Despite the saying "It's the thought that counts," people are materialistic and like actually getting something tangible. Anyone who says otherwise are lying and deluding themselves.
I usually don't have a problem with this. Most of the time I'm buying gifts for friends or family and I know what they would like to get. It's not a guessing game. I would just go to the store with the item, buy it, wrap it up, and stick some sort of card on the package. Voila. I'm done.
It gets quite sticky with people I don't know so well. Usually a card might work or simply a heartfelt, "Happy Birthday", but it gets quite frustrating when they give me a gift first. It doesn't matter what the gift is, because the whole entire situation turns into a bizarre example of a zero sum game where the rewards are respectability and "being nice" instead of money. In order to keep up, the next time there's a special day, I feel obligated to get them a gift too. And I end up completely flustered because I don't know what they want from me and I just want to break down and plead "insanity" to get out of a game which I didn't want to play in the first place.
There are a few things I can conclude from this. I'm making things more complicated than they should be. I'm inept at reading other people's intentions. Or people are being delibrately obfuscating. If it's the very latter, I'd just wish they'd stop waffling with social niceties and come out and tell me what's really on their mind.
On another note: I finally have my photos up. These pictures taken at a cozy bed and breakfast place secluded in the lakes region inspired the setting for my writing project earlier this month.
Someone once told me that the term "Black Friday" referred to the financial status of businesses on the day after Thanksgiving. For most of the year, stores would operate in the red, but once the shoppers come in full force for the start of the Christmas shopping season, they will once again operate in profit. I actually prefer the alternate meaning--that people buy so much that they go into bankruptcy--because a lot of people appear to be reckless spenders.
I find it fascinating to observe the crowd on a busy day. In contrast to sunny Pasadena where most of the people are trendy yuppie go-getters carrying cell phones and pagers and shopping bags from expensive stores, people in Upper Valley New Hampshire on a whole seem a lot more down-to-earth and practical. Of course, that could also be the result of cold weather and snow.
Today was a big day for sales and people tramped outside despite the falling snow to head to the stores in lemming-like herds. But even over the mob behavior, it was interesting just to watch individual people. A family of women speaking a bastardized form of French mixed with English bought three microwaves. A fat man wearing low-slung jeans in an effort to look cool practically mooned an entire busload of people when he got up for his stop. Two adolescents, one with a skateboard and another with a video camera, prowled around town looking for trouble. Whiny children tagged along with long suffering parents. Bums slouched outside stores smoking and stamping their feet while not far away, a Salvation Army volunteer bundled up like an Eskimo rang his bell.
A kiddie movie I saw today: Treasure Planet. I sat in front of a pair of catty mothers bickering about PTA meetings and fundraisers while their kids were shouting out periodically in the movie. I sat behind a harried father attempting to control his tantrum-throwing and sulking children. Yes, observing the audience is half the fun.
I keep trying to tell myself that I'm not a packrat, but I don't think these constant mantras are helping.
Lately, I've discovered a love of collecting boxes. Like those small fancy coffee and cookie tins. Large cardboard boxes. Plastic boxes. Cardboard boxes that used to contain packets of jello. Even jam jars. One time I saw a sign that said "Free Boxes". I took home an armload of small paper boxes that could be used to store index cards. Except I don't have any index cards.
My obsession with collecting things once got me in trouble. When I was in high school, I collected pencils. Any and every kind. During the height of my mania, I had to do college interviews. Needless to say, my meeting with the young doctor who was an interviewer for one of the universities I applied for did not go well.
One day, I've got to make myself throw them all away before my roommates finally realize I'm crazy.
Getting pictures developed around here are way too expensive. Perhaps I should invest in a digital camera. I will probably have the rest of my very boring nature photos up sometime later this week.
A Link: Recommended Reading. Completely useless. They kept spewing popular weblogs at me which never interested me in the first place. Of course, this little site might be nicer to you.
One of my friends was complaining about how quaint everything was. "I mean look at that gas station!" he said pointing to a pretty yellow clapboard building with a white awning. Fancy gas pumps painted in the same cheery yellow were lined up neatly in a row. Nicknacks decorated the store's window. "Even the gas station is quaint!"
"It's not quaint," I told him. "It's gaudy."
Most of yesterday and this morning, I was stuck in the epitome of tourist traps, Meredith, for a biochemistry retreat. Last night, I was a nervous wreck since another first year grad student and I were going to present a poster on some work that another grad student had done which was published in Science. We were the only first years presenting a poster, which was odd because we just got here relatively speaking, and I was afraid of making a hash out of someone else's work. Thankfully, the judges thought we did pretty well.
And for anyone wondering about my participation in NaNoWriMo, I finished yesterday. If you're curious, you can read my 51,040 words at Writing Sya. (Warning: This is a very rough draft, possibly with grammatical and spelling mistakes, and with plot holes big enough for an elephant to crawl through. I like the ending though. Dramatic and cheesy.)
1. What's the longest time you've gone without posting an entry in your blog/journal? What was or is the reason behind your dry spell?
I've actually become more consistent in writing here ever since I switched to the blog format last year. Usually my dry spells are during holidays. I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I'm guessing it's the sporadic entries during 2000 and early 2001 every month or so.
2. Are you "going over the river and through the woods" for thanksgiving, or is the gang coming to your place? Perhaps you have something to be particularly thankful for this year. What is it?
Once again, I'm going to be by myself during Thanksgiving. I'm sure my roommates and I will plan something (most likely not a traditional turkey dinner). It's not worth it to fly back home for two extra days. Christmas will be a different story.
3. All those bumper stickers that say, "I'd rather be...", what does yours say?
Writing in public? I feel very self-conscious. I know that as writers, we should all have this "screw you, I'm driven by art to write" mentality, which in its very arrogance would demand respect from non-writers, but truthfully, I can't be that arrogant. Oh, I may try looking the part by turning myself into a hermit, but all that would grant me will be strange stares by passersby.
What I'm deathly afraid of is that someone I know who's in science will stumble onto my little hobby and not understand. Scientists should be solely obsessed with science. No one really says it, but I always get this impression that if you're not stuck in lab for every minute of your life, you're not truly dedicated to science. But damn it, I'm not that single-minded. I would like to be a little more complicated than a simple slave to science. Feynman, for instance, played the bongos and womanized in his spare time.
Well, I don't play the bongos and I certainly don't womanize, but I do write. But maybe I'm really content with this little neurosis about being accused of not being serious when I'm occupied with this compulsive hobby. I certainly gain a bit of elicit pleasure when I'm hiding behind a textbook in the laundromat to take notes when I'm actually writing instead.
Scientists Planning to Make New Form of Life. You know, with an arrogant guy like Venter spearheading this project, I'm not surprised. This is indeed a cool idea but it requires a certain amount of machismo (not to mention many sleepless nights) to pull off and brush aside the criticisms that these scientists are "playing God". But to some extent, aren't we all gods to our own fate already?
As I walked home tonight, the sky above was inky and the air thick and misty. Even on the sidewalk, I didn't feel quite safe. Fast drivers could still mow me over.
Links: Global goofs: U.S. youth can't find Iraq. This just makes me real mad. These kids are in my age group and they can't even find the Pacific Ocean? I had to memorize all 95 counties in Tennessee. I had to learn the location of all the countries in the world from Southeast Asia/Polynesia down to those ridiculously tiny but long-named islands in the Caribbean. And all of this was before high school. All that education gone to waste. Dark Passage. A fascinating yet morbid look into urban ruins. The Internet Yodel Course. Practice makes perfect and makes the people who live with you think you've lost your head. What Your Children Really Want This Holiday Season. It's odd. I don't remember my previous Christmases very clearly. I don't even remember what I did on last year's Christmas day except that I blogged rather incoherently about movies and books (which were borrowed from the library, mind you, not bought). I always found the holiday highly disappointing. When I was younger, I was jealous of other kids who had huge Christmas trees and presents piled three feet high. Now the commercialized shopping season is making me feel quite cynical. I don't blame my parents. They spent money on me in other ways (like paying for music lessons). And now I'm just a poor student who can hardly afford sleeping in let alone getting presents.
1. Chad has been writing/talking about alternative forms of government. What's your take on a "new government?"
What sort of new government? If it's based on a business model as Chad mentioned in his post, I agree, it won't work due to the monopoly problem. If you want me to think up a new form of government, I'd say I don't have a clue. (As in, I don't have a clue on how to think up of a good alternative government.)
2. The last Harry Potter film ignited a "whirlwind of controversy." What's your opinion; is Harry Potter dangerous to children?
No. I think children understand that this is fantasy and not something real. Unless someone invents an anti-grav car real soon, we're not going to have any enchanted automobiles taking to the sky. Religious zealots just need something popular to latch themselves onto to make themselves feel good and justified.
There are plenty of other children fantasy books out there like Harry Potter that don't have Christian influences (i.e. Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia) but are plenty more insidious from a Christian viewpoint if they even bothered to read them. In Tamora Pierce'sThe Song of the Lioness tetrology, there's some pretty heavy-handed paganism going on. Garth Nix's Sabriel/Lirael cycle deals with an alternate view of death. And in the His Dark Materials trilogy Philip Pullman challenges with Christianity outright (as well as messing around with science).
3. What do you think of this ("What would Jesus drive?")?
A noble cause, but I don't see an environmental problem as a moral problem. It needs to be solved via science and common sense, not preaching.
I thought of myself as the navy blue polar bear, trudging through several inches of sticky snow. I did not wear boots--and all the worse--as my toes slowly congealed and became numb. My footsteps crunched as I broke through the pristine white layers, jamming my feet into the cold ground below. I watched where I stepped. Where it was white, it could be slippery. Where the snow met the road, there was unsightly wet brown mush.
When the snow ended, I looked up, blinking as if I had just broken out of a trance. A yellow and white monster rumbled up the road, exuding exhaust and splashing mush. I tucked my nose under my collar as a brief bitter wind trailed in its wake.
The recent posts at Jaded Ju and Tiger Cafe are excellent observations into how far racial integration has gone and how far it has yet to go. Instead of speculating about other people's motives and feelings (of which I am no authority of) I will offer my own thoughts on the matter.
As a general minority yet academic majority, I do not feel like I fit in anywhere at all. I grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods so for most of my life I have felt different and ostracized (although my reclusive nature probably accounted for a lot of that too). I could not even relate to the few other Asians around. They were the token Asians, popular and highly competitive. And I couldn't even fit in that mold.
When I was thrust into a situation where I was part of the majority, I felt like I had been dumped in a mirror universe. Everyone looked like me, but they didn't believe the same things I did, didn't wear the same things, didn't like the same things, and certainly didn't act like me. I was puzzled as to why the Asians would want to lump so closely together that they excluded everyone else. I was excluded because my behavior did not conform with theirs. (If I want to be honest with myself, I feel like I don't look like the other Asians enough to be accepted. I'm not coy, thin, or pretty. That's probably better in the long run, but geez, I feel like I'm living in a vacuum.)
It's not that I don't have friends. I do. Only that my friends are of the more eclectic mix--where communicating ideas is a stronger motivator than sticking to people just like them. I'm torn between the two conflicting imperatives: should I head on ingrate myself into a group of people suspicious of others in order to fascilitate integration or should I just avoid those not-so-forward-thinking people and stick with the people who are like me? Both don't sit well with me. Although integration is a noble goal, I'm never sure if deep-seated prejudices are changed. As for the people who are like me, they're really not like me.
Integration not only should be about race, but about who you are. I'm tired of being labeled as the chicken in the flock of cuckoos wherever I go. I'm going to roost on my own lonely branch.
A science link: What's in That Bottle of Jack Daniel's? A Chemistry Mystery. Sort of like the European version of Kombucha (unfortunately, I don't remember which issue of the New Scientist I read it in) where a 19th century biologist meticulously separated the jelly glob to determine the two symbiotic bacteria that made the brew.
In a room with three king-sized beds, a woman writes a letter. The letter itself is three pages long, each page the size of the beds. The paper is black and the lettering is a pinkish-red, but the words are nothing I recognize. Each letter or word is an intricate pictogram of spirals and dashes. At the head of each bed is a window. Late afternoon sunlight falls upon the black parchment, partially bleaching the letters.
"What is it?" I ask, motioning to the mysterious words.
"A cursed reply," the woman answers.
A man stands at the doorway, agitated and nervous. He paces back and forth, occasionally glimpsing at the letter, but then looks away, shuddering. The woman draws out white translucent parchment to lay over the pages of the letter. The sky outside grows dark and the man hurridly draws the curtains. The only light now comes from the open doorway and a small lamp on a table nearby.
The woman hands me an instrument with a long wooden handle that is etched like an intricately carved bedpost. At the end is a hollowed out brass bulb. Inside this bulb, there is warm, white substance that looks like sugar or salt. She takes a brush, loaded with red dye and stirrs it with the white substance until the resulting mixture looks like hot red wax.
"You must help me copy this letter."
But as I raise the brush, ready to paint the white parchment, the windows fly open, extinguishing the room's light. Bluish-white specters swamp inside, howling. When they touch me I feel pain.
* * *
People have said that skim milk spoils faster than whole milk and that whole milk spoils faster than cream. And butter is practically indestructible. But whole milk supposedly contains more nutrients for bacteria than skim milk--so shouldn't the whole milk spoil faster (I wonder what Einstein would say about it)? I hope somebody with time on their hands will perform this experiment to confirm this.
Anyway, I found some information on how long dairy products should be kept if they are refrigerated: Hard Cheese - 3-4 weeks Soft Cheese - 1 week Cottage Cheese - 1 week Cream Cheese - 2 weeks Whipped Cream - 1 month Milk - 7 days ice cream - 2-4 months Butter - 1-3 months Buttermilk - 7-14 days Half and Half - 3-4 days Eggnog - 3-5 days Margarine - 4-5 months Pudding - 2 days Sour Cream - 7-21 days Yogurt - 7-14 days
I don't believe in paying for scientific information. This is supposed to be stuff that everyone is able to access from the rocket scientist to a kid in school. Sure, providing free information will allow some unscrupulous person to use it for ill, but I find the alternative even more frightening. What if we had to pay for finding something simple like how to fix a bike? Companies would profit but the population would become mindless dummies. Common knowledge would be thrown back into the Dark Ages.
More sites targeted for shutdown. A commercial publisher has been successful at shutting down PubScience, a site that provided free access to scientific and technical articles. I personally think this is the beginning of the end, unless people become more active in attempting to stop it. I was suspicious about their claim that they wouldn't go after PubMed (my lifeblood!) next so I went to the website to reassure myself that it was still there.
And don't think authors of scientific papers get any money from publishing. They actually lose money. So it'll be worse all around because researchers also wouldn't have their work exposed to the largest possible audience.
I know you've got something to say. Everyone has something to say, and I'm not denying you the right to say it. Ideas should be communicated for the benefit to yourself and others. However, I do not think you need to punctuate your speech with expletives to get the point across. There are times when expletives can be used quite effectively (such as when you slam your finger in the car door or your mother-in-law unexpectedly drops in for a visit) but I do not think it is appropriate to put them in every other word that comes out of your mouth.
I am not a prude. I'm certainly not shocked when someone utters a dirty word and I'm definitely not above using them if the occasion arises. But, I feel that you should only use these words on particular instances and not while you're talking about boring things like the mortgage or getting the oil changed. People who use "f**k" in 50% of their speech are like the valley girls who use the word "like" in similar fashion. I'm sure you wouldn't want to be classified as a valley girl.
Tornadoes in Middle Tennessee. And I thought my days were bad. Yeah, I know this is several days late, but yikes, those were perilously close to where my parents live. I remember back in high school we got out of school early when the weather got really bad. I think the closest I got to a tornado was when one passed over my hometown and razed the neighboring town instead.
Please do not slurp the rice. Or the chicken. Or even the pizza. I know you may be enjoying your lunch immensely, but you're ruining mine by making me think of car tires squealing, squelching shoes, and gunky industrial waste (as well as some other unpalatable things which I won't bother mentioning). Please do not make kissy noises with any food that comes in contact with your mouth. Please, for your health and my sanity.
Yours Truly, Sya
P.S. Do not even think about crunching those fish bones.
1. Is there something you find fascinating/interesting that you'd like to share (oh so 70's)?
I overheard someone say that what's wrong with the younger generation today is that kids today feel like they have an entitlement to do things. An entitlement to do what? Stay up late? Eat junk food? Watch television all day while their parents work? Or is it something more insidious?
I'm sure some kids are spoiled, but that makes them no different than kids who were spoiled, say thirty years ago. Styles and culture may change, but kids are always the same. I don't doubt that the adults during our parents' childhoods were also saying that the younger generation was going down the tubes because all of them felt like they had an entitlement to do something.
Oh yes, and I found this: Calculating Doomsday. It's not as morbid as you think.
2. What's your latest accomplishment/achievement? I know, I know you got up this morning, but what else?
I wrote some more of my novel. I'm beginning to get bored of the plot, I'm behind the progress that I had made last year, and I just got a new idea for another story about whiskey and grouse. But hey, I'm still plugging along and that's all that counts.
3. What do you see yourself doing 10 years from now?
On the day I turned four, my parents took me out. The ground was covered in brown and yellow leaves and the air stung, both my cheeks and my lungs. I wore a coat the color of a cat's green eyes. The Chinese symbol for good luck and fortune were embroidered on the pockets.
I wished it snowed.
It was a small town and I walked with my parents to main street. The wind rustled in my father's hair, musing it. "Tornado hair" he would call it. My mother carried the squirming bundle that was my sister. I stepped carefully on the paved stones. Someone in my kindergarten class had told me the rhyme, "Step on a crack, break your mother's back."
The main street was a ghost town, but I thought it normal, as the stores closed every Sunday. The street ran down a hill, stopping at a park. And there was the pale St. Lawrence and gray, cold clouds. An elderly lady in a dark cloak and black cap stood at the corner with a box. Wisps of her white hair escaped her braid, but she didn't stop to brush it away from her face. Instead, she reached into the box to give away red velvet poppies and silver pins.
My father helped me pin the poppy to the breast of my jacket. I reached up to touch it. The poppy was fuzzy and faintly scratchy under my finger tips. The old woman's eyes were rheumy, but they were sharp. Her hands were gnarled like the pair of oaks next to our house. My hand wandered down the smooth fabric of my coat and finally to my warm pockets.
This has got to be the most depressing birthday. Ever. Taking a five hour exam at an ungodly hour of the morning and running on one hour of pseudo-sleep is not healthy.
It's exactly one year since I have switched over to a blog format. And since I started out by complaining, I'll do so again. (Well, I always have something to complain about but I don't always vent.)
I hate answering the phone. I don't hate talking on the phone, per se, but I'm always annoyed when it's for someone else because it reminds me of my lack of social life. Or maybe it's not a lack, really. Maybe it's just indicative of my roommates' hyperactive social life. I had to run up and down the stairs at least ten times yelling at my roommates to take the phone. And this was yesterday alone within the space of two hours.
Somebody needs to get a phone and plug it downstairs so I don't feel so bad ignoring the phone when I'm feeling quite perverse (and especially when the phone rings after midnight). And nobody should look at me when thinking about purchasing a phone. 99 out of 100, the calls are not for me.
Links: NaNoWriMo on NPR. All you Chris Baty fans can now swoon over his voice as well as those peppy e-mails he sends to all the Wrimos. Blog Sisters. I have no idea why I never noticed this site before. There's lots of interesting discussions pertinent to anyone although it's written only by female bloggers. No mushy stuff. I promise. The Waypath Project. I don't want to be pigeon-holed. Even if it's by an impersonal search engine.
Suppose you sent out resumes to companies, all of them identical except that 50% had the name Brian Smith and the other 50% had the name Kathrine Smith. Which fictional person would get hired more often? Would it surprise you if everyone answered that the male counterpart would get the job more often?
Early this morning, I went to a lecture by Dr. Bernice Sandler on the "chilly climate" or sexual discrimination in the classroom. Now this isn't about blatant abuses like lewd jokes. Everyone knows those are wrong. But it was research on the more subtle differences in the treatment of males and females that got me thinking.
Take for instance the reception between female and male lecturers. A study found that the audience looked at their watches more often when a female spoke than when a male spoke. In discussions, females were interrupted more often and when questioned, they were trivalized. In a study of class participation, roughly 30% of participation was female. When this percentage was raised to 40%, the males felt threatened, i.e. they perceived that female class participation had increased to 90%.
There were many more such statistics. Have you ever wondered why there is a roughly 1:10 women to men ratio in faculty hired in most universities (sometimes the ratio is worse) even when the number of qualified people in either gender is about equal? Dr. Sandler gave out one possible theory--people like to hire clones of themselves. Academic circles used to be painfully elitist. The good old boys would bring in another good old boy through their connections. Nowadays, it still happens despite the struggle to hire more diverse candidates.
The predominantly male atmosphere is undeniably quite daunting. Even though there is no overt nastiness, someone once remarked to me that there was just simply too much testosterone. There are plenty of exceptions, but men usually use confrontational tactics when they want something done. This, people accept. But when women act the same way, they are labeled as "bitches."
This is not about being treated better. This is about being treated equally. I would never want to be sweet-talked to or slammed. I want the straight facts. And this is not just about education or job hunting. This subtle discrimination is everywhere. Many people have said that whenever a woman wants to buy a car, even if it's only for herself, she should bring a man with her to negotiate the deal because the dealer would be more pleasant bargaining with a man. It's a sad state of events when I can't even go to a car dealership by myself.
I must make an entry, yet I draw a blank. How can I even try to top the excellent graphical design the previous journallers have poured their sweat and time into? I hardly have time. I can't draw. I can hardly cut and paste without making a large mess. I don't even have any ideas.
1. When was the last time you really had fun? What were you doing? Are you someone who can have fun alone?
Last weekend, I attended a cider party where I got to help press some apples. I found it interesting because I've never done it before (I find most new things quite interesting). And yes, I can have fun alone. I have less need to be social than your average Joe.
2. Are you going to vote today, and do you know the major differences between the candidates? Does the balance in the senate and the house figure into your choice?
No. From what I've heard, both candidates are equally bad.
3. Is there something extraordinary going on that you've failed to notice?
Yeah. Most of the outside world. I can get incredibly self-absorbed at times and when I realize it, I'm appalled.
I say that music such a part of my life that I can't imagine living without it. Yet it's precisely what I do when I feel like I'm really living and not just moldering in a lecture hall like a dusty coatrack that's been forgotten in the corner.
Fictional lives on screen are always accompanied by a soundtrack. And I wonder, do I have a soundtrack? I can't think of a song or a series of songs that could ever portray me. When I'm remembering something, I do not remember music. I get images and voices and smells and tastes, but no music. I don't even remember listening to the music I've played at concerts. I only recall the physical sensations of moving my fingers and reading the printed music.
Music is nice. I feel quite pleasant when I'm listening to the latest tune. But music isn't living. Living is being in the moment, not remembering what you did when you were six or thinking about what you're going to have for dinner or even anticipation, but being completely aware of here and now.
That said, I don't think being lucid is all that different from being blasted by loud techno.
I really shouldn't be procrastinating: Finding Nemo. The trailer from Pixar's newest movie. There are fish. And lots of them. Which era in time are you? I'm in the fifties. Apparently I'm old fashioned. Design your own webzine: A practical guide. Which can also be applied to personal homepages. Too bad the majority of amateur web designers don't take the advice. Hereinmyhead.com. It's a Tori Amos fansite. I stumbled across it when I was looking for info on A Sorta Fairytale (link is to a streaming video).
And today I found: Emotional Intelligence Quotient. I'm not sure how people can equate smartness or stupidity to emotions. I think it's more a matter of common sense. And don't worry if you don't do so well. I screwed up on those questions about anger management (probably because I usually brush that emotion aside rather than examining it). Besides, the "right" answers seem more than a tad too clinical for real life. Blogdex. I just noticed today that Blogdex has a new look. The new navigation for citations seem a little wonky to me though. Tales from the Land of Dragons. Traditional Chinese painting.
The cider press is a wooden contraption about four feet high. A small box containing the grinder is connected at the top. The apples are dumped in here and the handle (connected outside of the box) turns counterclockwise to crush the apples. The resulting fruit bits drop down into a barrel where the bottom is non-existent except for a stretched piece of cheese cloth.
A few wooden slabs are fitted on top of the barrel and a rotating hinge from above is turned until the slabs crush the apples. The juice is strained through the cheese cloth and runs onto a wooden tray at the bottom of the press which has a hole. The liquid drips through this hole to be collected onto a pan.
But we're not done yet! The juice is then further filtered through a pushkin which is basically a funnel with more cheese cloth. The remainder of the apples, called the mash, is then either used as compost or set out as deer bait for overzealous hunters.
"In colonial times people would use this for the cider," the maker of the press told us. "Unfortunately, they had no way of keeping the cider from fermenting throughout the winter. The more wealthy of those times would have a pint of cider in the morning with breakfast and they would keep drinking it for the other meals and other times. So that's why the founding fathers were smashed when they framed the constitution."
Well, you learn something new everyday.
Update: Apparently those dumplings were a "success". They disappeared rather quickly after they were set out for consumption.
It was chilly so I took my hat and my gloves and my coat that makes me look like a navy blue polar bear. It was pitch dark and snowing. And I stopped.
A horde of silly undergrads inadequately dressed for the weather (some of them half naked) flooded the streets, screaming and waving their arms in a frenzied mob. They were led by a kilted man playing the bagpipes--the pied piper, perhaps, leading overgrown children astray. It was a parade in the middle of the night. Elderly band members in red caps sat leisurely on a moving platform as they blasted away a Sousa tune. Alumni held up signs proclaiming their year. And snooty women in high heels and mink coats stood around looking rather bewildered.
On the Green, people were standing past the swath of yellow caution tape. Paramedics and firemen waited on the sidelines. A bonfire consumed the center, the fuel built the previous day stretching twenty to thirty feet in the air, and the flames now leaping twice as high. It was an inferno of bright orange and black, the heat and the cold mixing so that the fire spawned white vortices of steam. The flickering embers mixed with the falling snow.
I figured I'd been transported to a primitive village--the villagers all coming out to celebrate some barbaric ritual--which made me forget about scallions and carrots and sesame oil, the reasons why I was even outside in the first place. Fortunately when I shoved my hands in my pockets and found a scrap of paper, I realized I had made a grocery list in case I did forget.
Linkage: WordWeb. The free thesaurus and dictionary for Windows. I still like the paper version better. Steamed Chinese Dumplings. I'm going to attempt to make these tomorrow. The problem is, I'm not going to be the one eating them all. Geez, I wish we had made it to the Asian food store yesterday instead of getting lost in the backwoods of New Hampshire. Donald Roller Wilson. His paintings are really weird. Monkeys galore.
