While waiting for my gel to run, I found this website: http://readymade.com/

Then someone posted something interesting called A Week Without Processed Foods (http://www.readymade.com/blogs/readymade/2009/08/10/a-week-without-processed-foods ). This seems like a brilliant concept, afterall, it fits in nicely with all our ‘Save the Earth’ and ‘Be better people’ kind of mantras. P and I have also talked about eating less processed foods, and would like to make it into a personal habit. But doing it isn’t easy because basically everything IS processed these days, from bread to cereals. The aforementioned post has some classifications for herself to define which foods are considered ‘processed’:

“For me it’s any food product with ingredients that don’t reasonably belong in it (i.e. not an ingredient I would use if making the equivalent from scratch).”

“Unprocessed foods would be items which look as they did in nature: apples, eggs, fruits, fish…”

“I scale it on number of ingredients (preservatives, food colorings) and processes used to get to the end product. Could it be recreated from scratch in my kitchen with supplies from a standard grocer? If not, it’s probably incredibly processed.”

“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” “

Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.”

Today, for instance, I had Nutella on wholemeal bread for breakfast, a mushroom omelette with fries for lunch (vegetarian! yet not super healthy), and some varieties of ice-cream for tea. Already, there’s nothing natural about my breakfast, the mushroom in my omelette probably came from a can, and FRIES, gosh! Let’s not mention the amount of white refined processed sugar inside the delectable ice-cream. Yum. I guess ‘unprocessed’ foods would mean home-cooked, unless you’re cooking with stuff from a can, like pasta sauce. Which brings to mind the food my parents always cook. Sure, they’re crazy healthy – vegetables stir-fried with WATER, if can anyone top that, I salute you. Last night’s lecture on Sustainability also brought to my attention ‘needs and wants of yesterday vs today’. Sure, we CAN eat rice and tapioca, and walk 10 miles to the watering hole, and poop in the jungle. But the thing about progress is to NOT poop in the jungle, or have girls peep into boys-only classrooms just to learn the alphabet. How do we maintain a sustainable, eco-friendly, healthy lifestyle today, and yet not subject ourselves to the physical/mental constraints of yesterday? Suggestions? I will probably try eating unprocessed foods for abit, and chart my progress, if it works!

So I turn on the telly, and it’s Elton John’s Birthday concert! What a treat!
I have an obsession with Elton John/Bernie Taupin (the songs, mind you) years ago. The lyrics, the melodies. Songs in those days were all about the story-telling. While Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan sings of the blues and the American Life, Elton sings, well, also about that but in his own almost-hopeful way. Some of the songs are pretty trippy too!

‘Lately I’ve been thinking how much I miss my lady
Amoreena’s in the cornfield brightening the daybreak
Living like a lusty flower, running through the grass for hours
Rolling through the hay like a puppy child

And when it rains the rain falls down
Washing out the cattle town
And she’s far away somewhere in her eiderdown
And she dreams of crystal streams
Of days gone by when we would lean
Laughing fit to burst upon each other

I can see you sitting eating apples in the evening
The fruit juice flowing slowly, slowly, slowly
Down the bronze of your body
Living like a lusty flower, running through the grass for hours
Rolling through the hay like a puppy child
Oh if only I could nestle in the cradle of your cabin
My arms around your shoulders, the windows wide and open
While the swallow and the sycamore are playing in the valley
Oh I miss you Amoreena like a king bee misses honey
Lately I’ve been thinking how much I miss my lady
Amoreena’s in the cornfield brightening the daybreak
Living like a lusty flower, running through the grass for hours
Rolling through the hay like a puppy child’

– Amoreena, The Tumbleweed Collection

Reading ‘A Whole Lotta Nothing‘ awhile ago, and this post made me wonder about things in the past that I would like to remember. I think it was nice back then, when we weren’t so dependent on technology. Things were slower, and we always felt that we were smarter than the machines.

I remember the library in secondary school. I was always there after school, indulging in my fantasies of being the in world with Anne of Green Gables, dreaming over lush Gilbert Blythe. I watched the tape in the library a couple of times. And used the internet access there.

Circa 1996. There was a time when internet required dial-up and you’d sit at the computer reading a magazine while a loud ringtone connects you to the Internet.

Geocities, Area 51 is my ‘hood. I write X-Files fan-fiction, read stories from Gossamer.org, and memorized scripts from my favorite X-Files episodes.

Clip-art was all over the place, you download them and put them on your website (Lycos, Altavista, Geocities… the days before Google!). I learnt HTML and loved creating webpages that contained my favorite things.

People bonded via ‘Webrings’ and chatted on IRC or ICQ.

Webpages had frames!

Black backgrounds with neon colored texts were ‘in fashion’.

Blogger was formed by Pyrolabs, later bought by Google.

Blogging was all about storytelling. It was riveting!

We made all our own graphics, and sent each other ‘fan art’ or ‘fan signs’ saying things like ‘Bing is cool! Check out her website!’ There were things like Geocaching (wonder if it’s still being played now). SWSX. Fray.org. Discovery of storytelling, made modern and fun again!

Cica 2001 – CSS and PHP and whatnots came. It’s all about the technology now. Dot.coms, everyone wants one! I had 2! Soupcubes.org and Battybelfry.com. Both are now defunct.

Blogging is still about storytelling, but styles changed. People talk (like me!) about everything, without structure, without point. Designs are minimalist, grunge, angry but chic. Bookcrossing – the start of several online-to-community projects. The 1000 Journal Project. The chopsticks project. The Mirror Project. Webcams were the rage!

Circa 2007 onwards and even before? Turn of the decade! Things like Twitter, Plurk…micro-blogging. SMS-blogging. Nobody wants a Dot.com. Everyone is doing craft or scrapbooks, design-fairs, having own booths. Typography matters. Designs matter. Pastels, countryside, homemade bread, healthy salads, organic foods, farming, muffins, cupcakes. Small businesses. Eco-friendly. Go green. Buy handmade. Being personal is the new trend.

As we come to the end of 2009 and approach 2010, much has changed in the last 10 years.

In another 10 years, we’d probably all have children.

What will their world be like?

Can YOU control it?

Today is the last day of my wonderful one-week break.
Didn’t do much studying, as you can see. But I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Although am annoyed right now with the trumpets blowing from the school next door (Damn you Alma Mater!!! ARGH!! haven’t you plagued me enough!!).
Apart from feeling a little disappointed in my utter lack of willpower, there are some things I wouldn’t trade the world for. Things like being able to hear the birds chirping in the morning for one week in a row. Waking up to quietness and a bright blue sky and morning fresh air. Having no work, so I enjoyed pottering around the house carrying cups of green tea. Cleaning my poor hamster’s cage after 2 months, watching her play and be a happy little critter. Watching more podcasts from Ted.com and feeling inspired and empowered (mwahahaha). Spending more time with my dad and showing him websites with good photography. The general feeling of contentment when life slows down and you don’t need to be in places (in the daytime that is. Classes at night are unavoidable!). All this, and being bitten by a big black Horn Beetle last night. Yeah we got a lot of laughs.
I don’t think I ever want to go back to work.
Crap.

Read online that someone would frame this poem up and place in their kitchens, and it was passed down many generations, because its simple truths kept their families together:

‘SUCCESS
You can use most any measure
When you’re speaking of success.
You can measure it in fancy home,
Expensive car or dress.
But the measure of your real success
Is the one you cannot spend.
It’s the way your kids describe you
When they’re talking to a friend’

Today marks the start of my one-week break from work. And it’s beginning to look awesome already. For starters, I’m enjoying the sleepy dull-looking morning and still in my silly Pikachu jammies at 9.45am. I just ate the tiniest donut ever for breakfast and even though I’m quite the prude when it comes to breakfast (c’mon, start the day right! Eat your organic whachamacallits!), I think after spending a million hours on a stupid 5-page essay on the Arctic ecosystems and management of its resources and handing it in at precisely 12.01 AM, a shitload of shallow instant gratification is required to set my eyeballs straight.
I love love LOVE! a quiet house in the morning. 🙂

Gosh it has been a busy few weeks, and I’m up to my neck in readings and stuff. I’ve been surfing around and found some really nice websites like The Saddest Bear of All and got addicted once again to Lifehack.org because I am neurotic like so. I have a million journals to read, and some assignments to do, and I do wish to kickass this semester, although my procrastination is laughing at me. I have watched 2 Korean dramas, both which reduced me to a slobbering bucket of tears, much to my own dismay because I abhor the ‘meet cute’ trait in movies, much less in Asian dramas. I have unsuccessfully, for the second time, fried egg noodles containing nothing more than a piece of chicken and a handful of mince and a kidney-destroying amount of soy sauce because SOY SAUCE WILL SAVE THE DAY DAMMIT!
Now I will procrastinate some more because I am obsessed with Jim Parsons from my new obsession, The Big Bang Theory.

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So yesterday we went to school for a bit to set up a brine shrimp assay for our Ecotoxicology class, and the sea monkeys were so adorable, but we had to add copper solution to them cos it’s an assay for goodness sake, and it brought back so many memories when I had my first Sea Monkey set when I was a wee lass and I remembered being vaguely disappointed that they look more like floating dirt particles than monkeys.
We’re going back to the lab today to check on the little buggers (whom I’ve named Arty, from Artemia) and I’m feeling pretty sad they have to die for science, even if they are just brine shrimp.

(image taken from Etsy :: bacon is like a little hug from God, which I’m sure will thrill the socks off Mr. P)

I also found this image (below) via Caterina, and this is the sort of nerdy academia-inclined stuff that would thrill me endlessly. Which I guess doesn’t work very well in an Asian culture, because we are such insane work drones, but it would be great in my ideal world if I could check work emails like 3 times a day because checking it every 10 minutes (and receiving an email every 15 minutes) is SUCH a royal pain in the bloody arse. I wouldn’t want to minimize chat though, because then I’d only be talking at meetings, which are at once unproductive and too long for comfort – I want the hours of my life back.

Having said that, I still like my job because no matter how you look at it, Science still rocks my socks off. 🙂

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ryan Adams before, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know. Still, couple of years ago I stumbled on some Annie Leibowitz photography book and there was this blurb by Adams. It was at once insightful, young, listless, and romantic.

I used to live in hotels. Because I thought it was romantic. Or something. I have an idea of how that sounds, so spare me. I can go on here and reveal that I mean I lived “in” them, as in weeks, sometimes months, eventually for over a year, but – trust me – I know how that sounds, so, again, spare me. I tell myself, and other people, now that I thought it was romantic, but I am beginning to see the lies. They unfold over time like wet newspaper and there’s always a little lie left on the page. Lie residue. Like when you lean against a coin or a metal grill long enough. You can see some of the letters or numbers or the indentation, but then that fades out and you’re just left with skin. Skin and wet news. Wet cartoons. Unreadable crosswords. I didn’t live in hotels because I thought it was romantic. That was the fall guy. It was all I knew. Somehow paying up front kept me from the bigger and truly more horrible lie. A fish refuting the sea. My own seventy-dollar-a-day fish tank. I lived in hotels because I could do nothing and everything at once. Somehow all those days of crawling past the front desk into the laundry-room heat, or the snowfield of cars, those singular days, they became uncountable. I was afraid of life running out on me, So I started counting. I started counting and I lost myself somewhere and it all meant nothing. The hotel is the easiest time a dreamer like me ever does. That is, until now. Until I write about these things now. And spare me. I know how this sounds.

I save movie ticket stubs. I have hundreds. I have divided them up into several different wallets over time, and I find them in jackets that I might not have worn for a few years. I don’t do this because I’m sentimental. When I find one in a jacket and I’m out I usually am finding something for someone and I pull one out. I can retell the exact time of night, where I was, who I was with, what they were wearing and, from time to time, where we sat. I always say it’s because I’m sentimental. But that is also a lie. I am not sentimental at all. I save them because I would have no memory without them. What is the story with the gingerbread house and the pieces of bread left to find your way back? Movie stubs are my way back. My way back to countless bad movies I have digested over the years at the suggestion of a friend or lover. I have never taken anyone to the movies on my own account. I hate the movies. I have never seen one alone. Actually, I went to see one movie alone when I was twenty purely because I had the worst crush on the girl who worked at the counter at this hellhole movie theater and I had a girlfriend so I went alone. I didn’t save that ticket stub. This must be the exception. It was a Spanish film and I fell madly in love with the caretaker of that house – a minor role actually – and I believe I made my home without as much as a second glance at the girl I had come to see. I saw her eyes drifting past me night after night as my lover would roll over to the cool side of the bed and reach for the light. Lying with shoulders back and arms outstretched, the tape leader clicking away on the metal spool.

I would eventually see this same film from the projector room, drowning in a pool of hair and lipstick, peering through the tiny projector-room light box at my Spanish lover. Unknowing idiot college students majoring in farming and English screaming “Focus” in their tired Southern accents. The girl at the theater was not American but not English and she only murmured something inaudible as she came.

Hotels have some secret code, so subtle that it can only be broken if you submit yourself to that kind of routine. In them I have found glamor. I have found power. I have found moxie. The finest being the tall and brutish hotel that sits at the end of Hollywood Boulevard, a stubborn, unchanging coat of windows and soot. A special little hellhole that is unchangeable. Like a cruel fact. As a con man more than an artist, I am obsessed with “fact” because it is unattainable to me, like spirituality for junkies. A pleasant paper trail, a wild-goose chase meant only to throw you off the one that was successfully killing you the last time. I’d much rather chase the carrot an ass full of whiskey and coke than getting all strung out on questions. Questions are far more destructive. There’s no room for vanity in questions, and the hours are crap.

There are no rules to living in hotels but one. Do not drink at the bar. Ever. It implies a relationship. It’s kissing-on-the-mouth, hooker-to-john kinda stuff. Plus they always ask questions. Imagine yourself three or four easy half past ten and you reach for a cigarette and out you pull a movie ticket stub. The mystery just wouldn’t be the same. It’s far easier to tape the Do Not Disturb sign to the doorknob and collect bottles from the liquor store that delivers. If they don’t come in, you don’t have to explain why the prints of Van Gogh or whoever are riding the spare blankets in the closet. It’s just you and the angry word. The truth and the numbers. The counting to one million and the money you’re losing you were never gonna use for anything anyway. That kind of money is best squandered because you have to save yourself from trying to save the world. You have to convince yourself there is nothing between you and these songs, or these letters, or the pieces of paper with numbers of people who told you something nice at the shit-hole bar down the street about your shoes that you just wouldn’t stop talking to. Accent changing back and forth from fake English to pure wasted drunk fuckface.

You can’t save the world but you can save the receipt. Somebody told me that in a taxi cab once and I vaguely remember throwing up out the window someplace in Los Angeles slightly before I checked out for the last time. The car was uttering it’s disapproval, making its way up Laurel Canyon – or whatever canyon – and it wanted to throw a rod, but over all that screaming laughter from these ridiculous girls in the front it had no choice. The stars that spun above me as I hung my head out the window, drooling mouth, were a warning sign from the past. As if they were saying, we have all died, but if only for you to witness now. How pretty a long and spectacular cosmic death it must be. And to go on, and make that kind of noise with light up there in that pool of empty tar, my universe is an asshole, no, an endless sea of assholes at the bar, with movie ticket stubs and a checkout day they will never control.

~ Ryan Adams, New York City