the final story arc of this season's veronica mars is getting bumped off, so that the network can feature a new reality series called "the search for the next pussycat doll". sheesh. as if you need a whole reality series for that. you know where to find the next pussycat doll? go to myspace, find the chica with the most attention-whoring pile of scantily clad pictures of herself (especially if they prominently feature fake-lesbianism), and you've got yourself a winner. to add to my tale of heartbreak and despair, the network hasn't confirmed if veronica mars is coming back for a fourth season.

why do all the good shows have to go? my only hope is, that knowing they might be abruptly canceled after the mid-season to come, the writers are smart enough to tie up all loose ends, and not leave me hanging like they did with my so-called life. now that was tragic. angela chase had just found out that brian krakow was the writer of THE LETTER. The Letter is kind of infamous around girls of a certain age. it's like a female touchstone of sorts. however! what gets my goat is that few girls even remember that it was krakow who wrote the letter, and they just use The Letter as evidence to bolster their adolescent yearnings for jordan catalano. the final episode of my so-called life also marked the point where angela's dad makes out with the woman financing his restaurant. a woman who is not his wife. dun dun duuuuuuuun. it was epic! and then...nothing!!! hopefully ronnie doesn't do it, and i can get maximum logan echolls and veronica mars time to sustain me for the cold, empty years to come.

for dinner tonight i packed leftover veggie lasagne from last week. the family is having split pea and ham soup, featuring leftover ham i had frozen from a few weeks ago, over the holiday. i REALLY love split pea and ham soup, so i might wait and have a late dinner of that instead. the secret to my split pea and ham soup is the unusually high proportion of mirepoix, and the addition of a sweet potato to add some body and a bit of sweetness to offset the saltiness of the ham. they're also having toasted and buttered fred's potato and onion bread alongside the soup.

recent food trend: bacon in desserts. i've seen candied bacon showing up all over the place...and on top chef a couple of weeks ago, one of the cooks sent out a dessert bite that blew my mind. half a ripe strawberry, topped with swirl of sweetened mascarpone, garnished with a lardon of bacon. GENIUS. sweet and salty is an amazing flavour combination, and i'm only surprised it's taken people this long to come up with it.

fin.

pearls of wisdom

gleaned last night:

a) i do a killer shakira impression (to add to my stable of impressions, next to my donald fagan from steely dan)
b) according to the boy, i'm addicted to: food and NOT exercising. haha
c) it wouldn't take us all that much money to go down on rita mcneil for half an hour. this conversation stemmed from the initial opener of how much it would take for us to take it in the butt from a priest. the initial offer was $500 000, but apparently again, our standards are really low and we're desperate for cash, because we eventually talked it down to $250 000. i'd probably go down on a priest for $50 000 for 10 minutes. in my defense, i understood the priest to look like captain jean luc picard, or the dad from frasier. i think dr. rei was thinking the priest was more in the baron harkonnen from dune pantheon of priestly repulsiveness.

the point was: it was funny to the 3449503984nth power.

sunday brunch is going to be garlic breakfast sausages from the mennonites, alongside either challah french toast or swedish pancakes topped with banana pecan sauce. tonight for dinner we're having stromboli. which is kind of like a calzone, but you roll out the pizza dough, layer on the filling, and then roll it up like a sausage. so it comes out looking like giant sausage-shaped torpedo of crispy pizza dough. when you cut into it, the inside is spiralled through with the filling. i'm filling it with roasted peppers, basil, provolone, and various salamis. we're having this with a spinach salad with avocado, red onion, grape tomatoes, toasted salted pumpkin seeds, and lemon vinaigrette.

fin.

jean's!

is happiness encased in non-biodegradeable styrofoam. i forgot to take pictures as i was too busy stuffing pad thai, pad see yew, basil eggplant, and "chicken" green curry into my gaping, slavering maw. i haven't had much experience with asian "mock" meat, but it rocks! they even go to the effort of imprinting little rosy stripes on the soy-based, pale fingers of "shrimp". it was absolutely delicious. i'm so glad they're back! the roomie picked it up on her way home from a hospital visit, and she said they weren't very busy...so i'm a little worried. i'm going to make it my weekly takeout destination and try to single-handedly keep them afloat. it's my civic duty!!! if only all civic duties were so enjoyably exercised.

in other civic duties news, i was supporting my local italian grocery store, masellis. they make their own proscuitto, and the man working the deli is sweetly geriatric, with bright eyes peering out at you behind glasses, and he's going a little deaf. i was getting some salami cut, and was passing the meat counter, when i saw a lovely, plush, proud roll of white that could only be fat. i stopped short in my tracks and was practically drooling in anticipation. the butcher, sensing the palpable waves of lust, told me that it was pork fat (!!!!!!!!). i have NO IDEA what i'm going to do with it, but it was calling to me, on some micro-sensory level. i tried to buy myself some time: "do you always have it in?" a regretful headshake was my unsatisfactory reply. so i bought it, with the butcher's assurances that it could be frozen.

in other news, yesterday was a writeoff. by the time i got back from work and errands, it was 4:30pm, and the roomie had been to two births in two days and was coasting on about 8 hours of sleep over a 50 some hour span. so i gave up and have made today STATS DAY. tonight we're having dr. rei over for dinner and shenanigans (read: gabbing on the couch) as i doubt we'll be motivated to leave the comfy confines of our home. a friend of the boy's who lives around the corner was saying that we should all go out sometime. and i was like: "well...do you like to dance? cuz we like to go dancing, or hear music". the idea of going to a bar to drink a few rounds of beer seems pointless to me. a) because it's more expensive b) because the environment and food is always better at home c) because the idea of going out for a whole night without dancing doesn't really compute. and well, i should probably add d) because i don't drink at all. but still!

tonight for dinner we're having turkey pot pie. with leftover thanksgiving turkey chunks bound with a creamy, parsley-flecked sauce, alongside chunks of rutabaga, carrots, parsnips and peas all topped with puff pastry. with a salad of mixed greens, and roasted gorgonzola stuffed, pancetta-wrapped figs. in a light balsamic-based vinaigrette. the figs at this one veggie store on the danforth were so round, so plump, so fatly succulent that i had to get them. before deciding to put them in the salad, for dessert, i was going to make a rosemary crusted mascarpone and fig tart. slicing the figs and laying them over the tart and then bruleeing the whole. but i arbitrarily decided to make a chocolate creme brulee instead. the roomie and dr. rei both love custards and i have a pile of amazing scharfen berger chocolate that my sis buys for me. pictures will definitely follow!


fin.

top chef!

i love this show! but it definitely shows that cooks are crazy mofos, always negotiating the ultra-thin line between creative perfectionist and effed up bully sadist (i wonder if those are both interchangeable). however, allow me to draw your attention to
this ---->
that is padma lakshmi, the host of "top chef". she's quite a looker, right? i mean, i think we can pretty much generally agree that she's pretty freakin' hot. so in WHAT UNIVERSE does THAT woman, end up in the arms of...



wait for it...




that's right. SALMAN RUSHDIE. something about this couple just don't sit right with me...i can't quite put my finger on it...hmmm....

yesterday was fun. although i think i got made fun of by a classmate for my typed notes on foucault. i just prefer to do it that way so that i'm not aimlessly flipping through a book all the time, so that all the information that i need to discuss the text is laid out in front of me, and highlighted with my own thoughts and interpretations. it was kind of awkward, and brought me back to some high-school moments when i felt very self-conscious about caring about school and being interested in some subjects, and people called me out on it. it's like, i pretty much loathed my first semester at FIS, and you're going to try to take this away from me too? HELLS NO. class yesterday was fun...it's fascinating to hear other people's readings of foucault, and compare and contrast with how they differ from my own.

we also tried to do a foucauldean discursive reading of myspace. now, i've made my feelings of myspace fairly clear. i think it's stupid and silly and a time burgler. i read the "confessional" quality of myspace (and also blogging, oh dear!!!) as the need of the subject to be recognized as a subject, occupying the space that the power-knowledge matrices of production have made available, and ultimately depend on for their own continual iteration. i think there's a paper in there somewhere...and i want to write it!

i caught the boy nosing around on facebook the other day and i gave him hell. here's the thing: you haven't THOUGHT about people from high school, grade school, college etc. for years and years and years. the ones you WANTED to keep in touch with, you did. so why bother?!? it seems so pointless. i know i'm a totally different person now then when i was, oh, i don't know, five (you don't say!), and i think the probability that i would hit it off with someone who was in my life then, through the random mapping of fate, is equal to the probability that i would hit it off with someone i met today, again through the random mapping of fate. also, don't complain to ME about how there's not enough time in your life. if you didn't spend countless hours in the hinterland of myspace and facebook and youtube, then maybe you could accomplish all that shiz. but that's clearly me transposing my own desires and personality onto others. fine, i can accept that. i know i have a freakish need for constant productivity. and that i'm just privileging the way i choose to waste time over other people's, because i'm a judgemental f**k like that.

at the same time, i can't help but wonder at people who have the time and resources and luxury to go around sending people links to "funny" shiz they "found" after endless time trolling the most vapid recesses of the net. i mean, i'm sure youtube has some funny s**t, but i guess i'm just not the kind of person who does the aimless net surfing in the hopes of hitting that funny goldmine. i'm very results-driven.

and let me say it: i didn't find JT's d**k in a box all that funny. it was amusing, but i didn't do the proverbial LOL.

today is pretty low-key. i'm working a 4 hour shift at the library that i loathe and then coming home nice and early. friday is designated "stats day". so i'm going to be doing a lot of reading and researching my upcoming paper.

for dinner tonight, i think i'm going to take a break from cooking and rejoice in the return of JEAN'S to the east-side! jean's fine food catering was the BEST thai restaurant in toronto, run by a little, wizened husband and his robust wife, in a pretty grungy storefront at woodbine and queen. they do this thing where they open for a few years, burn out, take a year or two off, then reopen again. i was heartbroken when they closed down last, and pretty much haven't eaten thai food since. but huzzah! they've reopened! and get this: THEY'RE CLOSER TO MY HOUSE THEN EVER BEFORE!!! they're in the danforth and greenwood area, and they're only doing vegetarian cooking now. i got tipped off about it from the toronto chowhound board. i'll probably get takeout with the roomie and the boy. i can't wait! full review with pictures to follow.

fin.

clothes make the person???

after a filling and msg-laden lunch at kelseys on saturday, i convinced my sister to let me take her to winner's to get her some work clothes. i was really impressed with myself...in about 45 minutes, i got her two pairs of pants, 1 suit, 1 suit jacket, 3 tops, and a pair of shoes, for a total of at least 7 different outfit combinations. i think in another life, i would enjoy being a stylist. the problem is, as with most potential careers for me, i'm pretty choosy. i don't like working with people i don't like. this severely limits my potential client pool, as i only really like maybe 5% of people* (*error percentage of 5%. thank you, stats analysis!)

i really do believe that looking good makes you feel good, and that sometimes people need a fresh set of eyes to shake them out of their sartorial funk, or body issues/misconceptions. i also think it's important that my sister, who is fearsomely smart and talented, look her very best especially at work, so that the outside matches the inside. my sis has a tendency to be a bit of a martyr and put herself on the back-burner and she's so awesome that she deserves some self-spoiling. i love you, little ze's mama! here are some pictures of my favorite people on earth from this weekend, just for good measure. little ze is looking less and less like a fat chinaman, but good lord he's so cute! also included is a picture from my family's 3 guitar band. featuring 1 classical, 2 toy.

and let it be said again: I LOVE SCHOOL!!! this semester is rocking so hard! my two classes with prof. phillips are engaging, and constructed in a very proactive way that calls for a lot of student participation (my favorite!!!). i really feel more in my element. the readings are fascinating and generally approach things from an analytical perspective that resonates deeply with me. i'm interested, motivated and driven again, which compared to the lethargic torpor of last term, is a welcome and fresh perspective.

even the less theoretically driven class, online information retrieval, is proving very useful. at last i feel justified in my criticisms of google, and i know WHY. it's also a shame that people who believe that you can find ANYTHING on the internet, and who use google as their primary search engine, blindly handing over their information fate to the capricious whims of the algorhythmic gods, don't know how much they're missing, and just how much more is available if you simply took the time to produce an orderly search strategy. i've always found google woefully inadequate at producing information of a detailed or rigorous nature...it's excellent at random and general queries, but i've generally found it difficult to focus on very narrow, particular, or arcane subjects. which isn't to say that i've succumbed to the conceit implicit in my eventual professional designation of "information specialist" (har har!), but that i wish this know-how was more readily available so that the true powers of the internet could be harnessed.

there's more, but i have to go do some reading before monster day. the good news is, i took stock and realized that i can't commit to an 8 hour shift at the library on wednesdays. it's just not feasible and my work would sacrifice (note: caring about school means that your workload increases exponentially). so i've trimmed my wednesday shift down to the original 4 hours in the morning, leaving me with most of tuesday and wednesday to do school.

having done that, last night i was home to partake of veggie lasagne, which was delicious. i made that radicchio, fennel, parsley and romano bean salad again and we ate that with pumpkin pie, sans the boy's friend, who just decided to flake out without calling, which i consider the hallmark of a ne'er-do-well. oh well, his loss. he can eat his michelina's frozen 1.99 entree in the miserable confines of his lonely hovel to his own spiritual and bodily detriment (i have no idea if this is the case, but i'm taking literary liberties). tonight i'm packing either leftover lasagne, or stir fried udon for dinner at the lovely claude t. bissel building, home of the faculty of information studies.

fin.

children of men

i saw this over the weekend with my siblings. i thought it was fantastic, evidenced by the fact that i wanted to talk about it afterwards and pick it apart, and tell other people to see it so that i could then talk about it with them. first of all, i love clive owen. which is weird, because he's a very man man, whereas i usually go for boys or dudes. i was shocked that it was based on a p.d. james novel, probably in a way that is revealing of my own biases, i had always assumed that p.d. james wrote schlocky suspense novels and churned them out by the dozen. i thought the concept and the execution were really clever, and what i liked most about the film, is that it wasn't so self-reflexively caught up in its own conceit. i find a lot of films nowadays come up with an idea, and then want to hammer you over the head with just how look-at-me! clever the idea is, to the point where it interrupts the viewing of the film. case(s) in point: crash, little miss sunshine, most wes anderson flicks, etc. this film also features a hippie'd out michael caine, which is amusing in and of itself. i'm already a fan of dystopian speculative fiction, so maybe i'm already predisposed to give myself over to the world and world-view of the narrative, but i really thought it was a visually and theoretically interesting film. apparently the soundtrack was compiled by one of the dubstep dudes. the music chosen worked well with the movie, but i'm kind of hoping that film scoring doesn't go out the window. where would we be without the overwrought melodrama of john williams? or hans zimmer? we'd have to completely reconstruct how we watch movies if film scoring became obsolete. which would be an interesting exercise, come to think of it.

so i've listened to almost all of the clipse album "hell hath no fury". it's hit and miss for me. i really like "wamp wamp" "dirty money" and "we got it for cheap" and "ain't cha" is aight. i'm fairly certain the hand of the neptunes is all over this...a lot of the tunes are really one dimensional for me. but it could be because i'm all about the backtrack, and i don't listen to lyrics, which is probably pretty sucky for/of me. i also checked out lily allen. she blows. i don't really get the point. so she's some british chica who does pikey-ish reggae-electro-pop? snoozefest! i've also listened to most of the wolfmother album. i kinda like it. it has that arena rock feel that i like. but most of the tunes are completely forgettable and disposable. so far the only standout tune is "woman".

dinner last night was aces! instead of the baked acorn squash, i made a salad i copied from torito. chopped radicchio, shaved fennel, parsley leaves, and some romano beans, tossed with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. the balance of the flavours and textures was outstanding. i'm pretty uncreative at coming up with new/original salads. tonight i'm supposed to work a long shift at the library, so i'm packing stir fried udon with tofu, long beans and eggplant leftover from last week. the family is having a "white" veggie lasagne, with a layer of mashed butternut squash with mascarpone, another layer of sauteed spinach, and topped with a parmesan bechamel. no-cook lasagne noodles are one of the greatest inventions of all time. we're having the boy's friend over, so i made a pumpkin pie for dessert.

<-- i also love this man

fin.

people with foot issues...SKIP THIS POST!

today marks the one year anniversary of The Day I Burned My Foot, setting in motion the chain of events that would reveal to me The Fact That I Am Actually Black, and also marked the turning point where i decided to walk away from the restaurant industry. i was working the day pasta station at canoe, featuring my nemesis, the "spag" machine (basically, a self contained unit that boils water, and features little baskets so that you can cook or reheat individual portions of pasta). this picture isn't the exact model we had, but you get the idea. twice a day, before and after service, i had to empty the just-boiled water into a bucket, and drag the bucket around the corner to empty it into the slop drain (the machine did not drain automatically into the sewage system, due to an incredible shortsightedness in design and implementation). i'd been doing this for months and months, and well, on january 16th 2006, with me freshly arrived back from a vacation with my family, the bucket caught on something on the floor as i was dragging it, and it tipped over onto my foot.

lesson learned #1: salt raises the boiling point of water. ergo, the water was actually hotter than regular boiled water. starch probably also raises the boiling point of water (i'd just cooked 40 orders of rigatoni in that water) or at least, maybe makes it stick to the skin a bit more? at any rate, i screamed: "S**T, F**KING, S**T, S**T!" kicked off my shoe and ripped off my sock, and plunged it into a bucket of cold water that my friend andrew got for me when he heard the commotion and saw what happened.

i think i went into shock or something, because while they were figuring out what to do with me, i was joking around and laughing. they decided to send me to the hospital. i was assuring my sous chef that i'd be back in THREE DAYS (!!!!!) at the latest (classic cook martyr supermachoman randy savage syndrome), and i was apologizing to them about being such a numbskull. then they sent me to the emergency room with the most awkward guy in the world, my nemesis sous chef, brent maxwell (not his real name). at this point, my foot was no longer in the cold water, and i was beginning to feel the pain. i took the elevator down to the ground floor (we're on the 54th), on one leg. then i had to HOP from the building, to king street, where the cabs are, crossing the distance equivalent to the distance between king and wellington. with socially awkward brent maxwell by my side.

when we get to the hospital (st. michael's), i had to wait for an hour or so, and at this point, the pain was so intense that i had trouble breathing through it; my breath was coming in quick gasps. this is also when i realized that health care in ontario, and in our hospitals, blows. the skin was kind of peeling off my foot in big swaths, and the doctors put some flamazine (the white cream in the really grody picture) on the foot, wrapped it up, told me to get the bandages changed every day, and sent me on my way with a prescription for percacets. oh, wait...did i mention that brent maxwell was completely fidgety the whole time? while i was waiting to be seen by the doctor, he says: "umm..well...i guess i better be going back to the restaurant for service". to which i replied, through GRITTED TEETH: "yeah. go." thanks for making sure i got home okay, chump!

the next day, not knowing any better, i went to a walk-in clinic to get the bandages changed, where they were VERY reluctant to do so, because "it costs them money". they did it anyway, and told me to go to my family doctor. that night, being the supreme idiot that i am, do you think i kicked back, took some percs and relaxed? hells no! i went drug-free, and hobbled around my house making a meatloaf dinner. i'm stupid.

then my mummy stepped in, calling me and freaking out on the phone. she insisted on taking me to another hospital, where the emergency room doctor pulled off the bandages to reveal the monstrosity that is picture 3 and 4. he immediately referred me to a plastic surgeon (plastic surgeons handle all burns and things to do with skin), who i found out, was at st. mike's when i was there, and for some reason, the emergency room doctor didn't page him, even though he was the on-call plastic surgeon. the plastic surgeon popped all the blisters in one quick motion (tricksily catching me by surprise by distracting me with inconsequential banter), revealing the open wound that is picture number 5. the plastic surgeon also told me that the doctors coating me with flamazine were doing nothing, because they were basically applying it to what was already dead skin. great! your tax dollars at work, people!

i had a very very deep second degree burn. i know it was second degree because my nerves weren't burned off, consequently, the next month or so was a blur of pain, daily trips to the hospital to get my bandage changed (yes, that's right...DAILY), and sponge baths. it was awful.

it took a long time to heal, and it was about 6 weeks before i walked on it. i moved back home to markham for about 5 or 6 weeks so that my mom could "rally the forces" (her words) to make sure i got to my appointments on time, and make sure that i was fed and didn't have to do anything. the boy came up and lived in markham too, and was very sweet, supportive, understanding and caring. during this time, i had to deal with the lovely cook management at canoe. my chef, tom, made snide comments every time i called in with a progress report, insinuating that i was faking it, and milking my condition so that i wouldn't have to work winterlicious. the sous chef, whom i had worked with at two other restaurants and had known for 6 years, also made some comments to other cooks behind my back, basically to the effect that i was milking it.

i think the way they treated me when i was dealing with my foot was the strongest factor for my decision to apply for my MISt, and to leave the restaurant industry. the final nail in the coffin was the day that my sister had her second baby. there was an emergency c-section, and my nephew was born under extraordinary circumstances, and we're very lucky to have him around. it was during summerlicious, and i couldn't call her all day, because cooks aren't allowed to use the phone to make personal calls. i couldn't make plans to go see her that weekend, because i was tied to this horrible job, feeding people i didn't like, working in a demeaning, belittling environment, and for what?

this is what my foot looks like now. the scarring is called keloid scarring, which is a particular kind of scar that occurs when there's a particularly severe wound, and happens mostly in people of african descent. it's weird thinking that i used to have two feet that looked the same. and sometimes in the summer, i caught people looking at it on the subway and stuff. i kind of wish that people would just ask, instead of the whole sidelong look thing. i'm definitely more offended by the looking than if someone came right out and asked me what happened.

there's not a lot cosmetically i can do to make the scar less visible...with keloid scars, the likely probability is that they grow back, and not even that, grow back LARGER than they were before. i kind of like having the reminder there, of what i went through, and i'm just grateful that it was my foot, and not my hand, or arm, or torso or something.

there's a lot of concern from members of my family, that i'm entering a profession that i'm not passionate about, in order to make some money, and that i'm sacrificing something by not being a cook anymore. yes, i do love cooking, and a part of me does miss working in a restaurant. but i chose a quality of life. i chose being able to see my niece and nephew, arrange my schedule around what i want to do, and while my life as a librarian won't be *quite* as professionally fulfilling or intellectually engaging or creative as being a cook, i'm more than happy with my decision to choose a life. i believe the idea that a job is going to fulfill you is a sick fallacy perpetrated by capitalism. i work to live, not live to work, because i know that my time with my family and friends is the substance of my life, not what i did to make money. being able to be home to make dinner 5 nights out of the week is gratifying in and of itself: i'm cooking for people i love, and **i** get to call the shots, not belinda stronach and her weird dietary restrictions.

with that in mind, dinner tonight is ribeye steaks, probably pan seared in my cast iron skillet then finished in the oven, with brown sugar glazed, oven baked acorn squash wedges, sauteed mushrooms, and panisse. panisse are chickpea flour fries. so i make basically a polenta with chickpea flour and water, season it, stir in some chopped thyme and pour it into a square baking dish. when it's cold and firm, i unmold it, cut it into fry shapes, then deep fry them and sprinkle with some salt. they puff up and get crispy on the outside, souffled on the inside.

fin.

mondays are le poopoo

and how! having 6.5 hours of class and then 3.5 hours of work consecutively are NOT doing it for me at all.

i don't have much time to ruminate on my weekend, so i'll just share my dream with you. i dreamt i was hanging out with christina aguilera, in her current 40-50s vargas-girl, bombshell siren incarnation. i was digging through her wardrobe and gabbing and she was very warm and welcoming. the sucky part is, i was consciously telling myself in the dream, to remember to ask her what it was like working with dj premier, and then my alarm went off and woke me up before i got the (sure to be) scintillating answer. bogus!

tonight i packed myself a dinner of roasted tomato soup, with a smoked paprika, parsley, and caramelized onion chickpea spread. the spread is an idea that i got from eating similar things in spain...a dish that i saw frequently consisted of sliced chorizo and chickpeas sizzled together with a squeeze of lemon. delicious!

fin.

the weekend! featuring: most righteous relaxation

family time this weekend. my sis is coming to visit with the two wee bobbins. it's actually kind of disturbing how much i love those kids. and they're not even the fruit of my own loins. when (if) i have kids, it's going to be redonkulous. and yet, random kids really gross me out. like in jesus camp, seeing all those 8 and 9 year old kids sobbing and snivelling was pretty repulsive to me. random kids bawling their eyes out just inspires feelings of disgust. i'm definitely NOT one of those girls who has this burning desire for chillun'. just like i'm definitely NOT one of those girls who has a burning desire to get married and make a big production out of the whole thing. so not me. i'm also NOT one of those people who likes raisins.

so this weekend is going to consist of: seeing "children of men", playing guitar hero (wolfmother, kansas, here i come!!!), eating (asian legend, all you can eat japanese, and hopefully, all you can eat chinese hot pot), and loafing. and maybe sneaking a peek or two at my foucault readings.

i made my brother in law an early birthday cake. it's a s'mores cake (yes, there's a recurring theme in my cooking...i like s'mores, or the concept of s'mores...actual s'mores are pretty lacklustre). there's a layer of graham crust, topped with a chocolate chip studded chocolate cake, topped with a marshmallow layer that i'm going to brule with a torch.

fin.

the office (u.s. version)

has completely and utterly won me over. stolen a precious piece of my heart. in the grand tradition of mercy being about five years behind the times (so sue me! i have a lot of interests!) i've discovered the office after just about everyone else in the world and want to sing it from the rooftops, only to find that my "revelation" is seriously dated and demode.

it's one of the funniest shows i've seen in forever. we're slowly doling out episodes to make them last longer...and each one has us HOWLING and belly-laughing. all the characters are so endearing. i love shows where the writing is so good you have a hard time picking a favorite.

other than that, my classes yesterday looked pretty good on paper. online information retrieval is going to be fun...it's like detective work...they teach you how to be a super-searcher. surveillance and identity has the potential to be good, but the class size is freakin' huge! and it's more of a tutorial-based thing. FIS is so effed up. how are you supposed to generate discussion with 40 kids around a table?!? way to NOT limit class sizes, you nards. but some of my classmates in the class have some cool interests...one of them wrote an m.a. thesis on reality television (paging tash!!!), and another one listed a side-interest in food and food production.

so, i was in the library the other day, and i just randomly grabbed this book off the shelf, it's written by some professor in maryland or something, a dude with a phd. the book is about a vampire, who gets the hots for jesus (who he calls "joshu" like a pet name or something), propositions jesus, gets turned down. goes on a murderous rape and pillage of ancient whereverthecrap they are. jesus gets crucified, dude propositions him one last time while jesus is hanging on the cross. jesus says no. then it follows vampire dude up to modern day, when the secrets of his past come to haunt him. okay. can you imagine if your PROFESSOR showed you THAT book?!? and said that HE wrote it?!? weirded out!!!

tonight for dinner i'm meeting a friend here for movies and dinner, and she's stopping by ghandi's to pick up rotis. so my dinner will be half sag paneer roit, half malak kofta roti, a ginger beer, and i've been craving ice cream like mad lately, so maybe we'll grab some ice cream for dessert, or eat the rest of the stick toffee pudding with bourbon caramel.

fin.

stats nightmares

secondary gist of stats analysis seems to be: don't trust any statistic you read. which is all fine and dandy, but then what's the point of inferential statistical analysis? why even bother? my research methods course seems to be preparing me to question and analyze and account for any inconsistency, bias, sample contamination, etc., to the point where i wonder why we even put any emphasis on statistics gathering in the first place.

jesus camp was quite creepy. although it pandered to my tendency to paint all religious people as bordering on zealotry. ultimately, i just feel sorry for those kids. it can go a few ways. hopefully, they'll rebel like crazy during their teenage years and listen to marilyn manson (or their generational counterpart) and have crazy monkey sex and do loads of drugs, OR they'll still have crazy monkey sex and do loads of drugs but flagellate themselves over it. the parents were the creepiest of the creepies. lots of homeschooling and boredom, anti-creationism, and anti-global warming propaganda. the documentary was interspersed with radio-show clips from another evangelist, who believes that the conservative right have co-opted christianity in a bid to collapse the divide between church and state.

speaking of global warming, i heard a statistic (!!!!!) on the radio this morning that 2006 was the second warmest year in 60 years of record keeping, with 1998 being the warmest. then the radio announcer said: "chicken littles attribute this to global warming". HOLY CRAP!!!! this bulls**t makes me so freakin' mad! i thought of a good business. i think more people would be inclined to carpool if there was someone who would do the organizing and screening for them. i think that most people aren't opposed to car-pooling, it's just a lot of trouble when you don't know anyone in your neighbourhood, and it's difficult sorting out the cars and stuff. i think the business should be government-subsidized, and you just do all the organizing for people so that they only have to show up, and it's done. i think i'm going to bring this to the mayor.

seriously though, worrying about global warming is kind of doing my head in.

in other news, senor el baptismo found me at the library again. and he ratcheted things up by asking me out for coffee. i told him i like to maintain a separation between work and personal life. he seemed fairly persistent though. if he tries again i'm going to ask him if he wants carnal knowledge from me. he wants secular love! he's also kind of stupid. in the sense that he seems to have a hard time following what i'm saying. he has a tendency to rephrase what i said in his response, but he never really nails it. maybe it's part of his pastor-training, but as the recipient of that conversational technique, it kind of makes the user look a little slow.

today is another monster day...i have class from 1-4, and then from 6:30-9:30. which means dinner for me tonight is the last of the indian food leftovers.

fin.

wamp wamp

i like the backtrack for this tune. it's got this clacky vaguely middle-eastern vibe going on. it's by clipse feat. slim thug. yesterday i went through rolling stone's top 100 songs of the year list and wrote down some shiz i thought i should check out. the best was what they said about rick ross. something about how "hustlin'" is so phat that he managed to get away with rhyming "atlantic" with well..."atlantic". haha!

i read 10 chapters of one of my research methods texts last night. so boring! it basically comes down to this: "don't believe the hype". it's 10 chapters of reiterating how research and (gasp!) statistics can be biased and how you have to ask yourself questions to weed through the bias.

after my 8 hour shift tonight, i'm going to see "jesus camp" at the bloor cinema. it's a documentary (that i'm fairly certain i've mentioned in an earlier post) about these evangelical youth camps training kids to fight in god's army. scary!!!

last night for dinner i ended up making a stir-fry of chinese long beans, tofu, chinese eggplant, and bok choy with udon noodles in chili black bean sauce. tonight we're having that eggplant pasta with the baked ricotta from yesterday. and if i can get my act together, for dessert we're going to have sticky toffee pudding with bourbon caramel sauce. we're having a friend over for dinner, thus the dessert.


i also love this man -->

fin.

i love school!

yesterday was an emotional whirlwind, featuring dizzying highs and crushing lows, all while my poor tender heinie was firmly planted in the most uncomfortable chairs to ever grace the hallowed halls of academia (incidentally, they're in the OISE auditorium). the prof for research methods is STILL an annoying stuff-shirt who's very "dot the i's and cross the t's", to the extent where the first thing he looks at when he marks your paper is the works cited list, to make sure that every APA format-regulated space, punctuation, and capitalization has been duly enforced and recorded. he basically makes a judgement of your paper's merits and your academic rigor before even reading the content.

so he gave this spiel, and i was hating him, hating him, hating him. and then, he dropped this little bomb: "one thing you should know about me, i stutter. some days you'll barely notice anything. there are certain tools and tricks and exercises i can do to keep things under control. other days, it will be quite noticeable, and i ask you that you be patient with me". !!!!! so now i can't hate him. you just can't hate someone with a stutter. in the same way i could never hate a really fat kid. but then! miraculously, i came through the other side and started liking him on his own terms, for his own merits. i think my ocd-tendencies recognized his ocd-tendencies and we're copacetic on that front. i actually like being pushed to be rigorous, and i feel like there's more of a challenge, and if there's anything that brings out the competitive spirit i have with myself, it's a challenge. i also respect him, whereas i did NOT respect some of my other profs last semester.

but i LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE! my prof for information and its social contexts. that class is going to rock!!! the reading list already is swoon-worthy. i had already pre-decided that as there was no exam in this class, i wasn't going to do the reading, but because i adore the prof already...i WANT to do the readings. huzzah!!! he's also the prof for the elective i'm ultra-excited about: surveillance and identity, which employs a foucauldean analysis amongst other paradigms. brup brup brup!!! things are looking up second term! but it's also looking like murderation on the work front.

we finished tristan and isolde. there wasn't enough steamy sex. it was a little too much emphasis on the "13" in pg-13. especially since my montreal friend had talked up the sex scenes big time...but that's because she's a hopeless romantic. our new dinner-time television is james burke's connections 2. i happened upon the whole series on vhs, moldering away at the library where i wait out my alternate sunday penance.

connections 2 takes a historic event and then traces its lineage to show the myriad inventions, progresses, and social movements that it sets in motion. episode 1 was about watts and carbon black. granted, it's all a little too tidy and relies heavily on a modernist, grand narrative of historical "progress", but the direction is really clever and cute and i really like his personality. i first watched the series in grade 11 "modern western civilization". we've also started watching the american version of "the office". omg!!! so funny!!!! all three of us are killing ourselves laughing. dwight's character?!? and the crush that that dude has on pam?!? so cute!!!!

tonight for dinner we're having eggplant caponata pasta served with crumbled baked ricotta. i rub the ricotta with olive oil, season it with salt and pepper, and coat the outside in some chopped herbs (thyme, rosemary, parsley), then bake it in the oven until it's golden brown and firms up. set that aside. peel the eggplant, cut it into 1" cubes, sautee it in a good amount of olive oil (eggplant absorbs oil, but then releases it later...kind of like mushrooms). then i add onions, garlic, and sweat that out. then i add in a pint of grape tomatoes, and cook them until the tomatoes start to burst, add some chopped black olives, capers, parsley, salt and pepper, and toss it with the cooked, drained pasta (penne). then i crumble the baked ricotta on top.

fin.

first day of term deux

hopefully this term is as much of a throwaway as last term, meaning i can while away my hours doing menu planning, watching tv on dvd, being feisty, and catching up on celebrity gossip.

i finished reading two comics recently. "the placebo man" by homer tanuka has a great cover design, but the collection left me feeling kind of blah. it consists of a series of stories featuring a naive line-drawing style that depict strange, hallucinatory vignettes infused with a sense of foreboding and malignance. the stories were just kind of boring and typical, and when it comes to emo-y dark angsty stuff, i much prefer adrian tomine's work.

the other one i read was called "the chuckling whatsit". now that was a story! it's a hitchcockian thriller with this macabre cast of characters filled with mystery, horror and intrigue. unwinding the threads of the story and keeping the sub-plots straight was a little tricky, but it was completely engrossing throughout, and the drawing style suited the narrative and underlined the creepiness of the world the author (richard sala), created. if you have the means i highly recommend it.

today is one of my long days. i have class from 9-12:30, then 1-4, then i have to high-tail it to work and work a shift from 5-8:30pm. meaning it's a full 12 hour day with only a few breaks. i packed a dinner of leftovers from last night, but as i only get a 15 minute break at work, i'm going to have to try to cram it all in in 15 minutes, which can't be good for my digestion.

the family is having leftovers as well, with the addition of a coconut dhal that the boy is making. additionally, the boy is starting some kind of detox thing today, featuring the addition of greens plus, detox brand to his diet. i'm HIGHLY sceptical of how greens plus purports to work, and further, how spirulina and green tea (which are the principle ingredients from my disdainful reading of the ingredient list) "detoxify" your system. why don't people eat FOOD anymore? north american culture's relationship to food is so effed up, it's like a pathological sickness.

additionally, the computer reformat went a-ok, except for one little problem, i can't find my soundcard drivers to install...and i don't know which soundcard i have, or how to figure that out. any suggestions from the world at large would be appreciated! i've definitely done a few reformats in the past few years, the last one was maybe 6 months or so ago, and i think i figured it out then, but i'm drawing a blank now.

fin.

research methods

is already going to make me want to kill someone. bigtime. what a time-waster. it's basically a stats-analysis course, and the prof sounds like a righteous blowhard. i got the syllabus already. talk about snooze-fest 2020. fine, i suppose it *might* be useful. but i highly doubt it. and dude's all strict about deadlines and shiz. as if. you can take your "deadlines" and STUFF IT, mister. i've NEVER known anyone to complete graduate school who didn't play around with this ephemeral thing we call "deadlines".

the syllabus also contained this little gem about sending the prof emails: "email should be composed 'in proper, courteous english, with a proper salutation'. email should typically used in two circumstances: to ask questions that can be answered with a yes/no reply; and urgent messages regarding a health/bereavement situation. please phrase your questions such that they can be answered with a yes/no reply. (emphasis mine) should you have more than one question per email, please number the questions." see? snoozefest! i'm already vomiting my disgust and disdain all over this busy-work session.

this one i also like: "this course assumes that each student will spend 9-10 hours per week outside of scheduled class time completing any required readings and assignments" LOL!!!!!!!!!!

it sounds like a bunch of scare tactics. and it also sounds like unless i'm going to be pleasantly surprised by the prof, i'm going to need a new t-shirt that reads: RESEARCH METHODS CAN F**K ITSELF IN THE EAR.

i hate courses like this. it's just quantity over quality. these kinds of things make me want to get ultra-obnoxious and all situationist on their sorry asses.

anyway, relish wine bar and grill was pretty good, but not great. standout dish was the lamb empanadas with pomegranate glaze. other notable mentions: the grilled calamari was fairly tender and succulent, although conceptually weak (served with halved grape tomatoes and some indistinguishable aioli), the lobster potstickers featured a tasty, vaguely asian-inspired filling redolent with sesame oil, and featured a pleasantly chewy wrapper, but again was sided with an indifferent, nondescript aioli. the annato rubbed pork ribs were juicy and falling off the bone (due to their being braised as opposed to smoked), and were sauced in a pleasantly sweet bbq sauce. there was also an eggplant dip that was quite nice, and eggplant fritters that were encased in an eggy, moussey batter.

weak point was the focaccia. the bread had no taste, the mie (the interior of the bread) was very generic and soft, with none of the gluteny brawn of proper bread, and overall, it was a doughy, thick, undersalted and underwhelming offering, regardless that it is "housebaked" (which incidentally doesn't necessarily mean made in house...they could be getting frozen dough and just baking it in house...oooh the deception!). another dish of roasted pepper, artichoke and tapenade was served frigid and was therefore unpleasant to eat. i had a caramel panna cotta that was served inverted, like a flan or creme caramel. the caramel flavour was darkly roasted and bittersweet, but the panna cotta had way too much gelatin in it, defeating the purpose of making the dish in panna cotta form. panna cottas should be softly, gently quivering masses yielding creamy spoonfuls of milky goodness. because this had to be unmolded like a flan, it was bouncy and al dente.

dinner is indian feast night. we're having spinach, zucchini and eggplant pakoras simmered in a tomato-cream based curry sauce. with eggplant bharta, naan and coconut almond lime rice (rice steamed in coconut milk and lime zest, tossed with toasted almonds and coconut). maybe samosas but something tells me that won't be necessary.

fin.

michael snow

is terrible. that was pretty much the theme of yesterday...although hanging out with my BFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF dr. rei is a treat upon treats. "matthew mcconaughey's sister" lol!!!!

there's been a lot of talk recently around these parts about funding of the arts, and the grant system in particular. i kinda have a problem with it, and think the system needs SERIOUS reform (to the extent that i'm going to apply to be a juror for the FACTOR grants, which had the good sense to recently award COLIN JAMES $20 000 of YOUR MONEY). that's right, colin james.

to wit:

1) "only western culture views the arts as a source of meaning through which life is recreated in all its dimensions. The idea that every self-conscious individual aspires to the condition of art is not endorsed by non-western cultures" (not my words)
2) following pierre bourdieu, art and the system of reifying art within a gallery system serves the cultivated, privileged classes, through the legitimization and division between "good" taste (high art, classical music, now jazz) and vulgar taste (popular culture, the great unwashed).
3) through my conversations with people applying for grants, the justification for the fact that they deserve public money to produce their work, is usually couched in language that relies heavily on point #1, that is: the integral role of the "artist" in society, to further advance culture, etc.
4) yet, the reason that they require funding, is based on the notion that the great unwashed, the teeming hordes of the tasteless "masses" mindlessly lapping at the exposed coochie(s) of lindsay lohan and britney spears would not otherwise fund or deem their project worthy of funding. BUT! the justification is always predicated on the entirely ego-centric and ego-furthering notion that what they are producing furthers culture as a whole.
5) therefore, it appears to me to be a uniquely solipsistic exercise that's being obfuscated by a rhetoric of "serving the public" "serving society" "serving the discourse of art" in the wholly unique way that only artists can.

here's the thing:

- you can come up with a justification for anything to serve the greater good of society and culture if the price is right.
- why not the responsibility to make your art relevant to people at large? what does the system of grants and grant-giving do but create a closed circuit with its own internal logic and definitions that only serve the purpose of perpetuating the system? have we not then created a culture that privileges a very specific sort of "artist" that is granted funding (ie. michael snow?).
- if you really love art and your craft in particular, wouldn't you want to make it as widely accessible as possible, instead of denigrating people who "just don't get it"? again, a closed system that speaks only to the converted.
- why shouldn't you have to answer to the public at large? if you only make art that about 10 people are into, under the convenient over-arching precept that they're the only ones with the cultural capital to "get it", then what's to stop you from being a self-indulgent, undisciplined hack? (paging michael snow again!). doesn't the viewing public serve as a check and balance to precisely temper that sense of reckless entitlement?
- doesn't true innovation come when you have to struggle tooth and nail against the best of the best of the world to have yourself heard, as opposed to being supported by a crutch that artificially props up the worth and dissemination of your product?
- if you were truly dedicated to furthering a culture of the arts in canada, why don't you give up that grant money and lobby for funding for the arts in education? for building educational facilities, for art classes from kindergarten through to high school? that is what is going to create a viable culture of the arts, not you getting your grant to pursue whatever whim you choose.

caveats:

1) this is a criticism of all grant-giving, it just happens to be so that the arts is the current hot topic in my face lately. university research is much the same, with a lot of spurious, self-indulgent vanity projects being given funding.
2) i'm not necessarily saying that we should do away with all grants, only that the current system of the canadian culture machine needs a lot of work (don't even get me started on cancon), and mis-manages and mis-directs funding to produce and further a standard of mediocrity. big-time reform!
3) i especially take offense to the self-congratulatory rhetoric that invokes the subject-category "artist" in a self-serving, reifying, elitist way.
4) i'm bigger on "craftspeople" as opposed to people who identify themselves as "artists".

tonight for dinner we're going to this place called "relish bar and grill" which bills itself as a wine and tapas bar. it's been getting good reviews, so i'm excited to try it out. a cursory look at the menu shows that's it's more of a small plates concept, as opposed to classic tapas.

fin.

no snow

is really starting to mess me up and stress me out. i'm one of those people who doesn't mind snow and cold and doesn't really get seasonal affective disorder, and i've always appreciated that toronto is one of those cities that gets to experience the textbook rendition of all 4 seasons. that's what's so great about the place. so i'm not one of the people rejoicing in the lack of snow, and because of my hyperchondriac/neurotic tendencies and doomsday worrying, i'm actually spending a disproportionate amount of time concerned with global warming.

i've always been an energy saver in the extreme. i'm the one who has to be convinced by the rest of the denizens at the house to turn on the air conditioner. i'm the one who has to be convinced and lobbied to turn on the heat. i'm also pretty rabid about turning off lights when not in use. to the point where the boy has come home to find me chatting on the phone in the inky shadows of the dusk, because of my ocd-based, slavish devotion to coming as close to a zero carbon footprint as possible. seeing "the inconvenient truth" this summer and a documentary on peak oil only strengthened my resolve and ratcheted up my anxiety levels. seeing people drive cars in the city kind of makes me nutso. especially when it's something that's easily accomplished via ttc or walking.

the point is, i'm freaking out.

here's what gave me some joy yesterday. i have a sinking suspicion that the proximity of the two separate thrusts of my blog today have rendered me a hypocrite, but i'm going to continue doggedly ahead, with the conscience-mitigating caveat that the t-fal ez clean fryer doesn't stay plugged in all the time, only when in use. i LOVE THIS FRYER! i got it for xxxmas. it's really easy to clean, easy to use, and the oil automatically filters and drains into a holding chamber after use. fantastic!!! the chicken livers turned out beyond my expectations, and they were also the springboard for an appetizer idea.

the plate would consist of fried, panko-crusted chicken livers, served medium, with a shallot, bacon, and mustard vinaigrette sauce, with some toasted brioche rounds and a small pile of confit (read: caramelized) onions. i think it's a winner!

today for lunch i'm meeting h for eggplant sammies at st. lawrence market. tonight for dinner i'm making paella, with sofrito, saffron, chorizo, shrimp, scallops, squid and clams. and leftover sweet potato pecan pie for dessert.

fin.

culture round-up

i saw a few flicks this past holiday season. one of them was "volver". now, i haven't seen "talk to her" or "all about my mother", which are supposed to be almodovar's best. i have seen "bad education" which i thought was middling, and a little too campy for my taste. i thought penelope cruz's performance was well-acted, and i ADORE the art direction, but i find that there's a tonal disjunct between the subject matter, and the way that it's depicted, which ends up resulting in a confusing stylistic and thematic mish-mash, for me at any rate.

i also saw "idlewild". it was bad. really really bad. again, some clever ideas from the director, and some pretty scenes, but it shows the fallacy of attempting to stretch a music video concept over an hour and a half. the story was slim, the songs were boring, and the biggest travesty was that the dance numbers were poo. i hate pooey dance numbers, especially because people dancing in unison hold a very very special place in my heart. i love dancing movies. the most recent one that has grabbed my attention is "stomp the yard". that shiz looks good! i love the classic dance-movie underdog/dance "other" appropriation/love story.

we're currently part-way through "tristan and isolde". james franco is a little too fancy-dancy for my tastes, and there's a bit too much war-mongering and not enough smooching, but it makes for primo sicky brain candy.

my new favorite song is "carry on wayward son" by kansas. which is featured prominently on guitar hero, my favoritest video game of all time. i have a hole in my heart that can only be filled by 70s arena cock rock. lately, my latent private investigator leanings have led to a period of self-clue-compilation, which is pointing towards a very strong hillbilly streak in yours truly. i'm like one of those "off the grid" extreme libertarian hillbillies, setting up doomsday compounds in the wilds of wherever. ie. one of my favorite activities, inspired by my dear montreal friend, is planning for the apocalypse. planning for things is an activity in which i could while away endless hours in perfect contentment. for example, i LOVE packing for trips (i also LOVE re-organizing my sister's diaper bag, the state of which is a suitable surrogate for the socio-political-economic post-apocalyptic landscape). planning for the apocalypse and readying myself and my crew on our fictitious compound and assembling our crack team, is like packing for the ULTIMATE trip.

i finished michael pollen's "the omnivore's dilemma" while i was on vacation. what a book! i want to be a grass farmer. there's a section where he details the work and life of a joel salatin, who is a christian extreme libertarian anti-government dude who has a farm that is almost 100% sustainable and self-sufficient. he calls himself a "grass farmer" and believes in letting the animals express their inner animal-ness and that by tailoring the farm to the specifc innate leanings of the animal, the farm heals and runs itself. so he grows a healthy and intensely diverse crop of grass that the cows graze on for scheduled periods of time, then they get moved to a different pasture and he moves chickens over the just-grazed land so that the chickens can eat the pests and fertilize the grass with their droppings. it's all designed as the apotheosis of myriad symbiotic relationships developed since the agricultural revolution, all to promote optimal agricultural diversity.

now i'm reading a couple of books. i'm steadily working my way through raymond william's "culture and materialism" a collection of essays by one of my favorite theorists of all time, and the pop-pop of praxis-based cultural studies. i also just just started "molecular gastronomy" by herve this, who is a renowned chemist and the only person to hold a doctorate in molecular gastronomy, a burgeoning field in cooking. it's a series of short meditations, questions, chemical breakdowns and de-bunking of various commonly held ideas, notions, and food preparation practices. ahhhhh!!!! so exciting!!! i haven't read fiction in a long, long time. for some reason, i'm going through a phase where a lot of the fiction i pick up just seems really contrived and trivial, outside of my beloved graphic novels.

today i'm having breakfast with my dead-beat dad. we're going to go to cafe mocha on the danforth, a very nice breakfast meeting place, with a regrettably twee name. i'm going to futz around in the afternoon, and then meet my friend h. for some mall-trawling. for dinner tonight the plan is to make panko-crusted deep-fried chicken livers (sounds gross but only to those who don't recognize the power of a quality chicken liver) with caramelized onions and mushrooms, blanched green beans served with walnut brown butter and lemon zest, and leftover mash, turnip and apple casserole, and stuffing from the fridge to get rid of some of the oldies taking up room.

fin.

confessions

i not-so-secretly love nativity scenes, the more complex, the better. the effort involved in re-creating the birth of sweet baby jesus with cardboard or plastic figurines and putting straw or hay in the manger is beyond awesome to me. this probably stems from too many family vacations spent at disneyworld, which was the genesis of my life-long love for animatronics. in fact, my favorite "ride" at disney world wasn't a ride at all, but a moving theatre of staged scenes that served as a thinly veiled ad for general electric. it is called "the carousel of progress" and a quick search on wikipedia reveals that it holds a special place in the heart of walt disney himself - it is widely believed that it is his favourite ride. it follows a "typical" american family through the ages reaping the untold and wondrous innovations that electricity has made possible. it had an amazing theme song, which i still know the words to, but wikipedia has informed me that to my intense distress, the song has been re-written. i hope the one i know is the one they kept.

last night as we were walking along the danny, we came upon an empty manger, that had been demarcated with a sign that read (quite enigmatically) "what is missing"? it was mucho bizarreo. here is a horrendous picture of myself...i'm feeling slightly under the weather and i had gone for a brisk walk, ergo, vis-a-vis, my hair makes me look like a witchy woman. see how i debase myself for my (admittedly limited) reading public?

because i was feeling unwell i called in sick to work yesterday. marking the first time in 2007 i've skipped a shift at the library. hopefully, it won't continue thus and i can resume my good standing in that institution. hopefully. yesterday ended up being a write-off. but today is the day of the return to Reality. reality bites. now i understand that movie. working sucks. school sucks. everything but leisure sucks. i guess i had to start doing something because i was beginning to develop bed sores. but still! still i say! i shouldn't complain because a lot of people don't have the luxury of 3 weeks off around the holidays. but still! still i say!

i didn't feel like cooking, so we ate wings from makkah. the dude who runs the cash at makkah is extremely bad at math. the last time he was there he took our money and didn't give us any change (we were due back about $2 and a bit), this time, he gave me back 17 cents more than i should have gotten, but i figured it was part of our karmic destiny.

i get really stressed out when i see people my age with fancy apartments and clothes that i associate with being grown-up or upwardly mobile. like an apartment that's all matchy-matchy or all showroom-y, or features leather anything. i just can't relate. i'm also starting to get stressed out that maybe i should start wearing makeup. i don't know how though!

tonight for dinner we're having the minestrone with white beans, kale, tomatoes, zucchini, beans and other vegetal goodness, along with toasted fred's potato bread and butter. i'm getting my life back on track, dammit!

fin.

computer enema!

this marks the day of the big computer reformat. i'm TREMENDOUSLY excited. i'm a fan of cleansing.

this also marks the first shift i've had at the library in two weeks or so...bogus. although it will be nice to have some money in my pocket for a change.

we're going to the only for breakfast, and then i'm going to make minestrone with fred's bread potato bread for dinner. nice and simple and healthy.

fin.

2007

was rung in with little fanfare, but a lot of love. dr. rei came by, my ex-bf, now bff and his lurve, and an old friend, plus the new new guinea crew/family at home made for a night of intense conversation that covered a wide range of topics, interspersed with big stretches of grazing on food and arrested development and battlestar galactica on dvd. we laughed our pants off and it was one of the better new years on record.

we also turned our living room into wall-to-wall bed space, by dragging out the coffee table and putting it aside, and throwing in the centre between the couch and the futon, another futon mattress and piles of pillows and blankets. it was very conducive to schluffery of the highest order. it was not so amenable to smacking the terry's chocolate orange open...there was too much softness a gwanning. we went to bed really late and when we woke up, the new new guineans just started talking again. i think that's what makes our dynamic so fantastic, is the from dusk to dawn non-stop conversation.

we also assigned ourselves battlestar galactica counterparts. i'm a cross between sharon and starbuck. the boy is a billy/adama cross. the roomie is roslin. our montreal friend is number 6/xena, and dr. rei is gaeta. and my ex-bf now bff is the chief.

tonight for dinner i'm making a baked glazed ham, glazed with either ginger pear jam or lemon pineapple preserves. we're also having a baked rutabaga and apple casserole topped with brown sugar crisp topping, a yukon gold and cheddar gratin, and maybe beans with lemon zest in walnut brown butter. for dessert we're having sweet potato pecan pie with whipped cream.

fin.