Elegant Zucchini Leek Soup

Elegant Zucchini Leek Soup

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Elegant Zucchini Leek soup

  • 1 large or 2 small leeks
  • 3 zucchini
  • 7 cups of light vegetable or chicken broth
  • 3 cloves of garlic, or to taste
  • handful of fresh dill
  • 1 cup of milk
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • olive oil

In a large sauce pan, sautee leeks, zucchini and garlic in olive oil until soft. Add dill and sautee until limp. Add broth, bring to a noil, and simmer for15-20 minutes.

Let soup cool. Run though a blender until smooth but not textureless.

Serve hot or cold.

Blog Comments

Blog Comments

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Just added blog comments via enetation. V. nice, I’m most impressed. Very sexy looking. I haven’t had blog comments since dot comments went down, and I must say I like these better.

Thinking of alternative uses for them as we speak…

Sweet Potato and Coconut Cream Soup

Sweet Potato and Coconut Cream Soup

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Sweet Potato and Coconut Cream Soup
This may or may not be the recipe for the Sweet Potato, spinach, and coconut cream soup I love so much at the Carden St. Café in Guelph. I shall have to test it and find out.

Ingredients
15ml/1tbsp groundnut oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped finely
1 garlic clove, crushed
1.25cm piece fresh ginger, peeled
675g/1lb sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
15ml/1tbsp lemon grass, chopped
600ml/1pt vegetable stock
600ml/1pt coconut cream
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 limes, zest and juice

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and gently fry the onion, garlic and ginger for about 5 minutes until tender. Add the sweet potatoes and lemongrass and cook for a further 3 minutes.
2. Add the stock and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes until the vegetables are tender.
3. Cool the soup slightly, then liquidise with half of the coconut cream and process until smooth.
4. Return the soup to the saucepan, add the remaining coconut cream. Season with salt and pepper. Heat through without allowing the soup to boil, and add the lime juice.
5. Ladle the soup into bowls and garnish with the lime zest.

Learning how to Write

Learning how to Write

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Rhonna sent me some books. She is a goddess of all things literary. I am reading these books. I am get much out of these books.

Really what I want to do is sit down and talk to her about this, but she is busy and offline, so I will sit here on a little soap box and bore you with thoughts on writing.

Jerome Stern says,

“Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. When people communicate, they communicate with their faces, their bodies, their timing, and the objects around them. Make this a full conversation. Not just the words part.

How wise. And so right, of course. I was thinking about this in terms of my own writing.

I have been historically very bad with dialogue, and I know it. In my past (10 years ago) I wrote dialogue that wasn’t incorrect, per se, but just didn’t feel right. So when I started up again recently, I decided to just go very very easy on the dialogue. I use it very sparingly now, and cut it out where possible.

But I was thinking about this comment, about the fact that it’s not just about what’s in quotation marks, and I realized that I had done something sort of odd. Well, odd for me, I think. Without realizing.

Lately, I’ve done dialogue parts, that simply HAVE to be dialogue parts, and I notice that when things get more dramatic, and scary, and really delicate, I sometimes start to drop away everything but the dialogue. So like, I’ll start with one sentence of dialogue, and then a paragraph of thoughts or fiddling or whatever, and then another line of dialogue. Very very spaced out, as if it takes forever. But in some scenes, where the place is set, and the characters are, you know, quite far along in the development, so that we know what they’re thinking even without me saying so…I kind of let them drift off.

Like. I have one set of dialogue that takes place at the very very end of a story, where there’s been all this behind the eyes things that no one ever says, with this whole dance of ‘everything is totally normal and we have no trust problems here’, and suddenly at the end, one of the characters asks the ‘elephant in the middle of the room’ question. And the scene has been going on for some time, it’s on, like, page 5 or 6 of it. And I just stop describing. Suddenly it’s just all words, I don’t even interject with who’s speaking, though it’s pretty clear who is, thankfully. Like, you’ve been waiting to hear these words from those mouths for 18 chapters and now here it is.

It’s like…

There comes a point where I, as the third person narrator, just stepped back to let these characters express what they’ve been thinking about and muddling over the whole time, and there’s this stillness abou that. As if, and I guess this is the point, in a conversation like this, there is nothing else that’s important, nothing else significant. The body, the physical world just kind of disappears for a moment and this sort of…quiet conversation is all there is.

I know you can’t do this a lot. Like. Probably best to do it almost never. But I really like the end of that story. I think it’s quite effective, particularly since I am so heavily descriptive most of the time.

Well, I guess I could add lots of description in there. Maybe it would be improved by that. But there’s something about the zeroing in, the quietness of it, that I really like. It gives that last bit of dialogue this incredible weight, I think. Kind of hanging in the middle of nowhere kind of weight. But also a kind of lightness, like the slightest move might make it float away, or shatter, or disintegrate.

Hmmm.

What I love best about rules for writing is how sometimes breaking them is the fun part.

Pregnant Sister Watch

Pregnant Sister Watch

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Well, still no baby. But. They are planning to induce my sister tomorrow, and I’m going to go over there and look after Lucy, their lovely little liquid cat. And, like, give out information, I assume, cause, I would be calling a lot if I heard that my sis was in the hospital.

She sounds scared. Well, it’s scary, isn’t it? But my nephew seems to be just fine. They did an ultrasound and he was sucking his thumb, they did a stress test and they say he’s happy.

He’s already a happy baby!

There are so many worries with a late birth, and inducing, but I’m quite sure everything is fine. They just keep warning. I think needlessly, really. Little guy is just having a bit of a lie down before proceeding forth.

One more day.

Strange Dreams

Strange Dreams

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J. gave me a sleeping pill last night. No idea why I took it, but I did. And I had the strangest dream. I was in Toronto, doing something or other, and I looked out the window and saw that one row, lengthwise, of balconies had just fallen off one of the apartment buildings in St. James town. Now, you have to understand taht St. James town is an urban experiment that failed; there are fourteen or fifteen apartment buildings in there, which spans only one square block, and each of these is about twenty-five to thirty storeys high. It used to be the hip place to live if you were young and hip, but now it’s just the first stop off for people who just got off th boat from wherever. The landlords are rude and don’t bother being helpful, either. It’s really just an exercise in immigrant abuse if you ask me, not that anyone actually does.

So. In the dream, the rickety metal balconies careen to the ground. For a second I wonder if I should get out of my building. I am, after all, just across the street. I decide not to. I’m in the middle of something (a conversation? I don’t remember). The next time I look, the entire building has been demolished, just like that. There’s dust everywhere. Now I’m still wondering. Should I go downstairs now? (Keep in mind that I live on the 26th floor.) I still don’t.

And then, while I’m watching, the building directly in front of me leans toward me, the corner touches the building and I feel it rumble. Now I’m running into the hallway but I can still see that building leaning over and collapsing. Soon, all of St. James Town is just a mess of rubble and dust. I’m appalled, and scared about what’s going to happen when I get downstairs.

I’m home and I’m almost famous. I survived this bombing, or whatever it was. I drive with my dad down Wellseley, which leads up to St. James Town, and he doesn’t really believe me. “It’s gone, I’m telling you,” I say, pointing at the sky line, where there is this tremendous break. “Yes, yes, so it is!” he says.

When I did finally leave my apartment, I took only two things; my favourite blanket (which my grandmother brought back from West Germany, when there was such a thing), and my plush Snoopy. I didn’t bring my computer, or anything else. I felt good about this. Why, I would get a beautiful new computer, I am insured, after all. I would get new furniture, new clothes, new everything. I am strangely pleased.

I have this excuse now, and people feel sorry for me. “Oh, my. You survived that?”

I try to get a job based on that. I feel confident that it will work.

Curried Honey Chicken

Curried Honey Chicken

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Curried Honey Chicken (via my friend J.)
Ingredients:
1/4-1/3 cup butter
2-3 tbsp honey
3-4 tbsp mustard
1 tsp curry powder
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (I’ve been getting the thai cut, and I recommend that at this point)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Melt butter. Add honey, mustard, and curry powder and blend well. Put chicken in a shallow pan. I’ve been getting the disposable biscuit pans, because the mustard/curry thing does a number on your pans. That and biscuit pans are nice and small. Pour mixture over chicken so that it’s well covered. Put in oven. Walk away.

After about 40 minutes, come back and make some rice. (Hildegarde method: 1 cup of basmati, 1 1/2 cups of water in a corning ware dish. Pop it in the microwave. Set time to 12 minutes, power level 6. Go away until it beeps.) When your rice is done, pull out chicken.

Put rice on a plate. Put chicken on top of it. Yum.

Thoughts on my unborn niece/nephew

Thoughts on my unborn niece/nephew

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I had a dream that my sister went into labour. We were at a party, and everyone was doing other things, so I took my sister to the hospital. I don’t drive, so we walked. We walked along a kind of nineteenth century dusty road in the deep south. And I swear, you could SEE the baby moving in there, turning around and such. Her water hadn’t broken though, and when we got to the hospital they said she wasn’t really in labour at all.

But when I woke up, I thought that I should write a few words to my soon-to-be-forthcoming nephew/niece:

1) You are much anticipated.
2) We are expecting you to be a boy, but I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we will be most surprised, pleased, and wildly amused if you turn out to be a girl. Because everyone has agonized for so long over your name, assuming you’ll be a boy.
3) Last I heard, they were settled on Max.
4) I would have gone with ‘Elijah’, so be glad I’m not your mom.
5) I already love you. This must be a biological thing, even for aunties like me.
6) If you ever need anything, really, like, a place to stay, or some random adult to talk to, or a little cash (if I have any!), help with your homework, advice, someone to bitch at, a book to read, a movie to zone out in front of, a meal, a place to hang out, a gift for your mother, tickets to a hockey game, a stiff drink, you know, anything, you know where to find me.
7) Do you have any idea what an insane family you’re coming into? What an insane world you’re coming into?
8) Looking forward to getting to know you. I bet you’re going to be cool. I wonder if you’ll be artistic like your mom. It’s okay if you’re not, cause, like, I’m not either.
9) I wonder if you’ll turn out like you’re auntie. Hehehhee. If so, you know I have your back.
10) I’m glad you’re growing up in Guelph. Guelph’s a great place, and I guess you’ll be a Waverly kid. Nothing wrong with that. Foursquares is a fun game.

See you soon!

Religion, Politics, and War

Religion, Politics, and War

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Rex Murphy is trying to work out how much religion is involved in conflicts in the world, given the rising tensions in the middle east. I am completely confused by all of this, the events blur together for me. There is always violence, and I have a hard time remember whose side I’m supposed to be on.

I am very sympathetic toward Israel. Israel is the tragic hero of a beautiful story: gathered together and freed by God, settled with a growing series of rituals for communicating with God, the long, slow process from nomadic to settled; the history of relations with other nations, deciding on what is and is not problematic for them, their God, their lives. Their very literary decisions about justice; when the Levites lost their land, they were given, in return, the sole right to be religious men. Landownership for religious priviledge. The constant tension between the tribes, their political movements, siding with Judah, siding with Israel. Israel’s ability to sway smaller tribes, the debate about the golden calf. They have this beautiful unity and complete multiplicity, growing from roots unrelated to place and the present, yet always shifting in the tides of current events and very basic needs.

The destruction of the temple, the fall of Israel, the fall of Judah. The shocking disappearance of the contents of the Temple, the silence of the documents. (What did they do with the ten commandments? Did they break them, burn them, dance on them? Did they secret them away, bury them? Grind them down into nothing, use them to make mortar? slip them into the walls of a whorehouse?) The dispersion, the inability of these people to gather themselves back together. The tragedy of that loss: when you believe that the Temple is the seat of God, that the temple is your ear horn, through which you can just barely hear your beloved, and when your enemy arrives and destroys it, you can never find another, there is no other. You cannot hear your beloved anymore, and you are blind. You can only observe one another, sliently, without touching, just hoping that you are both still there, both still waiting. A Muslim dome is built over the site of the holy of holies, the single most sacred spot for Jews, a place that no one was allowed to see.

Another thousand years of persecution.Jews were not allowed to own property in Europe, and were expected to take care of morally problematic elements of society, in particular, money. (Money, banking, and charging interest is highly problematic in Catholicism.) When the plague hit one town in Italy, the government’s first response was to kill all the Jews, assuming they were poisoning the wells. They were driven out of most European countries at one time or another; they were constantly pressured to convert, and when they did they would still be forced to wear a plackard that said ‘I am a dirty Jew’ and walk through the streets. There was the Holocaust, which was just another atrocity. Throughout the whole time, the Jews mantained communities, languages, and a sense of self-identity.

I am sympathetic to the Jews, but I realize that the modern state of Israel has not behaved well. They have made a conscious effort to rewrite history; they have evicted Palestinians from entire villages and then set it up as a ‘recreated Jewish village’ and charged admission from tourists. They have made laws about historical Jewish buildings while demolishing Christian and Muslim holy sites. They want to purge their territory of peoplpe who do not allow them to recreate a long-forgotten Jewish state. Israel is far from innocent.

I know very little about these recent events, but they frighten me. Rex Murphy is talking on the radio right now about separating religion and politics and I can’t see it through. I don’t know how to understand the state of Israel without religion. I can’t imagine what the answer is to all of this drama.

People call in and say, “can’t we all just get along?”

The Technology of Knowing

The Technology of Knowing

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Isilya: I don’t feel like I know a person unless I’ve read their lj now… how did relationships ever exist pre lj?

Well. Yeah. I mean, now you can go through someone’s dayplanner/diary/personal correspondence before you even hook up with them. Before you even consider, seriously or otherwise, hooking up with them. Someone you meet in real life or across distances. Now, here’s the question: for a blogger, for someone who’s used to blogging, and reading blogs, and getting to know people who blog, and all of that…for those of us who do, do you ever really trust a person who’s unwilling to blog? Someone who won’t, for some reason? And I know we understand that some things are too personal to blog, but is there a part of you that wonders about it? A part of you that says, well. So what is it, then? Who are you, really? I mean, where would we be without details like this:

When I was two, I renamed myself Little Bunny Chicken Feather, and refused to answer to anything else for the next six months.

Otherwise, the only way you learn about the Little Bunny Chicken Feather story is at Thanksgiving five years later when your honey’s mother makes a sly comment about it, and everyone but you laughs. Yes, that’s a traditional way to find out about these little stories. But isn’t there something nice about the idea that you would also be laughing with the family? And then on the way home in the car you can casually drape your arm over the back of the seat and say, “Well, Little Bunny Chicken Feather. That was quite an evening, wasn’t it.”

Or the things that the family doesn’t usually know about:

Last night, I dreamed that I had a tricycle. It was big, and red, and newly old-fashioned. It was shiny and beautiful, but it was too small for me. When I would ride it around town, my knees would knock against the handlebars.

I didn’t want to let it go, but what I really needed was a bike.
I rode my tricycle to a trike and bike exchange. They had one bike there, older and blue and a bit rusty. I offered to trade my tricycle for it.

The shop owner said no, that she needed no tricycles. She said that she would sell me the bike.

I was upset. I emphasised how nice and new my tricycle was. I demonstrated how it changed into a milk truck in only a few easy steps.

She was not impressed. The bicycle could be converted into a fire truck.

Do you feel better knowing these things? Do you gain something from it? I love dreams. I know lots of people who hate to hear about them. I’ll never understand that. I think dreaming is very interesting. This may because a) I am a lucid dreamer, and b) I dream in plot. I think dreams say quite a lot about us, but I’m not sure what they’re saying. Granted. But I still like to know about them. If nothing else, they are filled with massive amounts of detail. Dreams ARE detail. And I am fetishistic about details.

I have friends who rant best on their blogs. Well, they rant best everywhere, most of the time, but their blog rants are wonderful and logged/preserved/noted down and handoutable as a url.

Listen, I’m not a passive observer. I read the writing on the fucking walls. I spend most of my time watching, analysing. Many years of internet addiction means that I even conceptualise in text.

So I notice the tags, I notice the signs.

The city is talking. It tells me to “Keep (my mind) Clear”, it tells me to “Shut up and Shop” and it tells me in tiny letters on the back of the underground toilets that “Meat is Murder” and “Hell is a state in America.”

This *is* dialogue…

…Or perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps my tutors are right. Perhaps the city is some infernal monologuist, and every dawn is herald to open mic day on the old concrete soap box. It’s a cohesive, many-authored monologue, though. There’s a thousand script writers standing behind the scenes, awaiting a pedestrian applause.

Is this good to know? Yes. Yes, it’s good to know that a blog is a place to get a point a across and show me, yet again, why I’m choosing to co-write with you. Indeed. And I’m a believer in the dialogue. Did I mention that I saw a perfectly dressed, rational-looking woman having a terribly amusing conversation with a concrete wall while waiting for the streetcar? Yes, I think it’s a dialogue, Lib.

How does one look rational, anyway?

have been ripped up from the inside out. have been sewn back together wrong. cannot find elements within me that used to be there. cannot rid my head of one verse of a song. sleep crawls ever further away on bruised knees.

Is blogging just a form of accidental poetry?

My Sister’s Book Cover

My Sister’s Book Cover

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My sister’s book! Yes, she illustrated this cover. Isn’t it nice? She hates that skateboard boy, but likes the skirt on the girl. I have an autographed copy, of course. 🙂

My sister rocks the universe.

Lecture for Jason’s Class

Lecture for Jason’s Class

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I’d like to thank Jason for letting me come in and ramble on to his class. It was a great time. I spend some time gathering up my notes on the topic (the medieval and early modern garden), and when I did a little minor run through myself it was awful. But once I got there it all made so much more sense. I looked at my notes a couple of times, but mostly it just followed one from another, the topics. I hope it all made sense. The class was great, they asked really interesting questions, and laughed at my silly jokes. It was great fun all around and I’m sorry I won’t get a chance to do it again, since the class is no more. Sad.

It’s Over: I’m a Dropout

It’s Over: I’m a Dropout

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I haven’t been meaning to ignore my blog. No, most certainly I haven’t. I must admit that I’ve been sucked into writing some stuff that I’m not sure how to talk about on here. But I’ll get around to it eventually.

Thing to note #1: I have dropped out of school. Yes, you read right. Rochelle has DROPPED out of school. I’m happy about it, but I need to find a job. If you know of anything, feel free to mail me. Other than that…Christmas was Christmas, and that was much…uh….fun. right. 🙂 More on that later, I’m sure.

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

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Let me tell you all about it. First: I didn’t sleep until about 4am. After that, actually. Don’t know why, bad rhythms or something. And then I got up at 8:45 or so, because I needed to meet emma at yonge and eglinton at 10am. Bah. 10am! Why so early? I was following her to work from there (I’d get lost trying to find the actual place, and hell, I got lost trying to find the damn starbucks) where we got a lifft at noon, to go see Lord of the Rings at 1pm up at Yorkdale. So off we go, with a group from her work.

So we get to the movie. It has about 15 years of previews, of course. And then it starts. Spoilers? Well, if you don’t want to know, don’t read this. But I don’t think anything I can say will surprise you. It starts with a sequence narrated by Cate Blanchett. That sequence explains the history of the ring. Which does kind of spoil the surprise of finding out when Frodo does, but it probably helps people who don’t know anything about the Lord of the Rings (who are those people?). The sequences with Sauron are BEAUTIFUL. He does stuff that isn’t in the book precisely, but makes perfect sense. We see the war 3000 years before, when Aragorn’s ancestor cuts the ring from Sauron’s hand. We see it being found. We see Bilbo stumbling on it in the dark. And the movie then starts with the party, just as it should. And Bilbo gives his speak just as he should. Perfect.

I wondered about Elijah Wood as Frodo, but in the film I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He really is beautiful, and such a perfect Frodo. His eyes….he gives off this sense of innocence that really works as Frodo. Sean Austin does a great job as Sam. (I was a bit surprised, though, because everyone kept calling him Sam GAM gee, like, aw, gee, GEE. I always said it myself with a hard G. But I know they’re probably right on all that stuff. Don’t know why that never occured to me before.) he’s a great sam, but my shock at how good Frodo was kind of overshadowed him. Merry and Pippin are hilarious. Pippin has an outrageous Scottish accent which works perfectly with the film. They’re lovely, though they’re really buffoonish. They added a scene where Boromir teaches the two of them to fight, and accidentally hits Pippin, and then Merry and Pippin both start wrestling him to the ground for it. That was cute. We don’t get to see them as schemers, though. They accidentally end up on this little mission.

They took out the songs, except one:

The road goes ever on and on
Down from the road where it began
Now far ahead the road has gone
And I must follow, if I can
Persuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And wither then? I cannot say.

The scenes are Bree as lovely. Aragorn is perfect; not what I imagined, but perfectly great. He’s tall and wiry, not bulky or needlessly good looking. They took out Tom Bombadil. Weathertop was really cool, but I wasn’t sure about their details. I had thought there were 6 who attacked on Weathertop, and I thought Frodo got a good slash in there. Frodo is far more ill after getting stabbed than he is in the book. Liv Tyler as Arwen is lovely, articulate, wonderful. I love that they beefed up her role, they really delved into the appendixes and brought out a side of Aragorn and her that we don’t see in the book, which I think is called for. It will make us more interested in book three, for sure.

Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel is lovely. They make her beautiful, wise, and terrible all at once. We understand that she is good, if there is such a thing as good, but she is also frightening, dangerous. I love that. Lovely, wonderful job.

Elrond is terrifying-looking. Very stern and serious. At first I wondered about this, but it’s bang on. Elves aren’t flitty little things, they’re solid and serious, though light and beautiful. Legolas was stunning. He was incredible, honestly. I never paid much attention to him before, but he was really wonderful in the film. They did good work on bringing out the conflicts between the races; Elrond comes off being blatantly and understandibly racist against men, which we understand, after his experiences in war with men. And this is true; he doesn’t want his daughter (Arwen) getting involved with a man. And we have Gimli being racist against elves, which of course makes sense. Gimli is beautiful as a dwarf, but his character doesn’t get as much development as we’d like. Hell, it’s only a 3 hour movie. But he looks great, and acts great. We just want to see more.

Gandalf of course is great. They added a lot of material here that is only referred to in the book; his confrontation with Sarumann..the niggling feeling that Sarumann isn’t just a traitor, but an attempted usurper. The orcs are fabulous. The white hand of Sarumann on their faces is spectacular. Gandalf: he comes across as more kindly in the movie than he does in the book. The first book, at least. There are a few FABULOUS scenes of Gandalf stuck up on the tower at Isengaard, left to died, tortured by Sarumann, and you can see all around him the Orcs pulling down the trees. (Foreshadowing my friend Treebeard!) Those scenes were perfect and beautiful to watch, I just shook my head and whispered ‘yessssss’ when I saw them.

It ends just when it should, though they made Frodo’s departure approved instead of unknown to Aragorn. Don’t know how I feel about that.

All in all…I loved it. Someone said that if Harry Potter was a 10/10, Lord of the Rings is a 20/10. I agree that it’s good, but Harry Potter is actually closer to it’s book than Lord of the Rings is. there are few plot diversions in Harry, but not as many. Granted, Fellowship had a lot more material to shove in. I loved Lord of the Rings. But I’ll probably see Harry more times. Don’t know why. Harry is easier to watch; Lord of the Rings made me cry. Twice. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Go see it. It’s worth it, even for the extravagant cost of movies these days.

Miso Soup for One

Miso Soup for One

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Miso Soup for One
Ingredients:
-two green onions, or three or four thin slices of white or red onion
-two or three mushrooms, sliced into strips (bite size!)
-olive oil
-one or two slices of bacon, precooked (you can buy it that way, thank god)
-two to three cups of water
-snowpeas, chopped (again with the bite sized)
-spinach (get a bag, you’ll want to do this again.)
-miso (So far I’ve tried yellow and white, both are good.)

Directions:
-throw your onions and mushrooms into a saucepan with a drop or two of olive oil. You know, just to make sure nothing burns. Sautee them over medium to lowish heat.
-when that smells sort of doneish (What? You wanted precise language? Phsaw.), throw in the pre-cooked bacon. It’s already cooked, after all. But let it get it’s groove on in there for a while. Stir a lot.
-Add water. Turn the heat up toward high, we’re aiming for a boil here. Throw in the snowpeas, and rip up your spinach. Try to keep as many stems out of there as possible. Fill up the rest of the pot with spinach until you think the lid might not fit on anymore. Press the spinach down a bit. See? The lid will still fit on. Put the lid on. Go watch tv for a bit, maybe 10 minutes tops.
-take off the lid. Wow! Look how little spinach that actually was. Cool. Now, turn the heat off. Stir it around a bit. Take out your miso. Put a tablespoon of miso in there, and maybe another half a tablespoon, another whole tablespoon if you’re like me and really like your miso. It might stick to the spoon, but swoosh it around in the water to get it off. Stir. Put the lid on again.
-pop a bagel in the toaster. When it pops up, put a little ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ on it. Slice the bagel slices. Put them on a pretty plate. Have another look at your soup. Stir it again. Doesn’t it smell nice? Pour it into a bowl, and grab a spoon.
-remember to thank me.

Dreaming

Dreaming

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I’ve been dreaming again. Not that this is necessarily new. I’m always dreaming, right? But not these dreams. These are familiar dreams, but taking new forms. I’m not a victim in them anymore, and the outcome isn’t clear. When you get past the point of knowing exactly what you want (since, that is a bit of a phase, isn’t it?), the dream has no real goal anymore, not in the same way. Now the dream is a bunch of stopping and starting, random miscue conversation, big skies. For some reason the sky is always particularly arched in these dreams, as if the whole world is condensed into them. The world is less round, and taller, I’m hemmed in by mountains, I can only decend into this world in an airplane. So I’m standing there, head filled with the space I have to grow into, mountains curving toward me, angled precariously by the edge of my lenses, and the conversation continues. It goes it circles. I’m bitter and annoyed but mostly it’s a front, because I’m not really used to feeling anything else toward you at the moment. And you are just human. Nothing else. You don’t even have the power to be mean or frightening or even kind in the dreams anymore. You’re a lump of meatspace, like every other lump of meatspace, and I’m not sure how acknowledge my understanding of that. Is it that I’m prepared to forgive you? Is it that I want to? (Do I?) I don’t know.

I’ve run out of shampoo. Can you believe that? I used to have 1500 bottles of shampoo lying around because I get so bored of the smell of whatever I’m using. Now I’m down to the dregs of two different shampoos, and it’s highly unsatisfactory. Yesterday I accidentally tried to wash my hair with conditioner. (When will these people understand that the blind need differently shaped bottles in order to avoid that mistake?)