BAB

I will never be a "popular" blogger because I can't be bothered to take a pretty picture or gussy up the ones I take. Some artist. I'm supposed to be all about aesthetics. I am. Just not conventional aesthetics.

Any hoo, I'm all excited because I sent away for some fitness shake powder thingies and they came! 

This is Skoop B Strong. It's supposed to speed recovery after a workout, among other things. 

Since you never know till you try, I got a sampling of their whole line. It sounds like good stuff. I'm all about healthy skin, a healthy body, and plenty of energy. Why not give it a shot?  Plus they donate a serving of fresh fruits and vegetables to school lunch programs for every portion sold. 

Yeah, I got the mixing cup too. The sipper cap part clicks tightly into place which is good. I'm much less likely to spray my entire kitchen with soy milk and protein powder that way. 

So how does this B Strong taste? It tastes gross! I've never been one to tolerate artificial sweeteners before. I HATE diet soda. YUCK! This has Stevia in it. According to the website stevia can support healthy blood pressure (which I already have) and, I guess do other things for me that I don't need. 

I don't know, I'll choke it down. I might get used to it. If it helps me feel great I'll keep drinking it. 

Of course the best way to take care of your health and have plenty of energy is to eat right and exercise regularly - which I do a pretty good job of lately - and GET ENOUGH SLEEP. I don't get enough sleep. 

Holy crap! It's almost two! There's always so much stuff to do! That's why no one gets enough sleep. Gotta go! Later!

You Have More Going On Than Your Face

This is going to be a little controversial. Just a little. I'm posting this thought here rather than on Facebook because it's more nuanced than a status update really allows. Plus I'm scared the wrong people will see it and get insulted and that's less likely to happen here. I don't want to insult anyone.

The thought: it bugs me when people (usually but not always gals) post photos of themselves where they think they look really good. It's asking for approval for the wrong reasons. You're supposed to say "congratulations on being so damn good-looking!" Then what? That's all there is.

You know what I mean. Not the "Hey I got dressed up for a special occasion and wow, look how surprisingly well I clean up!"kind of thing. Not the "I just won the karate competition! Check out my fearsome biceps!" kind of thing. Not the "look at these wacky rock club bathrooms!" kind of thing. It's the "I am sultry(/cool/hot) - you know you want me, don't you wish you could just gaze at me all day long" thing.

Now I feel like a jerk because it probably just means they're feeling a little low and need some encouragement. I know I need A LOT of encouragement. I don't know though, your looks are just your looks. They're NOT the most interesting thing about you.

Some people are bragging. Some people might think it's the only thing they really have going for them. I'm not trying to be judgy. It just makes me feel uncomfortable to see that kind of thing.

Sure, I picked that photo to the right over there because I thought it was flattering. You do want to pick a nice photo to represent yourself online most of the time. Put your best face forward. That's natural. We all want to feel good about ourselves in as many areas as possible. I should probably just lighten up. But so much emphasis on appearance. I wish it wasn't like that.

Maybe it's no better to post more substantive examples of one's greatness, like how you dominated the karate competition or how you got an A on your term paper. IN YOUR FACE WITH MY AWESOMENESS! There is a place for pride in one's achievements though.

I don't want to stop anyone from getting the sense of approval they need. So if you're into flooding your Facebook feed with dreamy photos of yourself you go right on. I will probably refrain from commenting.

I hope I don't regret posting this.

Not The Worst Thing In The World

People keep telling me I've lost SOOO MUCH weight. I hadn't realized that I was quite SOOO LARGE to begin with. Which just goes to show you that I have NOOO IDEA what I look like. Ever. Guess I don't care that much. I'm good with that.

Fun! I Had Fun!

Halloween party preparations! I forgot how fun it is to make weird stuff!

Like these heart-shaped pickled beets I made to garnish spooky Bleeding Heart Martinis:

So fun to carve them into heart shapes. I don't remember ever making cooked pickles before so that was fun too. I hope they taste good! They're supposed to leach creepy red tendrils through the martini.

The BEST thing is the horrific mummy meatloaf I made. I can't even believe how well it came out. I have to show you the before and after shots so you can see that it really is a meatloaf and not a war atrocity.

See - bacon wraps. Onion eyes and teeth and tomato sauce glaze for an extra charred flesh effect.

The results:

True Terror! What a horrible nightmare! Complete, resounding success! Will anyone dare to eat this wretched thing? It's almost insensitive.

I put a ton of work into making these ridiculous, meaningless things. It was so much fun! Clearly I need to do even more stupid, meaningless things!

Some Autumn Highlights

I love when it's persimmon season!

Also:

Way to go, Boston Public Garden designers! You did great!

Some Things I Learned From My Stomach

It's been informative to have my stomach out of commission this week. I found out a couple of things I didn't know about myself.

For one thing, I worry more than I thought I did.  I find I pay more attention to body parts when they aren't working as  well as they normally do.  This week I've noticed every time my stomach twinged because I'd thought of something that made me anxious.  Mostly the twinges were caused by thinking of someone I know who has a problem (which is pretty much everybody)  Just the slightest passing thought about someone would make my stomach tense up.

Anything that reminded me of someone could cause a twinge.  For example, a couple of nights ago I heard the distinctive rattle of an aluminum ladder bouncing on the metal rack of a contractor's pickup as he drove down our road at four in the morning.  I heard this sound in my sleep. My stomach twinged because the sound made me think of a contractor I know who is having major issues right now.  In other words, a very common background sound made my stomach twinge with anxiety.

Like everybody else, I hear background sounds and think of friends all day long.  Until I became aware of how my gut felt I didn't know that I was stressing about them.

It's not like I can do anything about other people's problems.  It doesn't help them for me to feel bad for them.  I'm not sure I can stop though.  I want everyone to be happy and for everything to be fine.  That's just not possible.  Accept it!!!!

The other thing I found out is that on a small scale I'm an emotional eater.  It used to be that if I got a little bored or a little sad - low level, in passing, while doing other things and not particularly noticing in the front of my mind - I'd have a couple of nuts or a piece of chocolate or something.  Just a quick little redirection of my thought patterns from fretting to my mouth to the next thing to think about.  Attitude adjusted, I'd move on and continue whatever it was I was doing.

That process is less rewarding when the most you can stomach in a day is a banana or some saltines.  Because I was unable to just casually grab a snack (unable or unwilling) I noticed how often I had the impulse do do so.

Not sure what I'm going to do about that either.

I need to either reduce the discomfort level in my life or learn to bear with it better.  I think the latter is more likely.  Or else I could just accept that I am what I am and I deal with it as best I can.

I think I need to come to terms with the fact that problems aren't merely problems and that fixing things for other people isn't always helpful.  Not that I can fix anything for anyone else, but also I should get out of the habit of wanting to.  We all learn from solving problems.  That's why there's math homework.  Mostly we don't like it but still, it's good for us.  Not to be too self-helpy but confronting problems gives everyone the opportunity to learn and grow.  It gives us character and experience and hopefully compassion for others.  I shouldn't wish to take those opportunities away from someone else just because I think I might be able to deal with them better or because it makes me uncomfortable to watch someone struggle.

I'm just trying to talk myself into thinking this way.  Bad things happen and we have no control.  Wishing it were otherwise doesn't help.  Worrying when there's nothing you can do doesn't help.  It's just so hard to be rational!  It's much easier to think sensibly than to feel sensibly.

Chocolate, CREEPY, Bacon

Today I made chocolate chip cookies for Pete.  I think I may have eaten six of them myself already.  BAD MEL!!!  Maybe it was only five?

Anyway, while I was doing the dishes I had VPR on (yes, I'm a member) and "Radiolab" was on.  They were discussing the Uncanny Valley effect.  This is what you get when someone attempts to make a facsimile of a human (say a robot or a CGI character) and they get pretty close but not close enough.  Anyone viewing the not-close-enough facsimile gets creeped out* and can't stand to keep looking at the thing.  They said a scientist tested the effect with monkeys and the monkeys all got creeped out too.

This completely explains my lifetime aversion to that Scientology guy who jumped on Oprah's couch.  (Ew.  I don't even like typing his name in my blog.  Ick!  I typed it but I had to change it!  Shudder)  Brad Pitt is headed that way too.  When the posters for the film of "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" were up everywhere I couldn't stand to look at them either.  CREEPY!!!  Giant photoshopped faces of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.  Yeee!

Bad plastic surgery causes the same effect.  They'd better watch it out there in Hollywood.  I wish someone would fund arts education at least for the folks who decide which people we all have to look at in our popular culture.  Wabi-sabi everyone!  Please!

I'd better stop thinking about this because I'm giving myself the heebie-jeebies.

I will move on to state that tomorrow I plan to make another batch of chocolate chip cookies.  This time I will be putting fresh cooked bacon bits in with the chocolate chips and walnuts.  I need to find out if it works!!!

*becomes profoundly unnerved.  See, I don't have to talk like a hippie.

Today I am cranky and sick of myself.  Don't worry though - it will pass.

In the mean time here's a video I made from Pete and my trip to Carrboro/Chapel Hill.  If you're ever in the area and itching for barbeque I highly recommend The Pig.  The food is all local and properly raised.  It's also beautifully cooked and FA-REAKING TASTY!

Eat Me

Okay, now you guys are going to know how nuts I am: I don't care if I get eaten.*

After I'm dead I really don't care what happens to my body.  If someone wants to eat me I'm fine with that. Just for God's sake make sure I'm prepared properly!

I've had a couple of meals in my life where I've thought, "you know, if someone was going to eat me I'd want it to be this way."  I actually told one of the chefs that if I was going to be cooked after I died I wanted him to do it.  I think I weirded him out.  Do you know any chefs?  It's not easy to weird them out.

Tonight Pete and I went to the Highland Kitchen.  One of the things we ordered was the Pig and Pickle plate.  I believe that the crispy confit changed my life.  To me they looked more like deep fried pancetta - thick chips of bacony pork, crispy as all get-out.  Smoky, salty, rich but not greasy or overwhelming.  Holy cow!  To me that's respect: cooked pig perfected.

If someone wants to eat me after I die that's fine with me, as long as I'm FRIGGIN' DELICIOUS!

*I am not so weird that I want to be eaten alive or that I would choose to be killed for food.  I'm sure that many of you (perhaps all three of you) who read this blog feel similarly when you think about it.  Once you're dead you're probably not going to care about anything at all.  Also, there are plenty of weirder things about me than this.

Silly Person

In other news (which nobody but me cares about) I was feeling a bit over-padded so I'm doing the South Beach Diet.

I WANT BAKED GOODS!  COOKIES!  CINNAMON ROLLS!  PIZZA!  CUPCAKES!  I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT!!!!!!!!!!

I'm Secretly Really Into Makeup

November thirtieth, here you are again. It's the final day of NaBloPoMo and my final post for the month - unless I think of something better to say before midnight.

Looking back it doesn't seem as though I've had a single interesting thought all month. So in that vein I shall come clean about the latest Kool-Aid I've imbibed.

Yes, I love Bare Minerals foundation. I never thought it would happen to me. I've always been a "please God no foundation" type but everybody was making such a stink about the stuff I decided to try it. If you hit the link above you will go to the page on Sephora.com where they are selling the starter kit (while you're there you might want to pick up this, or this, or one of these as well - all bear the Mel stamp of approval - except the first one which I haven't tried and hope to get for Christmas because I'm a big dork and I believe everything I read in a product's advertising copy) This is also bound to be good. When I say "good" I mean "fun."

Okay, back to the topic at hand. This Bare Minerals stuff is great! First of all putting it on is a very calming ritual. It's powder - but not super-drying - so it isn't cold and gloopy and you don't have to worry that you're not spreading it evenly. You just dust it loosely all over your face with a big, fat, soft brush. If you want more coverage you do it again. If you have spots to cover you hit those with a dab of the touch-up brush. You can't apply it badly (though you might want some help choosing the color to use) First you do the base, then you do the blush (I often skip the blush as I tend to be ruddy in the first place), then you do the translucent top coat. It takes no time and you don't even have to look while you're doing it.

You can't feel it on and, by some miracle, it really stays on. One thing I always felt was humiliating about foundation was the way it could end up on a person's shirt collar - UGLY. This doesn't do that - though I can't say I've rubbed my face in my shirt to force it.

Not only that but it's got SPF 15 and it's completely unscented. Since all the ingredients are inert they won't give you a rash either. High frigging five!

At first I thought, "well this stuff's fine I guess" but I kept doing it because I liked the ritual and because it has sunblock. More recently though I've grown accustomed to having really good-looking skin. Maybe that's a bad thing. Maybe that makes me product dependent. Nah - I can live without the stuff. I am chocolate dependent though.

There are plenty of brands of mineral makeup out there. Some are super-hippie-crunchy-pure and some are fake. I haven't tried any of those. I just know Bare Escentuals. Typical. The department store brand. I'm so bourgeois.

Thus ends my third NaBloPoMo. Now I shall go celebrate my success with a martini with blue cheese stuffed olives. Unless I go pomegranate - in which case, really no olives.

@#$@%&

It's not even lunch time yet.

Cold and Starry

Tonight was the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. We had clear skies in VT but I still missed it. I have to drive down to Brookline today for my annual physical so I went to bed kind of early, at 11.

Fay woke up at 5 AM. I took her out but there was nothing doing in the sky.

While I didn't see any meteors I did enjoy looking at the stars. It's so cool to think that if I could see the dimensions of what I was looking at it would be a sphere, a planet, a sun - an object so very far away in space and not just a point of light. I love to think that my little fleshy mortal eyeballs can see even a trace of something so far away.

Some Things I've Learned Recently

Number one, when reading a blogger.com blog DO NOT EVER (unless you're looking for porn) hit the "next blog" button at the top of the page (conveniently located next to the "report abuse" button) Learned that the hard way.

Feel free to hit the "follow" button, especially if you're reading my blog.

Number two, (hee hee, number two! Ugh, sorry.) Maybelline bronzing powder, the cheapest brand I could find, is an excellent product.

I don't normally use bronzing powder because I'm Palefaced and Proud* (and curly hair proud too - no capitulating to the straight hair standard!) I needed it this week to go as Rachael Ray for Halloween. I was going to use a hint of orange makeup from the costume shop (her T.V. makeup always looks overly orangey to me) but there was no way I was going to pay $8.99 for a pan of orange makeup.

Maybelline to the rescue. I bought a nice, dark color that I thought would instantly look glaringly wrong on me. In fact, I had to really cake it on to make it look overdone.

Of course I was wearing a very dark brunette wig at the time. Maybe it would look wrong with my real coloring? Nope, I just tried it. You can barely tell. Maybe that's why it's cheaper - not enough expensive pigment. Anyway, I thought it was a good way to build up a "natural sun-kissed" look. Not what I wanted it for and not something I'm likely to use again, but there it is.

Number three, "mayhem" is a crime in California. According to Wikipedia, mayhem consists "of the intentional and wanton removal of a body part that would handicap a person's ability to defend himself in battle." Also, "the noun 'mayhem' and the verb 'maim' share the same root, the Old French 'mahaigne'" which I'm guessing means "to harm in some way."

New topic:

You may have noticed I'm posting more regularly. Well it's NaBloPoMo (which I still think should be called INaBloPoMo - International Blog Posting Month) I hope to continue the daily posting habit long after November as well. If I don't then how else will anyone know what I had for lunch or how my latest pair of socks are coming along (which you still don't know) or what I think about shoes?

*Don't feel that I'm anti-tan across the board and I'll hate you if you have more melanin than me and you use it. Tan or fake tan if you want. It's none of my business.

For Those Of You Who Put Up With Ryan Seacrest For So Long

Is that better?

Six Days To Go

Is IBloPoMo over yet? No? Okay, here goes:

Today Pete and I went looking for vultures to photograph. I have an "artistic vision."

Unfortunately the vultures were uncooperative today. But while we were looking for them we came across a few Great Blue Herons and one otter. I've never seen an otter before.

When we got back to the house Marnee told us the story of a friend of hers who'd had a run-in with an otter. Aparrently this woman was walking her small dog when an otter started to chase them. She scooped up her dog and started running. The otter chased her and bit her eight times while she tried to run away. Finally she wedged herself between the screen door and front door of somebody's house. For some reason at that point the otter backed off.

Otters always look so cute and playful on T.V. The one we saw today was cute and not the least bit interested in us. It was chomping loudly on a cruchy fish and lolling around on the grass. Who would think they'd go all homicidal all of a sudden?

As for my "artistic vision," I have one more day to execute it. We're going back north tomorrow afternoon. Then we'll see how Fay enjoyed her stay at Ruff Life.

So Far Today

I put him up there again because people seem to like having him there. He has nothing to do with this post though.

So, so far today hasn't gone all that well. it stared at 4:30 this morning when Fay scrambled off the end of the bed. We sleep on a futon so the fall wasn't far but she was definitely not feeling herself. By 6:00 we were at the vet for an emergency visit. We're back home now and I don't think it's life threatening but we still don't really know what's bothering her. It might have something to do with her bladder/kidneys.

The complication is that Pete and I were supposed to go visit his parents for early Thanksgiving today. We were going to leave here at 8 AM, drop her at Ruff Life for the weekend and catch a noon flight from Providence. Now I'm still home and Pete's gone to the airport. I should probably call and cancel my ticket come to think of it.

The fun stuff continues...

10:30 AM

Okay, the flight's cancelled. On with the story.

So I was sitting in the dog emergency waiting area at the vet where they had the news on T.V. A story came on about a fourteen year old girl who survived for four months on an artificial heart while waiting for a second heart transplant. They showed footage of her walking in a hospital hallway while attached to a panoply of medical devices and using the artificial heart. She also had a number of staff helping her and her equipment move down the hall. I almost burst into tears. God, the agony for her and her family. I didn't cry though because I didn't want to have to explain to the emergency vet that I wasn't crying about my dog. I would have been crying about my dog too, and about some other things as well but that's too long an explanation to give a stranger at six AM.

The girl is doing well now, she's received her latest heart transplant which seems to be working fine. Hopefully that will pretty much be the end of that chapter for her.

I don't know about T.V.s in hospital waiting rooms. It's hard to find programming that doesn't make the wait worse. Yesterday it was the economic wrap up in the waiting room (yes, Fay and I were at the vet yesterday too) The Dow's in the toilet, everybody's getting laid off and what's going to happen with the Automobile industry? Yesterday it made me laugh but not in a good way - and it didn't make the wait any better.

A Little Random

Photo number one:

This was apparently sent by me to me from "Men's Health," some weird little daily digest newslettery thing, subject line: RE:ja.Doctor Phyllis. Fishy much? If I hold my cursor over one of the many links in this digest, like how to follow Daniel Craig's workout (and NO I AM NOT CLICKING THE LINK!!!!) a little window pops up and shows where the link goes. Each one goes somewhere different, like "http://www. dcmshjn.cn/." Oh great, I just got another one from myself. XOXOXO Love it. And I can't label it as spam since it appears that I sent it to myself.

The copy claims that "James Bond always gets the women. And while part of that is his charm and swagger, the way his muscles fill out a tux is what the ladies first notice about him." I don't know. Maybe it's unwomanly of me but that kind of muscle doesn't really do it for me. They look a bit overinflated. Not my thing. I won't deny that Daniel Craig is easy on the eyes but it's not because of the muscles.

Almost entirely unrelated:

I like mummies and bog people! No, not for ogling or dating etc. Gross. They're just fascinating. This is the mummy known as the Loulan Beauty who is on display at a museum in Urumqi, China (photo by Giles Sabrie) Mummies and bog people look just like us except for their mysterious accoutrements the meanings of which we can only guess. So cool! So many things to think about! What were their lives like? How did they die? What's the significance of that tattoo? Why does her hat look like that?

It's as if I have all the time in the world to think about random junk like this and then tell you about it.

A Bit Of Catch Up

I've been a bad blogger. One post (besides this) for the month of October. I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I'll make up for it next month with NaBloPoMo, or as I'll be referring to it, I-NaBlaPoMo. Really, it is international. Unless they're referring to "Blogger Nation" which would be ridiculous.

I've been doing a lot of cooking this month. Lot's of recipes from Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking. Behold, for example, the lurid pile below which I produced this evening:

This is a simple, traditional Japanese potato salad. I thought I'd bought red potatoes at the farm stand but in fact they are pink. Throughout. I think the pink gives my potato salad a certain Hello Kitty-ish air. Serendipity! This is the second batch I've made.

My favorite recipe from the book so far is Eggplant "Dengaku" Style. I also like the Tsukemono (Japanese Pickles) recipe which ends up being like a really tasty salad that will keep for a few days. What's not to love about a salad you make once and eat three or four times?

Speaking of salad, here's tonight's dinner:

Mixed greens, cucumber, raw golden beets, feta cheese, pecans and dried cherries. I don't know if eating a whole raw beet by oneself is allowed. If I have any problems with it I'll let you know.

Earlier today I also tried to make Kabocha Nimono from Let's Cook Japanese Food, by Amy kaneko. I'm not sure the item I cooked was a kabocha, a.k.a. Japanese pumpkin. I've never actually seen one that I know of. I bought a giant chunk of orange-fleshed, green-and-yellow-speckle-skinned pumpkin-like vegetable at the Super 88 market in Allston last week. It might have been kabocha. The dish didn't come out exactly as described but it's fine. It's not especially photogenic so just imagine rectangular orange chunks. That's about what it looks like. I've really got to work on my food styling.

Below is a photo of what happened to the last of the pears:

This is the Brown Sugar Pear Cake from Dorrie Greenspan's Baking, From My Home To Yours. This was another example of how things take longer to cook for me than they do in the book. While the cake looks well browned on the outside it could have cooked longer. I even tested it as directed with a long bamboo skewer poked to exactly half the depth of the pan and it came out clean. It wouldn't have if I'd poked it to a three-quarter depth. Think of that the next time you make a bundt cake. It's a very good cake though. You can really taste the brown sugar and the flavor goes well with the pear flavor.

That's not my kitchen by the way. That's the kitchen at my parents' beach house. Just if you care. And why would you?

Whoa, I've also been gardening my heinus off (that was a "Your Highness" pun - see, I'm clever and not very annoying) I ordered seven peonies and thirty-six lily bulbs this spring when I must have been smoking crack. It took me three days but I got most of them into the ground in locations I think they'll like. Never mind that I had a plague of lily leaf beetles this year. Well, really I do mind a lot. Along the way I learned that even when you have to make a really small hole (like for a bulb) it's much easier to use a full sized shovel rather than a trowel. A shovel can make a perfectly good, deep but thin slit in the ground between plants. It doesn't have to dig a trench.

Later in the week Michaela came by to help me with the garden's master plan, plotting which shrubs to buy and put in next and where they should go. While we were wandering around the jungle that was a vegetable garden about ten years ago (before I lived here) we stumbled on two more peonies. Michaela decided we should dig up, divide and move them. Well she dug them up and I was so glad it wasn't me that I told her so. One was normal sized and easy to split into three new baby peonies. The other was a mass of intertwined sweet potato-like roots bigger than a basketball. She said, "do you have a hatchet?" We need to go buy a hatchet but we do have an axe.

She was giving me all these directions like "Soak the root ball to remove the dirt until you can see where you want to make the divisions" and "when you divide the root ball make sure you wipe the blade with alcohol before each cut" and "don't worry if you lose a bud or two." She could tell I was getting scared about doing it myself. I gave her the axe and asked her to show me.

Then she took the axe and started CHOPPING AT THE THING like it was her ex's (or a certain politician's) HEAD! Now I was really scared. That's not peaceful, cool-headed "dividing," that's a massacre! And what happened to the alcohol? When she was done there were seven more viable baby peonies. She axe murdered that peony into a grand total of TEN MORE PEONIES that I had to find a place for! And then she left. She'd done the hard part after all. I gave her nine lily bulbs to take along. They'll be happier with her anyway. I don't think she has lily leaf beetles. She's my hero.

Somehow or other I found decent places to plant the ten new peonies (plus an armload of rooty things that might someday become peonies) by sunset the next day. With luck I'll have fifteen new peonies next spring (counting two divisions as old plants) Good thing I like peonies. They have beautiful foliage in the fall.

And now I will end with two photos of Fay that Pete took.

Interesting Times - We've Got 'Em

OVERLOAD

I don't even know what to write. I don't have organization skills. How can I express myself coherently?

I CAN'T!!!!!!

My favorite: excessive use of exclamation points!

I heard some dude on the radio say that the entire U.S. financial system is breaking down. I wonder if this is sort of what a tsunami looks like? I don't want to belittle the experiences of people who have lived through (or not) a tsunami. I'm just wondering if this is figuratively similar. It starts out kinda weird and you don't really know what's happening. The big wave comes from far away and you can see it but not understand what it is. Then before you know it you're engulfed in calamity and it's faster, stronger and more overwhelming than you could ever have imagined.

I think I may be in the "see the big wave" part. Where the hell is the high ground and how do we get there?

In Sierra Leone a woman's chance of dying in childbirth is 1 in 8.

At the same time the world is full of amazing things.

This article on tracking elephants with text messaging is pretty amazing.

Then there's amigurumi.

And I just found this incredible site full of wonderful things, Print & Pattern.

Then there's cupcakes. I know there's a major cupcake backlash going on but holy cow. How can you argue with this?

And of course the whole bento thing.

As it says above, I make things. How can a person possibly decide what to make? I'm really stymied right now because there are so many things to make and so many things to learn and I can't organize my experience in a way that makes moving forward meaningful.

Maybe there's just no meaning, no forward and it doesn't matter what I do next so I should just do anything. That's what I've always done in the past. No meaning, no path, no destination.

And we should all just do what we do. I'm going to try not to hurt anyone while I'm about it.

All my life I've idly wondered what it was like for people in other times. What was it like to be Roman during the fall of Rome? What was it like to live in the Dark Ages? World War I? What was it like to be German during the rise of Hitler? Times of chaos when the world (or one's country) seemed to be going entirely the wrong way.

Maybe I'm going to find out. How much chaos are we in for exactly?

How about ecology? Are we going to retract in fear and use up all our resources because we're too scared to take the apparent risk of trying new ways? Panicked people behave stupidly sometimes. Use up all your resources and you will die. Do we have the sense to take painful short term hits so that we can survive into the future?

Beats the crap out of me.

So now what do I do? Do I go to the local farm stand and buy some more eggplant so I can make some more Japanese eggplant with miso topping? Do I just go out and put in more lily bulbs and peonies? Make more fuck plates? Design myself an agedashi dofu amigurumi?

What the hell?