is it time?

is it time for me to be wrenched from my sturdy little 4.0 megapixel kodak easyshare and get a new digital camera? i am quite loyal and devoted to the little thing. i love it for a few reasons:
a) it's got a huge screen and it makes taking natural light pictures a no-brainer (relatively) - without having to know a lot about perspective and depth of field and shutter speed and iso and f-stops.
b) it survived (and dare i say, thrived!) despite immersion/submersion in the cats' drinking bowl.
c) i like that it doesn't take super glossy, ultrasaturated, crazysexycool pictures. call me a luddite, but i'm not a fan of seeing more than i can see with my eyes. i don't necessarily want my memories preserved in that way (maybe i'm fooling myself?). i have a lot of issues with other food bloggers who take super high-res pictures of their food because i think it glosses over poor execution and dresses it up so that it LOOKS like the food tastes good when sometimes it looks a little shacker. don't get me wrong: i think shacker food is totally a-ok. i just don't like it when shackers make pawn off their stuff with non-shacker trappings. it's like designer knock-offs. those are also a-ok, but don't try to pass off your kelvin coles as the real deal. i also know that i have NO DESIRE to see myself in high definition. that would be a disaster of near-epic proportions.

but, there are some things a new camera would have going for it:
- slightly less grainy shots in natural light
- perhaps a flash that doesn't make you look like the night of the living dead (thus my reliance on natural lighting)
- i wouldn't mind having my italy pictures preserved in slightly better form.

any suggestions? i'm a little too lazy to learn new software and i've had a good experience with kodak and have brand loyalty. is my loyalty undeserved? should i un-brand myself and join the world of the sonys, olympusesses, and canons? i'm thinking the kodak z series is good. what do you think? i'm also trying to be more enviromentally sound/carbon-footprint-minimalizing friendly in my actions, and i'm trying to separate my needs from my wants and be fiscally responsible by not buying frivolous things, which all begs the question, do i really NEED a new digital camera? if i do buy one, it'd be nice if i could still use my existing kodak-related camera stuff (well, basically i have a camera bag, and a flexible tripod, and a few extra memory cards).

any advice from my miniscule readership would be much appreciated. in other news, i have to say, that making grown-up money that allows me to save oodles and pay for things in cash, and still maintain my quality of life AND get myself out of debt, is a life i could get used to.  most important of all...I LOVE MY JOB! and i love where i work, and i really like the people i work with. is everyone sick of hearing that yet?

fin.

faux family

this is a picture of me and the dotytron with my friend h's baby, d. she's very cute, but don't let those good looks fool you...she's hopped up on meth and she'll jook you in the blink of an eye! in other news, i've thrown myself into increased productivity with righteous abandon. it feels good. i got two of my assignments back and walked away with two decent A-, so i'm feeling pretty good. let's see if i can keep up the momentum. i'm buying my hot docs pass today. my goal is to be completely done my school work by april 11th. worse comes to worse, i'm willing to give myself until april 16th, but that's IT. then a glorious week of work and documentaries, and then ITALY. the three little bears are big time stoked (the three little bears are: me, dr. rei and the dotytron and the moniker came about when we were booking our rome hotel and saw the cute little triplet single beds in our prospective room).

i participated in another stupid teleconference tonight. so brutal! i sat with my ear rapidly cauliflowering against the unforgiving plastic surface of the phone, my head cocked at an increasingly crick-inducing 72 degrees listening to inane question after inane question for FORTY MINUTES. when it was finally my turn, i asked my question and then hung up. hopefully i didn't get caught out! i couldn't deal anymore. there's nothing worse then when OTHER people waste your time FOR you. brutes. tonight for dinnie i had the last of the oxtail, rice'n'peas, and pumpkin stew. tomorrow is an epic long day which will be enlivened by me eating leftover goose, stuffing, an apple, a pear, and the braised cabbage. so far spartan ways have been adhered to. i feel better (but that's probably attributable more to the placebo effect of virtuousness than physiological effect of reduced spicy baconator intake).

fin.

well played, wendy's, well played.

the past few weeks have been an orgiastic tumult of baroque style eating at casa dotytron and lagerfeld. i mean, for the most part, we've been eating a good amount of home-cooked food, but after the weekend spent in the states, then last weekend with my family, and then this weekend of the ritualistic goose dismemberment, things haven't been too ship shape and i'm starting to feel slightly the worse for wear.

yesterday was supposed to herald the return of the REAL lagerfeld - slim, trim, and kale-filled. things started to go cock-eyed when i followed up my breakfast of freshly squeezed beet-apple-cucumber-celery-orange juice and bowl of steel cut oatmeal with a lunch of goose meat, a raspberry jam bar, and 2 profiteroles stuffed with lemon curd. oops. at that point, i was willing to throw in the towel and acknowledge that i probably wouldn't feel like coming back from dodgeball and making the stirfry. so after the game, we bandied around a few suggestions and settled on wendy's. WITH THE BEST OF INTENTIONS. we drove there (courtesy of bwong) and had a long discussion about how the baconator was TOO MUCH (actually, it was more the dotytron on this jag), and how there wasn't enough vegetable, and you felt like hell afterwards. the dotytron was hoping they had his jalepeno cheese melt thing, because he felt it struck just the right balance between spicy vegetal matter and beefy patty. yes, we all agreed, the baconator just didn't feel right last night. i was toying with the idea of a chicken sandwich, and the dotytron and bwong were going to go with the big bacon classic. we roll up to the drive through window, but it wasn't operational. then we go through some parking hurdles. then we finally enter the wendy's and lo and behold, before us is an eye-level sign for "the NEW spicy baconator". i pointed at the sign and i think all our mouths dropped open. it's basically the baconator except with two slices of pepperjack cheese and jalepenos and some kind of spicy sauce (like a chipotle mayo - but wendy's-style). how could we possibly be expected to resist? so wendy's won. and we ate that and felt like hell afterwards, but i think we all collectively agreed that we were going to start a day of spartan-like restraint and gastronomic asceticism today.

so far so good. two slices of multigrain toast with peanut butter, 2 bananas, a glass of orange juice, a tonne of water, and 3 handfuls of spiced nuts i made over the weekend for lunch (as an aside, my friend d inspired me to put corn nuts in a spiced nut mix...and sweet holy mother of all that is sweet and holy, corn nuts are AWESOME!). the spiced nuts are easy...i whip some egg whites until nice and foamy and then toss the mixed nuts (i buy raw, unsalted versions of the following: peanuts, cashews, pecans, corn nuts, and almonds) with smoked paprika, cayenne, salt and sugar. they're pretty tasty and make a good work-snack. i also have a grapefruit and an apple i'm going to tear down later...and i'm going to try to fit some yoga in when i get home. ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, spartan life. for dinner tonight we're having that veggie stirfry...i think i'm not going to go to the trouble of the crispy noodle pancake and just mix the veggies and sauce with the noodles. keep it simple. the veggies are: broccoli, asian eggplant, snowpeas, green onions, and red pepper. with tofu chunks. in a spicy black bean sauce. i feel more virtuous and healthful just typing those words.

then it's a night of homework and knitting, and maybe we can squeeze in the very last episode of season 2 of the wire. poor sobotka. you poor union shlub. poor unions! going the way of the dodo. it makes me sad, but it also makes me mad that all those union shlubs are so shortsighted that they contribute to the (somewhat accurate) private sector public perception that union peeps are lazy. you can't have it both ways, shlubs!

pictures to be posted of tonight and last night's dinner later.

fin.

dickens-fest 2008

was a rousing success (and didn't require all that much kitchen-time, all things considered). the goose was ENORMOUS and compared to the last time i wrestled with a goose (summer 2007), which i now realized i egregiously overcooked, this one was juicy with just a touch of pink near the bone, encased in a mile of crackling, crisp, salty skin, sheathed in a little suit of molten, golden, sweet, goose fat. it's almost enough to make me want to reverse the hands of time so that i can go back to last night and experience it all over again. goose is > turkey. there is no longer any question in my mind. we were hungrily tearing strips of dripping meat off the carcass in a primordial, medieval frenzy, our faces coated in a sheen of fat (which insulated us nicely when we staggered out of the house in an attempt to rustle ourselves from a goose-fat induced torpor for a fruitless mission to rent highlander from blockbuster). the thing with goose is, it's ALL DARK MEAT. luscious, sinewy, chewy, flavour-packed dark meat. the satiation levels were extremely high in the house of plenty last night, and we went back for repeated portions. we also scored strips of the skin and fried it. the results were different. the less winning samples were basically goose jerky or crisp goose bacon, but the ones that exhibited the effect that we were after (properly seasoned, salty strips of crisp skin with a molten layer of lubricating fat bursting forth with every bite) were absolutely transcendent.

it was well matched by the sides. a silky puree of cauliflower (that i'm willing to concede was a touch too watery) and an ad-hoc rescue of a previous refrigerator blitz that yielded half of a well-worn cabbage. we cooked up some lardons, sweated a julienned red onion in the fat, then added the shredded cabbage and some chicken stock i had made yesterday and let it braise away. then near the end we added some cubes of tart green apple (peeled) and let it finish cooking until the apples were just tender. finally, we finished off with puffy-chewy profiteroles, sandwiching a scoop of vanilla-bean ice cream (not made by me, unfortunately) and crowned with rivulets of my whiskey toffee sauce.

THIS is what michael pollan is talking about. it's not about everyone becoming a vegan. it's about reducing your meat intake (the roomie has a sensible suggestion...it should be a reflection of the amount of meat that you could have hunted yourself, way back when)...so reducing your meat intake (i know the previous orgiastic description of last night's feast would seem counterintuitive to what i'm espousing in this paragraph, but wait until you hear what i'm making for dinner tonight), and sitting down to a MEAL that YOU cooked with people you love. eating is about pleasure and history and culture coming together through a shared, elemental practice. there are few things i love more than the convivial company of the dinner table, and of feeding the people that i love and letting the lugubrious qualities of good food and shared sentiments work their magic and create memorable evenings.

i'm very, very lucky in the sense that these evenings and outings happen so often for me, that by virtue of their constancy, it's hard to highlight or pluck one particular evening from the list of good nights. they all coalesce and become one long, contented, hazy memory of good times gone by and permeate the ether around my coterie with the expectation of fun, laughing and sensory deliciousness. it's a good place to be in.

today is the day of industrious application to my studies that i should have had yesterday. i'm going to try to finish two assignments today, before dodgeball. tonight we're having a broccoli, red pepper, asian eggplant, tofu, and mushroom spicy black bean stirfry, on top of a crispy noodle pancake. and maybe for a post-day-of-academic-fortitude treat, we'll eat some more profiteroles and watch season 2 of the wire.

fin.

i don't get it

granted, in the past year or two, with my attention increasingly split between all my other interests, work, and school, staying on top of new music and music in general has kind of fallen by the wayside. once i broke off from the jungle scene, i became a little bit of a musical orphan, as the de facto fall-back genre just wasn't cutting it for me anymore. so i'm kind of out of it, and i rely on the zeitgeist, pop culture osmosis, and the advice/referrals of people who are doggedly sticking to it (dr. rei being the chief example). i've just got too much going on and not a lot of time for seeking out tunes and sampling from the musical buffet to find which tasty morsel i'm going to keep returning to. i'm a subway reader, not ipod listener, i'm either doing homework, or knitting, or reading, or cooking, so basically the only time i have for tunes is when i'm sitting in a car (barely ever) or cooking (at which point, it's background because i'm focused on other things). so i've made my peace with it, and i totally acknowledge and own my demode-ness. however! all that being said, i don't understand the attraction of steve aoki. people (especially the young uns) go apes**t for this guy. je ne comprende pas. i've listened to a set here or there...it's aight. it's nothing earth-shattering. and well, not to stress the peripheral, but he's kind of gross. he's like a combination between susur lee

and the vampire guy from the black eyed peas:



ummm...that's not exactly a stellar combo. anyway this is yet another example of how i just don't understand the kids nowadays. i'll go back to listening to my best of heart, thank you very much.

so the dotytron and myself went and braved the storm yesterday to pay a visit to my friends h & j, who are the new proud parents of an absolutely delightful, rosy, bandy-limbed baby (1 week old today!). she's very precious, if a little boring right now...the first few weeks seem a little lame, as far as parenting goes. baby cries, you feed it, change it, and then stare at it. that's not the part that gets my squeaky parental wheel turning. i'd say from 4 months + it's primetime. i can't wait to see what kind of a person she becomes, and it doesn't seem real yet that a friend of mine HAS ONE OF THOSE!

today is a day of errands and homework, and then a dickensian feast. we're having roasted goose, with bob-evans sausage laced sage stuffing. and some kind of vegetable...maybe roasted cauliflower, and a sweet potato gratin? i don't know what we're going to have for dessert either. i'm so aimless!!! based on the cover of this month's gourmet, i'm leaning towards vanilla ice cream stuffed profiteroles with whiskey toffee sauce. mmmmm...that sounds good. i say we go for that!

fin.

regardez-la

take a look at this picture. it's notable for a few reasons:



a) it's michael pollan's new book, "in defense of food" the central thrust of which is neatly encapsulated in the print on the yellow band encircling the red leaf lettuce: "eat food. not too much. mostly plants."
b) i purchased this book at the talk hosted by the cookbook store, here in toronto, at which pollan was the featured attraction. he read an excerpt from the book and then was subjected to an interview, which was fairly banal and fawning, but not like, inside the actor's studio, "tell me about that time you were awesome"-level fawning. more like, "i'm going to lob easy, open-ended, not terribly specific but highly topical to the subject matter of your book generic questions that you can easily and coherently expound upon in digestible sound-bites" kind of fawning.
c) i saw one of my favorite people-i-love-to-hate, shinan govani "society" writer for "the national post" seated two rows in front of me, which titillated me to no end. seeing that smug mug in the flesh and feeling the adrenaline starting to pound in my bloodstream at the thought of punching him in the face or better yet, demoralizing and destroying his false sense of superiority by telling him in no uncertain terms that TORONTO SOCIETY IS NOTHING TO TALK AND/OR TWITTER ABOUT, let alone that working for "the national post" is nowhere close to working for "the new york times" or "vanity fair" so his affectations sound like the desperate machinations of the (at best) nouveau riche petty middle class clawing to the top of the toronto hoi polloi dung heap and thinking that it means something when all it means is that your very desperation is patently visible for all and sundry to see. i mean, dude is pictured here with TRACEY MELCHOR (i think). and he looks like a bloated, self-important, buffoon straight out of a moliere-esque cutting vivisection of parlour society and the grasping social climbers it attracts.

d) i went with a group of girls to this talk, only one of whom i know, and she's a very new acquaintance at that. one of the other members of our party, is a producer at much music's "the new music" show, and was more than happy to oblige when i asked her to give me the dirt on the much music staff. my first and (obviously) most pressing question was: "why is devon so orange? does he LIKE being that orange?"
[exhibit A]
the answer is that, while most of the much music vjs prefer NOT to avail themselves of the makeup services offered and like to do their own, devon consistently gets his makeup done by the much music makeup artists, who are either a) working in very poor lighting b) are blind, or c) wear those terrible glasses/sunglasses combos that darken on their own depending on the amount of light available (my grade 6 teacher had those and from my experience as an observer of this technology when it was in its' infancy, those glasses are NEVER clear. there's ALWAYS a slight tinge of corrective shading...even in NATURAL DAYLIGHT WHEN THE SUN IS AT ITS ZENITH). apparently, devon uses the vision/lighting impaired much music makeup people, but then consistently complains about their handiwork.
e) i went to this talk coincidentally, when a free ticket became available (the talk has sold out twice!), AFTER getting into a heated debate around related issues on a messageboard yesterday with my nemesis. michael pollan could be credited for putting these issues onto the popular radar (and to a certain extent, be held culpable for stupid, non-critical-thinking people [read: benevolent liberals] reading his books and taking up the very, myopic, privileged position that my nemesis was espousing.

so yes, the first picture is notable for all those things. but! it is most notable for option

f) i got him to sign it thus:



this is how it went down -
*generic pleasantries are exchanged*
mp: "who would you like me to make it out to?"
kl: "karl. lagerfeld. please"
mp: *slightly nonplussed* "umm...okay. does he spell it with a k or a c?"
kl: "k"
mp: "do you work for karl lagerfeld?"
kl: "no, he is my online alter-ego. i have to protect my internet persona, you know"
mp: *laughs (a little uneasily)* *shakes head* "uh, sure...okay! there you go"

fin.

wow.

i didn't get anything proper done tonight because i was too busy pwning n00bs. how does this happen to me? some tit-face (my nemesis, to be exact) on some messageboard was flapping her gums about "local" and "organic" and how farmer's markets and community food boxes are next to godliness and now that i've been through the looking glass and know what i know, i couldn't stand down. gah. it's so frustrating. it takes so much time explaining to people how wrong they are whenever they think they're so right. stupid liberals are the scourge of our planet. hahahaha...j/k (but not really). stupid liberals hurt the left and the annoying thing is: THEY DON'T KNOW IT. the annoying thing is: they need movies like crash (paul haggis not cronenberg) to tell them how they're secretly so stupidly liberally racist. it's infuriating.

anyway, here are pics of last night's dinner and tonight's dinner. tonight's dinner was jerk oxtail with an irie pumpkin stew (i bought this new kind of squash, called "kuri" squash...it was very nice and creamy and not fibrousy at all) with coconut rice'n'peas (a little mushy from too much liquid). it was delicious, but even though i put two habenero peppers in the mix, it wasn't that spicy. pooh.

tomorrow is a long, ass-kicking day of getting my butt back into full gear. i have a full plate at work, a full plate of school, and a full plate of leftovers for sustenance to get me through the other two full plates.

fin.

shame

is the theme of this post. we won yesterday's dodgeball game, a fact i attribute to a few factors:
a) i sent out an email using pointers from my brother (probably the best dodgeball captain i've ever known) who provided me with a detailed scouting report of everyone on the team's strengths and weaknesses and we all really took those pointers to heart and worked on our game
b) i did a pre-game huddle
c) we worked as a team together
d) there wasn't any music playing (music seems to be our achilles heel)

me, dr. rei and the dotytron stayed to watch my brother's game right after ours (as he was driving us up to my grandpa's birthday banquet). my brother was playing a team we had played last week. there's a little man on the team who just LOVES to call his opponents out for various minor (usually dismissed) infractions (a toe over the line, a player whose shorts got ever-so-slightly - and more likely questionably -grazed during play). it's pretty annoying because the way we play is that each team calls our own outs. and 99% of teams are really fair and balanced and good natured about it. in the heat of play, everyone misses something the odd time, and karmic destiny seems to make it all work out evenly in the end. anyway, little man was the last person standing on the court, and was hit with a barrage of balls that got him out. so what does he do? he claims that one of the people on my brother's team was actually OUT already, and shouldn't have been throwing in the first place. it was just a flagrant, crappy call, and my brother was the bigger person (as he always is in dodgeball) and pulled his player off the court and let the little guy stay on, and it got me hoppin' mad. [this is where the shame comes in]. we're all outraged on the bench and i'm all pissed off at the little twerp and i shout:

"dudes. DUDES. you are going to be SO. SORRY."

at which point, dr. rei turns to me, stares at me aghast for one second, and then bursts out laughing. as well she should, because at this point, i was dressed in my "grandpa's 85th birthday" finery, i'm a 5'4" short little asian girl, and i ACTUALLY SAID THOSE WORDS in the heat of a DODGEBALL GAME. ahahahahahahahahahaha! what's WRONG with me?!? who DOES that?!???? it comes down to a few things:
a) i'm a competitive hothead
b) i love my brother and i protect my family at all costs
c) i run my mouth like a motherf**ker

anyway, that was kind of embarrassing slash hilarious. so shame on me for being a giant loser who is easily riled by poor sportsmanship.

shame on paul haggis for in the valley of elah. this was presented as a "maturation" of paul haggis' writing style after the maudlin, patronizing abomination that was the grade-school treatise on racism, crash. this was slightly less maudlin and patronizing, but still fulsome in the heavy-handed sentimentality department. it was a mediocre movie featuring a finely calibrated, disciplined performance from tommy lee jones. paul haggis really doesn't like leaving things to the viewer to interpret. everything has to be foretold, forewarned, foreshadowed (frequently using the symbolic vehicle of a dog [twice in this film, once in that terrible piece, million dollar baby] - ie. stuff happens to a dog, and THEN in the last 1/4 of the film, happens to a human being). it's just so blatantly manipulative that i'm shocked that tommy lee jones managed to eke out some nuance and subtlety from his role. it makes it all the more striking that he managed, and not only that, does so with admirable grace and quiet, stricken restraint. it was beautiful acting.

be kind rewind is terrible and boring. i fell asleep periodically (granted, i was sick and tired), but i think even if i had been 100%, i still would have been pushed into slumber by the thin (read: nonexistent) story and even thinner characterization. now we know: eternal sunshine of the spotless mind was almost 97% kauffman (not that i had many doubts after watching the science of sleep) and 3% gondry. gondry should just stay well enough away from writing scripts. he's not good at it. at all. what he IS good at, is creating fanciful, charmingly naive, dreamscapes and imagery out of ordinary materials. he captures the spirit of child-like imagination very well, and hints at the sentiments of creativity and community that underlie people's connectivities through whimsy. however, a spirit and sentiment do not a movie make. mos def delivers a horrifically wooden performance and jack black needs to reassess his career after this (and king kong). the critic in now magazine (which i guess is toronto's answer to "the village voice") gave it one "n" on the premise that the plot device that has the narrative hinge on the notion that a community would still rent vhs tapes was implausible. with much respect to the film reviewer, that is the WORST CRITICISM EVER. that, i could buy. if that was the logic of the world that i was faced with, then fine, i can deal. what i CAN'T deal with is someone who is supposedly sensitive to inner city african american experience (and that is how gondry is spoken of, in the wake of the marginally successful dave chapelle's block party) populating that same community with people for whom "child-like innocence" comes across as mentally challenged. and yet, INCONSISTENTLY so. so that mos def's character on the one hand can have trouble deciphering a 3 word (11 characters total) message written backward (this after he copies the message [backward] out onto no less than 20 different slips of paper), but balk at the problematic of recreating driving miss daisy with jack black's character, and at the same time have no problems with jack black's character adopting the EQUALLY problematic slitted eye that is synonymous with "asian" to recreate rush hour 2. quoi? how the hell is that supposed to work again?

i get gondry's point and where he's coming from. blah blah blah, loss of innocence and wonder, blah blah. i don't think you need two movies with creepy man-children at their core to expound on this. i also don't think you need to make two full-length feature films as an excuse to show off your clever art direction.

and with that, i'm off to make tonight's dinner.

fin.

for the love of pete, ellen page!

okay, by all accounts (and from my personal experience having watched juno and odd episodes of the trailer park boys ellen page is a beautiful, young (21 years old!!!), girl with a whale-load of talent, and a promising future in acting. OR DOES SHE?!? every time i've seen this girl out at a red-carpet event, press junket, or daytime/evening talk show, she is wearing something so incredibly BORING, not-age appropriate, and just all around off-the-rack-at-jc-penny that it makes me want to scream. it ALSO makes me fear that she's going to go the way of mia kirschner or other promising (and considerably "hotter" in the conventional sense) canadian female thespian exports, and end up on crappy marginalized cable television (at best) or just have faded into obscurity within five years. this is your breakout moment! look young! sassy! sparkly! hire yourself a stylist! seriously. it's all black shifts, grey strapless dresses. nothing that's going to land you in the pages of "in style" magazine or get you noticed by the head honchos in hollywood AT ALL. it's not even memorably non-fashion-y (a la chloe sevigny in that counter-intuitive stylistic sense). it's just drab. i was bemoaning this fact to my sister off-handedly while flipping through the pages of some magazine this weekend, and my sister agreed. we were both concerned.

lo and behold, as i watch the oscars last night, THIS is what a 21 year old girl chooses to wear at what will probably be one of the BIGGEST GALAS OF HER LIFE, where she's nominated in her chosen field for ONE OF ITS HIGHEST HONOURS:

no sooner did the camera cut to her (we only saw the last 1/4 of the oscars as we were at my grandpa's banquet and then had to be driven all the way back downtown) then my home phone rings. i pick it up, and without a hello, i hear my sister's exasperated, harried-working-mother-of-two voice: "SHE'S. WEARING. BLACK." as a point of comparison, let's look at what, say, helen mirren wore:

ummm...helen mirren is like 60-something. and she's rocking her silver hair, amazing bod, giant tee-tas like it ain't no thang.

fine, let's get someone closer to ellen page's age range:

jessica alba is knocked up with some random schmoe (with minimal prospects)'s baby, has starred in more flops this year than i can count (one of which featured DANE COOK) and yet she STILL manages to make it look like she's got her s**t together.

i rest my case. no excuses, ms. ellen page!

mark my words: if she doesn't get herself a stylist, she'll be marginalized in hollywood within 5 years. you gotta play the game, son. you gotta play the game (if there's one thing that both the wire and dodgeball have drilled into me, it's the above).

i'll probably post my reviews of in the valley of ellah and be kind rewind tonight. a bientot.

fin.

m.i.a.

yeah, i know i've been missing-in-action round here lately. last weekend's baroque-era level of sloth and poor eating habits (the land of the free also = land of the conspiciously absent non-battered, non-fried, vegetable) plus plenty of face time with my snot-geyser of a nephew means that i got sick. a miserable cold that has left me cranky, with a throat full of barbed wire, hitting apple cinnamon neo citron like it's going out of style. this past year has seen me be sick more times than in the previous five combined. all the work and school and the extracurricular activities and the general harriedness of my mind, the unusually cold winter, and the slacking on the healthy eating front mean that i've been felled by an army of bacteria and viruses to whom i'm usually quite impervious.

i'm in the homestretch of my degree, the last six weeks before i get to walk off with my kinda-sorta masters...and in each class, i've only handed in ONE assignment. which means that in the last six weeks i have 3 assignments per class to go...which means a total of 12. in six weeks. ai-ya. taking the day off of work was a double-edged santoku knife (which is a bit of a implausibility, as japanese style knives are usually only sharpened on one side. generally western style knives are the ones sharpened on both edges of the blade - but i digress): on the one hand, it gave me an excuse to go home to markham and be coddled by my family (insofar as my family coddles - essentially they left me to whine away in a pile of sweatpants and stuffed me full of shanghai style dim sum and when the whining got to be too much, i was told off in none-too-gentle terms). on the other hand, the fact that i really, truly took reading week OFF, means that i'm thinking about tomorrow filled with trepidation and fear. groceries for the week haven't been bought. readings haven't been accomplished. assignments have not been started in advance. eep.

throw in the fact that this weekend was a gong show. dim sum lunch with my grandparents on friday afternoon in a dated monstrosity of a restaurant in markham (think: tacky san francisco chinatown decor by way of a tangled multi-generational familial drama by amy tan). my mom had us trooping en masse to a dinner with her clients on friday evening. saturday was breakfast with my deadbeat dad and the woman he married. saturday evening i cooked dinner (it turned out fabulous: olive garden salad, my award winning garlic bread, penne with cauliflower, proscuitto and breadcrumbs, and a pork loin roast smeared with a paste of mustard, garlic, sage, rosemary, and olive oil, wrapped in pancetta, and roasted to a spitting, golden, bronzed magnificence). today we're going to a dim sum brunch with the dotytron's parents (!!!!!!) then "tea" with my grandparents at their mah-jong birthday extravaganza (where they manage to tear themselves away from illegal gambling just long enough to tear apart trays of pickle barrel sandwiches, assorted puff pastries from chinese bakeries, and some kind of green-tea or chestnut-filled chinese version of a western style birthday cake). then dodgeball. then BACK to the mah-jong den for a multicourse dinner and lots of toasting for my grandpa's 85th. whew.

then i have to come home and ready myself for the week to come. yikes and more yikes.

we also saw two movies this weekend. in the valley of elah and be kind rewind full reviews to follow later tonight if i have it in me (and if my nightime neo citron toddy allows) or tomorrow.

fin.

reading week slack

i have taken the sage advice of my friend at work and am giving way to the insidious, slothy pull of reading week's manifest. no school work! as she so wisely noted, there's no point getting ahead, it's not like there won't be more school to replace it. better to enjoy my reprieve and luxuriate in my 12 hours less of class time this week. so i'm indulging myself by watching the wire and knitting and having a grand time slowly and fastidiously compiling my list of restaurants/gelaterias/bakeries/trattorias/cafes/markets and food emporiums for my upcoming reverse colonial conquest of florence. my sister planted a most wonderful seed, and i've started an active campaign of cajoling, pleading and entreating to see if we might be able to pay a visit to dario cecchini's butchery/restaurant in chianti (on our way to a day-trip in siena, perhaps?). cecchini was featured in bill buford's excellent book (reviewed in a previous post in this very blog) "heat". he's known as italy's most famous butcher, and he sells lardo and guanciale in his store, along with choice cuts of prime florentine beef. apparently there's always a free-for-all antipasto spread at the shop, with whipped lardo (!!!!) being a featured dish, to be lashed onto crostini. he recently opened up a restaurant, and on weekends, he does a 70euro steak-only tasting of three different types of cow, grilled over a wood fire. since bistecca florentina is on my must-eat list, why not at a place that makes a point of specializing in it? there's also no corkage fee if you bring your own wine.

tonight for dinner i made my award-winning falafels. it's nice to know that i've mastered a dish by the age of 28. it feels good. mind you: i've only got the falafels themselves down. the lemon sauce had to be charmed from the boys at square boy (who wouldn't let me pay!) and the tzatiki and tahini sauce remain elusive. i made them in my brand-new toy, a 14 cup cuisinart. which i love! a food processor with a sharp blade! how revolutionary!!! originally my sister had bought me a 7 cup one for christmas, but i was concerned about the size, so i brought it down for an exchange this past weekend. i was only going to go one size up (11 cup) but then they had the 14 cup for only $100 more. because i had a credit from the one that i was returning, i only paid $100 US for it (total cost was $186 US), whereas they retail for $346 CDN at sears. i can taste the savings! plus it'll last me for life.

tomorrow is a regular work day, but then my sis is dropping off the wee kidlets to be babysat by me while she goes to a hockey game. i have to babyproof the house somewhat (read: stack some full water jugs by the stairs so little ze can't take a tumble). we're eating stromboli with genoa and calabrese and provolone and basil and roasted red pepper and a caesar salad. the kids are going to eat grilled cheese sandwiches.

fin.

vacation 4-life

it's really hard to explain how much i love small-town america, and specifically, the area just outside of rochester. for me and the dotytron, that and the cottage are the ultimate vacation destinations, your go-to happy place, where you know you're not going to be required to do a single thing except eat, find a comfy spot on the couch, and hang. even though the dotytron took some extra time off of work and we left toronto at 3:30 in the afternoon, we hit rush hour long weekend traffic, and it took us almost 2 hours just to get to hamilton. it was really trying. luckily, we had the best of heart to keep us company. oooooh barracuda! the lead singer of heart (i forget which wilson it is) is beyond awesome. she can belt it, but it never sounds shrill.

so i ate my beloved dinosaur bbq which was predictably delicious. we also ate at this place called "red robin", where they specialize in burgers. delicious, fatty burgers and bottomless fries, and the best damn onion rings i've ever eaten. my only complaint is that i didn't like the fact that they put sprinkles on my milkshake. i'm a milkshake purist. we also picked up slices of cheesecake from "the cheesecake factory". unf! so effin' good. creamy and rich and light and flavourful (and at $5 a slice, overpriced, but hella tasty). i love america!

we availed ourselves of my sister's netflix subscription and watched 3:10 to yuma which had the singular distinction of a) making me enjoy the western as a genre and b) make me like russell crowe (whom i usually dismiss as being too florid and hungover-puffy for my personal taste). putting him and christian bale together on screen is magic. the film maintains a fantastic pace, allowing the characters to unfold while keeping a sense of urgency filtering through the tension of the story - it was a finely tuned balance between action and character, and both actors fully inhabit their roles, with crowe really amping up his rapscallion, roguish charm (heretofore completely unnoticed by me). i liked it way more than unforgiven which was a bigtime snoozefest.

the bad thing about eating in the states is that we barely ever touch a fresh vegetable, unless you're counting the onion in the onion rings, tomatoes in my ketchup, and hot peppers that were once a part of my buffalo wing sauce. i came home craving vegetable matter which i rectified by making a wild (read: supermarket definition of "wild" - ergo, shitake and oyster) mushroom risotto with porcinis, and that radicchio, fennel, parsley, and romano bean salad dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, and fleur de sel. it was just the ticket.

i feel like i might be coming down with a cold (that's what a weekend spent with a snot-fountain of a nephew will do to you), which is crappy and is making me feel tremendously unmotivated to tackle the mountain of "getting-ahead-during-reading-week" homework i had set aside for myself. all i want to do is curl up with the wire season 2 and knit knit knit.

fin.

lurve

today is the valentine's day. huzzah. i spent the day at work, and then i took my ready-to-burst preggers friend hanners and the baby daddy out for dinner at pho, and then i went to school to record the audio portion of this stupid group presentation for advocacy. unfortunately, the technology was giving us mad issues, so now i've brought the powerpoint home and i have to try to record it here, with assistance from the dotytron. i'm *hoping* the dotytron doesn't get all audiophile obsessive about it and try to like, remaster it or add reverb or some s**t.

so, not very romantic round here. i DID finish my sociology paper though. i'm kind of proud of it. i continued my trend of writing chatty, informal, the-way-i-talk and not terribly standard-academic sounding style of essay writing i've been doing lately (at least, where i can get away with it - in sociology classes). this prof (the hubby of my food studies prof) is much more preoccupied with quantitative method and rigor though, so i don't know how well it will sit. i actually use the words "either you know your s**t or you don't know your s**t" (i even used asterisks to bleep out the key letters...ha!) and i used a line that goes like this: "We have been asked to situate the readings in relation to our own research. I do not currently have any research of any import. What I do have however, is an interest in popular culture and people and a burning desire to be paid copious amounts of money for my prescient, foundation-shattering, brilliantly-written opinions on said cultural phenomena that will allow me to lead a life of decadent leisure." this is a rough breakdown of my paper (cut and pasted from an email exchange with my lone cultural studies friend at school...he was at a loss as to where to go with his essay):

- i talk about how i don't technically have any research at the moment, per se
- i then talk about how i'm not sure that quantitative methodologies would be of much use to me
- then i go into a critique of thomas and griswold's pieces for their defensiveness
that's predicated on trying to resituate positivism with this "provisional,
provincialism", which denies (even as it reiterates) the impetus for using those methods. so, they're trying to argue FOR positivism, even as they're neutering it from the source of its' traction (the fact that you CAN analyze things down into discrete, measurable, comparable data sets), which to me, represents a failure in logic that hasn't adequately been resolved...ie. why go to lengths to make an argument for positivism's validity as a support for interpretative analysis, if you're going to contextualize away it's efficacy so that it becomes nothing more than an adjunct interpretative method?
- then i name-check bruno latour and thomas kuhn
- then i name-check some raymond williams quote about not turning people into the objects of your study, and that when you attempt to insert an "objective distance" you collapse your ability to apprehend meaning, nuance, tone...in other words, there's something to be said for "knowing your s**t" - so that i can say with confidence that no one gives a rat's ass about shakespeare anymore, except for old dinosaurs who don't matter. like, it seems like some sociology is just out of it. so we're still talking about the "virgin/whore" dialectic or "high culture" stuff that's completely irrelevant to most people's understanding of the world, and we're spending time debunking something that just exists as a paradigmatic discourse now. it exists because we're still SAYING it exists, instead of actually looking to see if that's the case...it's the problem of reifying academic examinations of culture - which is what williams was warning against, methinks.

so this could either go over REALLY well, or the prof will nail my a** to the wall for being a cheeky bastard (with good cause). i'm kind of proud of it, because for myself, i managed to isolate and express my misgivings about the readings in a coherent way...and that was a major block for me to get over.

the KEY thing is: tomorrow is a half day at work, yay! we rented a car and we're going down to visit my sister. i'm giddy with excitement. whoever thought that i would grow to love rochester, ny so much? my sis is grabbing dinosaur bbq for us for dinner. here's a link to the menu. i ordered the tres hombre (with mac'n'chese and the fresh veggie of the day) and the dotytron ordered the fandango plate with mac salad and cole slaw. i also put in an order for their chocolate icebox pie. gah! i'm salivating already! visiting my sister is always so relaxing (for the most part) because all we do is loaf around her living room and eat disgusting amounts of food. bliss.

i also get to see this little bobbin again, and my niece, and we're so stoked. it's been so long since we've seen them! the dotytron is worried that little ze has somehow developed a full vocabulary in the month and a half since we last saw him and will be talking in the queen's english with a clipped british accent. that BETTER not be the case, because look how perfect he is here (also note how the dotytron is so good with kids that it makes most women made of weaker stuff than i to feel an immediate skyrocketing of the maternal urges in their uteri):



have a great long weekend everyone!

fin.

the big snow of 2008

this winter has been mental! i love it! i really really love shoveling snow. it's like a tame version of survival camp or something (VERY tame, i do admit). but i like that it's something where the fruits of your labour are immediately apparent. you really feel like you've ACCOMPLISHED something, or you do when it's not storming like it has been lately around here. last night i came home from school and engaged in an epic sisyphysian battle against the snow. i shoveled and re-shoveled and re-shoveled until finally the dotytron opened a window and was like, "dude. COME INSIDE THE HOUSE" that's a pic of our backyard this morning. crazy!

i forgot to mention what monday night's dinner was. you got the picture, but no ingredient run-down. basically, i took a pound of italian sausages out of the casing and browned the meat, breaking it up with a wooden spoon, then threw in a thinly sliced white onion and some garlic, and sauteed that. added some chili flakes and smoked paprika, and some chickpeas. i thinly sliced a bunch of kale, and tossed that in the boiling water i had going for pasta. when it was bright green, i scooped it out with a chinese strainer and threw that in with the sausage and seasoned the mix with salt and pepper. while the pasta was cooking, i took a few ladle-fuls of the pasta cooking water and deglazed the sausage pan with it. when the pasta was al dente, i tossed it with the sausage mixture and a big handful of grated parmesan. served with a caesar salad. delicious. it's what i ate for lunch today.

i finished reading chuck klosterman's sex, drugs, and cocoa puffstoday. it's aight. i don't hate him as much as i thought i was going to. it's fluffy enough subway reading. he's not *quite* as smug as i thought he'd be, but he's still plenty smug sometimes, with his "i'm going to call myself out for my own dorkiness which makes me cool, but i also get to call out OTHER dorks for thinking their cool for being dorks" schtick. some of his stuff isn't as witty or prescient as he'd like to think it is. one essay on mtv's the real world in particular played out in a completely self-aggrandizing way, while advancing a thesis which is so obvious, it's painful. oh really, chuck klosterman? you don't say that the character tropes on reality television have supplanted real people? how creative and smart of you - EXCEPT THE FACT THAT BAUDRILLARD LAID THIS S**T DOWN 18 YEARS AGO. that being said, i did enjoy lines like this though (from an essay about how the dixie chicks are the new van halen):

"...you can't really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. as a personality test, it doesn't work even half the time. however, there is at least one think you can learn: the most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music "except country". people who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. all it means is that they've managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop sociology; they know that hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. hipsters hate it because they hate midwesterners, and they hate southerners, and they hate people with real jobs."

ahahahahaha! this is so true! then he goes into a bit about how lucinda williams doesn't matter. which is also hilarious for its truth. so for stuff like that, i have to give him some begrudging daps. mostly, the smoldering embers of my hatred for chuck klosterman draw breath from two things:


a) i HATE HIS F**KING FACE. like, seriously. i HATE his face. his face creates this visceral distaste in me that only happens with certain people. sometimes, you just hate someone's face, and that someone could be a totally decent, okay person (i have to put this in, but in reality, when i generally have this kind of reaction to someone's face, they're never all that okay...like, they're never someone i could be friends with. at best, they're the kind of person to whom i would wish no ill will).

b) i'm embittered by the fact that this fool gets paid insane amounts of money to write about stuff i've been talking about FOR YEARS (keep in mind that i'm also like, 7 years younger than him). stuff like: "you may find these people interesting and you may find them entertaining, but they offer nothing for anyone who doesn't already agree with their espoused stance [about michael moore and similar "egocentric iconoclasts"]" chuck's book was published in 2003. 2003!!! at that point, i had already been singing that gospel for TWO YEARS, this while michael moore was just starting to crest the wave of the zeitgeist. this WELL BEFORE the backlash against moore gained popular traction. not only that, but objectively, i don't think that as a writer he's much better than i. i mean, right now he is, but that's because he's had years of professional writing under his belt, AND he has a job that allows him to experience loads of stuff that provides great fodder. i'm harvesting from MY LIFE here, people, and that's a damn sight harder than finding stuff to say about dave pirner from soul asylum. anyway, i think that if you were to take chuckie "hatehisface" klosterman and put us at the same starting point, with the same starting material, we'd be neck-in-neck [i'm saying that out of false modesty - in all honesty, i think i'm better than him, mostly because i don't (or at least, try to consciously stop myself) from saying OBVS stuff that people smarter and better than me have already said (like baudrillard) about cultural phenomena and try to pass it off as new and insightful].

okay. now i have to write a paper tearing quantitative, positivist methodology a new a**hole. wish me luck!

fin.

apparently i suck at advocacy

who knew? this class makes me not want to try and i don't even speak the same language as the prof. i'm so not about business acronyms and buzz-words (S.M.A.R.T. objectives! [specific, measurable, action-oriented, responsibilities stated, timed] keep your presentations B.A.S.I.C.!!! [brief, appreciative, specific, informative, courteous]) so sue me that i think the acrostic is the lowest form of poetry. so sue me that i don't think ANYONE IN THE FREE WORLD ACTUALLY uses those terms. those words are like the "dirty sanchez" or "hot carl" of the business world (to the uninitiated, urban dictionary that shiz, but DO NOT - I REPEAT, DO NOT - google it). everyone knows what they're SUPPOSED to mean, but no one actually DOES it in the reality that you and i occupy. anyway, i got a B+ on my S.M.A.R.T. objectives assignment. i take it as a compliment. because in the REAL hierarchy, a B+ means that i know enough to punch myself out if i ever actually became proficient with S.M.A.R.T. and trust me, mom, i do! you gone done good, ma!

i'm so busy right now that i want to cry hot, salty tears of productivity. unfortunately, all i can squeeze out is a trickle of wasted potential. to that end, today's post will be brief. suffice it to say that the thought of traipsing around rome and florence with my two bffffffs is helping me along considerably. that, and the knowledge that - as next week is reading week - i'm at the halfway point! only around 6 more weeks and i'm DONE! my work is clearly suffering, but at this point, i care not!

we've ironed out our plans for the trip, and we're booking flights, hostels, and trains in the next week. we're spending 2 and a half days in rome, and 8 and a half days in florence, with a day trip to siena or pisa in the works. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! i'm going to try to basically bring an empty suitcase so i can smuggle back lardo and proscuitto and balsamic and truffles and tripe sandwiches. unf unf unf!

tomorrow is a long day...i'm packing the last of the grain soup and an egg salad sandwich in a pita with fruit.

fin.

reason #26848181 why my neighbourhood effin' rocks

- aside -

pps. that jesus jones song below is ALSO about playing witness to the fall of communism and how awesome that is. aka, it's the best song of life.

ppps. the dotytron just read what i wrote about his life and its relationship to gleaming the cube and agrees wholeheartedly. not only that, but he reminded me that gleaming the cube features ASIAN people! here's the plot synopsis courtesy of imdb: "Brian's adopted brother is killed when he discovers that the shop he works in sends weapons to Vietnam instead of medications. To the police it looks like suicide, but Brian knows better so he skates off to investigate the murder himself." wow. this movie is clearly me and the dotytron's story in cinematic form. not only that, but christian slater's skate double is none other than tony hawk. tony hawk is awesome. and by awesome, i mean i saw an episode of mtv cribs featuring his pad and he seems like a good dad and a decent, hard-working, honest individual, whereas when i saw an mtv cribs with omarion (aka the dotytron's nemesis) i wanted to cut his heart out with a spoon.

- resume part of post related to the heading -

i love my part of the danforth. it's right smack dab in the middle where riverdale's upwardly mobile greektown-ness starts to fade into muslim-ville, which in turn fades into scuzzy bars frequented by grizzled, gnarled men and women ravaged by time and cheap, low-grade newfoundland screech and king cans of lakeport.

as i mentioned, we need an outfit for the dotytron that will look good for his teacher's college interview (and that he can use to supplement his paltry "nice restaurant" repertoire). we also have limited time to find this outfit. so on friday after work, i walked along the danforth and popped into this store "five o seven" (all rock and republic jeans - too casual and mad overpriced) and this menswear store, kory's, where everything 50% off was STILL $200 and the staff were snotty, mean, shrunken men of middle age with mass amounts of hair sprouting from their ears. they were also profoundly unhelpful. things were not looking good.

yesterday, i went to a store that's literally around the corner from our house that we call "pants only" (because that's what their awning proclaims) but in reality is called lb uomo. i walk in and talk to a nice, friendly, stylish man named ashraf who's beyond helpful. the only day the dotytron has off is today (sunday) and even though the store isn't open on sundays, ashraf is nice enough to tell me to call him this morning and he'll open up for us (he lives above the store, but still). so i took the dotytron there and wow. the dotytron HATES shopping. this store is possibly the BEST possible place for him. he hates places with fawning, tit-faced 16 year old girls, snapping gum, vapidly nodding their heads at everything he tries on, and relying on a vocabulary of superlatives that consist of "hot" or "awesome". ashraf was SO NICE and so on his game, and so chill. he was completely sympathetic, very professional and straightforward and polite and warm. he didn't try to up-sell us at all. when i mentioned that at some point the dotytron will probably need a new suit, ashraf just said, "sure, when you're ready, come in and we'll find something for you" when you know that if you were at moore's or someplace, those guys would have seized on that statement like sharks on chum. we brought with us some sweaters and a sport coat that the dotytron already owned, and ashraf recommended a plain white shirt, saying that it goes with everything (again, not trying to up-sell us on a different shirt for everything) and suggested various outfit and style suggestions. it was such a pleasant experience. the store has nice stuff, reasonably priced and the dotytron bought a nice sweater, a shirt, a tie, and two pairs of pants which were EXACTLY what we were looking for (cut like jeans, jean material, but NOT denim). perfect! i LOVE my neighbourhood and i love supporting businesses on the danforth run by good people like that. yay!

last night was the bomb. not only did me, the dotytron and dr. rei sort out our italy trip (three little bears, say what!), we had the most hi-larious conversation which again, i don't remember any of. there were some choice lines about how the dotytron turned out so awesome mostly because of the movie ghostbusters, "the movie pi has done more to mess up the concept of math for stupid people than anything else ever" (me), and dr. rei's repeated (tautological) defense of the western canon: "i don't care about art i don't know about in africa" the dotytron: "the problem with you two [dr. rei and myself], is that you don't like things where you have to give yourself over to them" me: "i give myself over to foucault"; we also spent time bashing the social sciences; quantitative, positivist methodologies, and marshall mcluhan (of course) - "the medium is THE MESSAGE? seriously?!?" we also talked about stockhausen, automatic painting and guerrilla poetry (which we all agree is self-indulgent crap), and how the breakfast club sucks (me and dr. rei) and how lloyd dobbler is a colossal loser with no prospects (me and dr. rei).

i honestly think the three of us (and bwong) should teach a grad school course. or at least that we should be recording these convos for posterity...we can never remember the choice lines that make us laugh for ten billion years after.

breakfast this morning was babka french toast with bob evans sausage. i used really bittersweet chocolate in the babka, so the french toast was surprisingly unsweet. syrup doesn't really go with it...i think next time i'd top it with toffee sauce or sweetened whipped cream.

finally, heart is the best female band ever. joan jett? please. chrissie hynde? please. heart has a serious legacy of ace tunes. from the galloping chug of "barracuda" to the soaring snarl of "crazy on you" to the 80s fantastic mysticism that is "these dreams". so, so wicked.



fin.

p.s.

as i re-watch that jesus jones video, i'm struck by how i'm oddly attracted to the lead singer, as he seems to possess those slightly skid-ish, seedy, suburban-white boy qualities that i tend to be a sucker for. i'm also having vague recollections of having a crush on him when i was 11, watching this video. so maybe from the start i was doomed to be with a guitar-playing, rangy, string-bean physiqued, vaguely ridiculous, so-cal laid back homie?!?!?

fin.

peep this

now, this video is striking for a few different reasons. 1) the song ain't half bad. 2) the lead singer bears a striking resemblance to the form and figure of the dotytron 3) the lead singer is also rockin' the style that i wish for the dotytron above all else. basically, the dude is wearing head-to-toe vision streetwear, a state of being that the dotytron covets like no other. i would probably pay $1000 for that hat alone. can you imagine how slick the dotytron would look? and it's so fitting! he's such a so-cal skater at heart. his life is like one long extended version of that scene in gleaming the cube where that pizza hut truck crests the hill and is shown in stark silhouette against the setting sun with a bunch of rag-tag skaters attached to it.

in other news, i managed to stick my foot in my mouth BIGTIME last night in the ride over to the restaurant. the dotytron got an interview at york for teacher's college (yay! i'm so proud of him! - this has earned him one week's respite from my incessant carping -) and we're trying to figure out what he should wear. a full suit seems a bit much, so i'm advocating for a sweater/slacks combo. the problem is, he doesn't have any pants that aren't jeans. so, i went around yesterday looking for men's pants that aren't jeans that are casual, and there's NOTHING. i commented on this fact in the car, and the dotytron's sister said, "sure there are. cords!" at which point i said, "umm...i can't respect a man in cords" at which point, the dotytron pater pipes up, "hey! i'm wearing cords!!!" this pretty much happens EVERY time i'm hanging with the dotytrons. i obviously didn't mean DADS. i meant any dude who i have biblical knowledge of. i can't deal with cords. they just seem teh lamez0rz to me.

today is a day of homework. ugh. but tonight i'm making a special valentine's meal for my boyfriend, dr. rei. and my other boyfriend, the dotytron. and the roomie. my favorite people! we're having pan-seared rib eye steaks with hollandaise (!!!!!!), frites, creamed spinach, and chocolate souffle with whiskey toffee sauce. it's the classic steak-house meal. i can't wait!

roomie-lagerfeld relations have improved substantially and have returned to normal love-in stasis. she's stopped messing around with this douche, which has eased me considerably. i'm not the kind of person who deals well with other people's poor relationship choices. it festers. and i'm ALSO not the kind of person who can deal with festering in silence...i'm kind of too honest for that so it comes out. it would be one thing if she would just acknowledge the a**holey nature and be done with it - that i can accept. i couldn't accept defending the person in question. and it was exacerbated by the fact that the person in question needed to be taken down a peg or two. but now everything is fine. i just needed to get it off my chest and we had an honest talk about things and the air was cleared. i'm a big fan of air-clearing. problems tend to arise for me when i feel like i can't be who i am and i have to suffocate myself under a veil of propriety and politeness.

fin.

sweater stories

so i'm knitting this sweater for myself. it's two things: my first BIG project, as well as my first project in a while that's for ME. i didn't get as far as i wanted to last night on it, because i ended up having to work backwards and undo a small hole that i had made by accidentally doing a yarn-over.

all this technical jargon basically means that i had to rip the project back a few rows and so i ended up working backwards instead of forwards. i'm about halfway done the back, and it only took me a week of VERY intermittent knitting, so i figure i have like 4 more weeks of the project to go? the yarn is lovely though...i'm obsessed with it.

today i'm working, then coming home, and at some point finishing my lecture stuff for my advocacy class this week (which i HATE). yesterday was the dotytron's sister's birthday, so we're going to some italian restaurant in yorkville, called spuntini. they seem to have one of those pan-italian, overly verbose menus with words like "splashed" liberally sprinkled throughout the descriptions. i generally dislike that kind of breathiness in my menu writing. i prefer a more terse, laundry-list of the main ingredients with simple connectors, ie. "served WITH mixed greens" versus "served on A BED of mixed greens". they also serve a caprese salad in the winter, and there's a vodka sauce on there somewhere, both of which tend to make me highly suspect. i'll post a review tomorrow...possibly with pictures!

fin.

gung hay fat choy!

happy year of the rat, F**KERS! i celebrated by waking up, working a long day, going to the government documents library for three hours after work, and sitting down to a very un-chinese dinner of beef and mushroom pie (although the sublime flakiness of my crust this time bespeaks of much auspiciousness in the year to come) at 9pm. what i SHOULD have been doing is eating the delicious chinese meal that my grandma rustles together every chinese new year's eve, involving all kinds of metaphor-laden, phonetically-prominent foods that herald wealth and happiness and health for the year to come. usually, we also troop down to my grandparents living room, where they have pictures of my grandpa's mater and pater displayed, and we offer them food and then bow three times to show respect for our mighty ancestors, without whom we wouldn't be rejoicing in a life of western idyll. i would also be collecting mad coin, as my continued spinster state (co-habitation does not a legally binding marriage contract make!) means that i can still be the recipient of lucky money from married people. this didn't stop my grandma from asking me pointedly if this year (the year of the rat) was going to be the year that i get married. i think once i graduate, i can start thinking about it. i'm sure i can throw SOMETHING together, if only to make grandmere happy. little does she know the spectacle that awaits!!!

part of my life's work involves driving the dotytron crazy. it's a slow, arduous process of constant adjustment and refinement. one thing that drives him crazy is the fact that the ACTUAL lyric to the theme from frasier is "TOSSED salad and scrambled eggs". the other thing that drives him crazy is that he knows full well that when i hear vocal jazz, what i supplant it with in my head is the theme from frasier. it drives him NUTS. he thinks i'm besmirching the whole genre. i probably am, but is it MY fault that the genre of vocal jazz lends itself to my muddled and muddied pop cultural associations? no.

shouts out to ms. s. green who saved me an additional 10 hours of work today. that's all that needs to be said, but know that i appreciate it. to the spirit of collaboration!

i think i'm going to take the night off tonight and watch my taped episode of project runway and knit.

fin.