18 Times More Decadence

This is the last of the fried stuffed peppers I made yesterday. Unlike the ones that my aunt makes, these ones are so spicy I have to eat them with milk. Today I ate them all along with two bowls of rice and two cups of milk. Now I am full, tired, and this is going to be part of dinner because I want to eat meat and I don't have time to make another meat dish.

Time time time time time. That always creates anxiety in me since I find it so hard to control, and when I am worried I start to ramble and sound extra pessimistic and borderline insulting. I thank my friends for being mature enough to see past my anxiety. Anyways, I spent my birthday weekend in an extremely anxious state but I had a good time and I feel like most people are merely confused by my strange attitude but aren't put off with me yet. Now I am going to become a hermit for the rest of the week to gather myself to be taken for a proper 18 year old. End of volatility please, and bring in some rationality for the sake of stability!

The Unexpected Healing Powers of Facebook

Baked salmon with lemon rind inspired by Jamie Oliver. I tried it once last time and put on too much salt. This time I didn't put on a lot of salt and used half a lemon because I wanted to use up the lemon. It ended up getting overcooked because it was a bit dry despite the abundant amount of juice in the parcel. Also, it was surprisingly filling, though I do prefer sashimi.

After getting a confirmation on the fact that the fellow who sat next to me during my madly fun hot pot party has a lady friend waiting for him back in his home country, I realized that he was just a victim of my desperate desire to love somebody. Without anyone to throw my sudden surge of passion, I had a bit of an existential crisis for the whole morning. Thankfully, one of my bestest friends from Hong Kong chatted with me on Facebook. She told me that she made the most beautiful milk pudding, I said I want one for my birthday. I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she said she wanted Abercrombie and Finch clothes. I asked her if she's got a boyfriend, and after some joking around, she revealed who's the lucky man. He was a gorgeous boy with a lovely personality, and my friend was obviously smitten, but then she told me that she had planned to stay single all year round, but this happened naturally, so I should enjoy my life as a single. Yes, I don't need to copy my friends just because they all have lovely love lives, I don't need to copy my friend who gets smitten by boys easily, I should just enjoy being myself for once.

The Incomprehensibility of Mold Growing Patterns

Yes I took this picture when I was about two thirds of the way done. When I spread my marmalade on my toast today I noticed little grey bits on the bright orange jelly. Thankfully it wasn't a lot so I was able to scrape it all out. Wonder if it was old bread bits that got stuck in the jam? I should put on my glasses when I spread my jam next time.

I had a brilliant hot pot party last night dominated by concentrated fruit juice, soy milk, fresh lemon juice, Canadian dry, milk, haagen daz ice cream, oily pots, horrible rhymes, and two loud fellas who rambled nonstop about their relationship with alcohol. I think I am in love with the fellow who sat next to me, and of course there is no way I can win his heart because I am shy and he's an exchange student who is three years older than me, which means he most likely has a lady waiting for him back in his home country who skypes with him every night when he trots back to his too far away residence, and also that he will be back to his kickass university in an year. I can just hope that next time I get to enjoy his company I can remain as outspoken and obnoxious as I can and not show my cheesy love smitten self.

Be Careful of Needles in Installations

This was my lunch from sometime last week. It was fried rice with ketchup and leftover ingredients from the minestrone soup I had made the day before. Tomatoes make everything taste heavenly.

So after a week of panic over a midterm that does not require much panic and a much needed night at a bar with the kendo club, I crawled out of my bed this afternoon at 2:00 to copy notes from a friend for a midterm that requires more panic than I can give and to go to a volunteer event held by an architecture firm. After getting out of the subway station, I found myself located in an area with sparsely populated streets, some interesting eateries (there is a curry shop that looks like a chocolate shop), graffitied walls, a secondhand clothing shop, an antique shop, houses in neglect juxtaposed with houses in the holiday spirit, warehouses, and land for lease. Apart from a group of laughing Asian exchange students at an intersection, I felt like there was nothing familiar that existed in my proximity. Later I left the architectural firm and entered a coffee shop part of a chain that was being pushed out of the Canadian cafe market,where the friendly cashier who served me struggled to understand what I meant by cheese pie and then rushed his elementary school aged son in his native tongue to microwave my pie. As I stood in the subway station waiting for the train, I bit into my oily cheese pie hungrily with a tinge of sorrow.

The Compadibility of Good Cooks and Exaggerated Laughter

I accidentally put pumpkin spice into the egg while I was frying it because I thought the pumpkin spice was the pepper. Despite the amount of salt and pepper I subsequently put into the egg, I can still taste the pumpkin spice, but it did not ruin the egg. This proves how awesome pumpkin spice is.

Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner at a buffet restaurant with a really close friend of mine and her family. The food was horrible, but I finally got to eat seafood after two weeks of not consuming any, got to taste lots of ice creams that I usually cannot, and best of all, I got to blab non-stop to my friend and listen to her little brother blab non-stop. Yes, I realized in that moment part of the definition of true friends; they discuss cooking seriously with you, they teach you how to do sit ups on their yoga ball, they look for cosplaying costumes with you, they give you samples of expensive organic drinks, they laugh at your screechy jokes, they tell you jokes in turn in their extra loud and high hysterical voices, adjust their plans to eat Thanksgiving dinner with you, and just make you feel exhilarated despite only getting four hours of sleep. I guess it took me about 12 bloody long school years to realize to make friends include whether you click with the people or not after with or without making some effort, and no doubt, the ones that do click with you will make your inner hysterical self (which I believe everyone has inherently) come out naturally, without any aid of vodka with 40% abv, as I found out today.

Graduation and its Correlation to Friendliness

I bought these in a Korean supermarket that does not sell fish balls or soy milk. This supermarket has two marks deducted for Asian fail and I am being too Chinese. They did sell abundant amounts of chicken wings and drumsticks though, so that's definitely a plus.

After grocery shopping I went to a gardening club that was held in a tiny office in the claustrophobia-causing anthropology building of my university. I was greeted by the very sweet coordinator of the group, and by unfathomable glances by the rest of the small group. After the short but soothing gardening session, the gardening experimenter of the group explained his plan to grow plants in sponges, and afterwards we said our holiday greetings and good-byes. I shared an elevator with the very sweet coordinator and another fellow from this club. He asked the coordinator in the most friendly and casual way what is she studying, and she answered in her naturally sweet way that she graduated this year with degrees in environment law and English and that she is only coming to coordinate to club. She in turn asked the seemingly easygoing fellow what he is studying, and he replied in his easygoing and friendly voice that he is studying philosophy and English. The elevator reached the ground floor and she in turn asked me what I was studying, and I said architecture. "Architecture! That's interesting!" She said, and I said "Yeah, but we aren't really doing anything related to architecture though" when she remembered that she left her bag upstairs, and said hasty good byes to us in her very sweet way. I was left with the seemingly easygoing fellow, who opened the door just enough for me to exit before walking two steps quicker than me and becoming a shadow on the empty sidewalk in less than two minutes, leaving me wondering as I pretended to reply my friend's text message what is it that make people avoid me before giving me a chance to talk. I know that I smile like a shark, so that certainly won't help, so what if I put on some eyeliner, some blush, some concealer, or if I dyed my hair bubblegum pink? No I don't understand the problem, if it is even a problem at all, because frankly, I doubt I would have wanted to talk to that seemingly good natured and easygoing fellow if I run into him, because no he does not spark curiosity in me. So I guess we are even and I should stop worrying about what others think of me, because objectively, I doubt I will give a damn about what most of those people are like if they did not turn a cold eye on me. Really, I am just a normal superficial soul who wants to be the centre of everyone's admiration without really bothering to wonder what others can be like.

Not-so-Revelation during Lecture on Hobbes

Never microwave a cheese cherry danish for more than a minute, since the Danish will become oily, the cherry jam will burn your tongue, and you can't taste the cheese any longer.

My misadventure with this originally delicious pastry started from waking up late this morning to go to a lecture on architecture led by an enthusiastic and smartly-dressed lecturer of Eastern European origin who can easily be taken for a very knowledgable rambler. Today however, she only led half of the lecture, and a guest lecturer from one of the Ivies came up to discuss modern architecture. Indeed, he was more or less the male version of the well-dressed Eastern European professor, except that he looked like Steve Jobs. Yes, they share the same long bony face, the same thin straight nose, the same hairstyle of hair loss, and glasses with round lenses. Ironically, he discussed some campaigns by Apple towards the end of the lecture to make his point of the irony of Apple's goal to be unique and yet Apple products are now very common. This was a point he made based upon a theory made by Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher that my favourite comic book tiger is named after, in his book Leviathan, which states that society can only function if people completely subordinate themselves to some absolute sovereign.

At that moment I thought about an unfortunate bloke who believes he's achieving sophistication by thinking that he is dressing and speaking so cleverly, who was so ever so rude to me in a dancing club because I was ever so shyly polite. It's one of those realizations that I try to forget so hard, but the fact that he is in every way my doppelgänger; a grotesque self-absorbed and shallow soul who wishes to gain freedom without understanding what is true freedom. I wondered if our strong desire to escape shallowness is due to the fact that we lacked something groundbreaking that occupies our attention, especially something abstract rather than tangible (Steve Jobs has the honour of achieving the latter more or less), some sort of "sovereign" that defines our modern, materialistic, and tightly serialized lives!

And then the clock stroke 11:00 and my overly-ethusiastic architecture connoisseur of a professor went up again to talk about a building on the powerpoint that most failed to notice, and all that occupied my mind at that moment is a pastry from Tim Hortons and a cup of hot chocolate.

Decadence is Synonymous to University Life

Like this bowl of rotting strawberries, my life in university is just as decadent as it had been back in my IB years once I and Toronto got to know each other again and I found a group of people who are willing to pamper my childish ways by skipping around downtown with me in the middle of a cold cold night and singing "I believe I can bloody fly" in falsetto voices aimed to break any sober persons' ear drums. But then, that was a night when both reality and idealism obscured in lines waiting for Starbucks, protests against the Syrian government, giant fireplace displays, fire-alarm like DIY video game music, 80s sing-alongs, and of course topped with a dash of sake, vodka, guava juice and ridiculous laughter. Yes, that pretty much sums up both my physical and mental state now.

But really, despite the complaints of the boredom of Toronto life, Toronto's beauty made me forget about that completely. Two weeks ago me and my friend walked to a street in the middle of a storm to find a paper shop where my friend's boyfriend had bought her a beautiful sheet of paper. Yes, in the middle of jumping across puddles and possible jaywalking, I was wondering why I was killing myself just to go to a paper shop, but then I noticed the quirky glass windows of houses that are starting to call for maintenance, the classical style of the gateway to an empty, lush forest of a park, and the perfect combination of the grey skies to the muddy dirty exteriors of shops compared with the cozy, carefully lighted interiors. Indeed, I had never been more enthralled by a rainy day.