Very Same 3 Meals in a Day

              Ate this for four meals (not including Siu Ye) in a row! Made this missing two of the ingredients from the original recipe and the flavouring sauce! Ended up just using Cantonese soy sauce, was good anyways! Also remembered how delicious shiitake mushrooms are! Shiitake! Tuna! Fried Tofu! Are! Awesome!

              Started my holiday job today as a stock associate at a culinary goods store unwrapping culinary goods from America, ripping off the American Dollar price tags on them, and putting on a new, much more expensive, Canadian Dollar price tag on them. As I was staring downwards on to the goods, half asleep, I noticed a very familiar pair of feet nearby. They were clad with a very familiar pair of black pair of Adidas sneakers, the same pair that the very kind and lovely exchange student wore. What reminded me more about him was that these feet were attached to a pair of legs clad in dark skinny jeans. Ironic how this is such a common way for a young male to dress. I guess he really is typical, maybe just much more intelligent and kind (to me) and that's why my mind still puts so much emphasis on him. I did however, talk to the owner of these familiar shoes, and the conversation went well, possibly because he was very knowledgable of everything we talked about, and was kind enough to withstand my meek comments and patient enough to continue explaining everything he told me in detail. 

            Through most of this whole semester, I was giving minimal thought to school work and trying to find a part-time job to pay for an expensive trip in May. I dealt with school in a manner that one would deal with an uninteresting job that will only pay their rent; school still meant to me, only the key to prestige, which meant to me personal empowerment and hence a satisfactory life. Has it occurred to me that personal empowerment, or the ability to enjoy reality, is through knowledge? It is the ability to understand the details of what happens when an uranium shell hits a tank, the ability to see the reasons behind a nations' actions, etc. which ultimately results in the ability to question the concept of fate, and be in control of it. 

               One should never forget who are friends, but one should never rely on the past. 

A Second Round of Decadence

This delicious stuff is called 湯圓(tang yuan), a dessert typically eaten during a holiday called 元宵(yuan xiao) for some reason I cannot remember. It has a chewy skin wrapped around a sweet paste that is traditionally either black sesame or peanut, and cooked in a sweet soup made of whatever your liking. In this version I used sweeten soy milk mixed with a Korean sesame and nut powder. Eaten this for breakfast tucked me in for a good six hours.

Last night out of a reluctance to go to bed I decided to go on a site I used to frequent to read Japanese fashion magazines. Again I was reminded of the strange mix of anxiety and exhilaration I felt when I read those magazines during my many procrastination moments in high school. The girls in the magazines dressed so wonderfully that you cannot believe they could be walking on the street; they all had some sort of lightly dyed and neatly cut hairstyle, rosy blush on their pale cheeks, cute accessories that dangled in their hair, fingers, wrists, and necks, and clothes adorned with lace, frills, cute symbols,and cute patterns. The backgrounds of their photos are also as meticulously planned as their outfits, and often as cute, giving an air of nostalgia, coziness, and ease. Yet! I always felt discomfort while viewing these images because I felt like that I can never be in the same image as them. Why? The answer I only found yesterday in an assigned reading for one of my classes, an essay written by Adolf Loos, an architect part of the Modern movement who abhorred ornament, stating that they only provide comfort for those who do not know how to appreciate their work otherwise. Despite finding Loos a bit too extreme, I do agree that as we grow older, ornament becomes excessive because things we need to devote our time to becomes much more focused, hence the ornament that we are familiar with, the ornament that is obvious like hair ribbons and teddy bears on shirts, seem to become distraction; creating joy during times when one want to escape reality, and creating disturbance when one want to face reality. I guess this somehow explains my unease and simultaneous joy when I view images of those beautifully ornamented girls in Japanese fashion magazines; I enjoy dwelling in the momentary fantasy but at the same time I know that my reality is never thus.

Just as I had Imagined it

I've wanted to eat this since I read about it in my fifth grade textbook about an Indian Canadian child who did not want to meet his grandmother; the child loved this dessert, and apparently his grandmother is superb at making it. I ate this in a restaurant in Indiatown yesterday with my friends, and it was exactly as I had imagined it in grade five; the first bite is soft and spongy with an explosion of sweetness, which does not linger as the products of many bakeries here, but rather transformed into a cool coat that spread throughout my mouth and throat. It is simply refreshing even on a cold day like yesterday, so I just had to buy them when I saw them at a supermarket before returning home.

So so so Simple

Who can hate ketchup after learning how it can make the most amusing expressions without you intending to (yes the ketchup just fell on the cucumber and cheese pancake and formed that cheeky smile). Another five minutes of the poor soul who has to listen to my praise for this magical condiment.

So its the first week of school and my attempt to do math problem sets, Facebook chat, and listen to Jpop has led me to finish the math problem sets, have amusing conversations on Facebook, get sick of the Jpop song I am listening to, and sleeping at 3:00 AM for the last three consecutive days. I look in the mirror and I see nothing but paleness and staleness, like cookie dough that has been left out for too long. Indeed, I do not have enough energy to continue this recklessly amusing lifestyle, because I can't even find the energy to feel happy about seeing the lovely exchange student who I am hopelessly in love with this Saturday. Yes, despite knowing that this will lead nowhere, I have never enjoyed the company of the opposite gender so much before, so I guess this will have a happy ending after all, in the current circumstances of course.

As for the remedy against my parasitic lifestyle, I will not repeat my idealistic approach last semester of dragging all my books to some library and feeling so uncomfortable for not being in my own space that I get nothing done in the end. I will stay in my room, just as I did back in elementary school, and work, along with avoiding Facebook as much as possible, which I think is perfectly possible, since I had forced myself to get all my dishes done in a reasonable amount of time this week despite having half of my brain cells shut down. That's really saying something.

And yes the picture is instagramed.

An Instagramed Start

These are made in the afternoon with my friend. The snickerdoodles didn't have nutmeg in them, but it was crumbly and buttery enough and anything with cinnamon is yum for me. The brownie pops are from a package sent to me from a friend of mine in America, they came with the most amusing rubber baking tray.

This new year I will be brave enough to realize that the source of my gloominess is my cowardice for being unable to accept my inaptitudes and face the hard work I need to make up for these inherent inaptitudes; I can no longer dress myself in an image of sophistication for others to see, because the point of my work is not to show, but to be.