Cooking victory

Working hard this week. I'm trying to catch up with my finances and not put anything on the credit card, and I had an outrageously small amount of money left over for living expenses for this 2 weeks, but I've been trying to live on it. The main focus this week is to make my own food. I had lunch out today because a client took the whole company out to fancy lunch in Milson's Point, just at the foot of the harbour bridge, so I didn't have to bring lunch today, but every other day I have.

I'm feeling the strain of developing new habits. Eating at my desk and not having any change of scenery during the day results in a kind of madness. Sometimes it's like a work trance that lifts when you head home, sometimes it's like prison. But I've noticed that no one else seems to leave for any extended period during the day, so it must have been strange all this time, me disappearing for up to an hour every day. They probably all know this trick of saving money.

Tonight I really didn't want to cook anything. I even stopped at my usual pub for a beer and cheese and onion chips - which I sort of now regret but needed at the time. I had all sorts of alternative thoughts - go get sushi, go get Thai, go get noodles. Get a bagel and have a bagel and an apple. Forget the whole thing and go to bed. But I had defrosted my unreliable fridge overnight (when the fridge part gets to basically room temperature and you have to put the beers in the freezer for a while before drinking them, it's time), and had two chicken breasts that had defrosted (slowly, over 24 hours, as they recommend), and I didn't want to throw them away, did I, because of the focus on budget, so I had to cook them up. I was just going to cut them in cubes and cook them and freeze them for a stir-fry later, but then I had an idea - chicken salad!

The CWA Cookbook didn't have an entry on it, but Mom's old Colorado Cache had four. I sort of used intuition validated by their recipes and made up a recipe myself! I cooked the chicken breasts on the stove, in a pan, with olive oil, and they turned out, a bit browned on the outsides, but really well. I mixed them with grapes, celery and walnuts, then some low-fat mayo (not really mayo, that mayo substitute they have here), and then I added a sprinkle of chopped green onion. Brilliant! And I was sort of not very hungry so I packed up most of it for lunch tomorrow and just had what was left.

And felt a euphoric rush of virtue.

Maybe there's something to this cooking thing after all. I will keep you posted.

The iPod Alphabet Project

So, after nearly wearing out my 5 Star list played on shuffle on my iPod during walks to work and back, and having a dearth of new music because of budget-watching, it occurred to me a few months ago to go "Shuffle:Off/Music/Songs" and listen to all the songs on my iPod in order, alphabetically.

The first few all started with apostrophes - 'Neath a Cold Gray Tomb of Stone by Hank Williams III was first, and then several versions of 'Round Midnight. Then the songs that start with parenthetical phrases like (Love Is Like A) Heatwave, or (He'll Never Be An) Old Man River by Tism. Then all the numbers, then finally got to A.

Some of the best passages were the songs that started with "Ain't," "Baby," "Bad", "Blue," and "Burn". Very rock and roll-y, blues-inspired of course, although still with quite a bit of variety. Some passages get a bit tedious, like the "Adagio" section, and when recently two Neil Diamond songs came back to back (Brooklyn Roads and Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show).

I'm up to C. The song that's on right now is Caramel by Blur from the album 13. It's very atmospheric, an experimental sort of track, maybe album filler, a bit. This is song number 682 of 4976 in my full collection. That seems a very high percentage to be through already and only be starting the C's, but then there were all those songs that start with punctuation or numbers at the start so that throws it off I suppose, and then so many songs are called "A something" (38, including all the Spanish ones where the A means "to"). And all the really good rock and roll words seem to start with B (see list above, also "Big" and "Black" and "Bleed" and "Blood" and "Bring"). So it's probably not unusual.

But tonight I had a new record. I often have multiple copies of a song, especially because I have so many Triple J Hottest 100 compilations, but tonight I found I had one song, the same recording of the song by the same band, four times. The song was:

Cannonball
by the Breeders

on:

1. The Breeders' own album Last Splash
2. Rage - the Songs Most Chosen by Rage Guest Programmers
3. Shock Records 13th Anniversary Collection
4. Triple J Hottest 100 from 1993

Husky update

Tonight I was walking home from work and passed the house on High Holborn where they had lost the dog last week. I saw a gigantic sign with a photo, and thought, oh no, a memorial, but in fact it said, "SHESHA IS HOME. Thanks to everyone for all your help in bringing her back."

I'm so delighted! Such a relief! All us neighbors thought she had been stolen, she's such an impressive and striking looking dog (one brown eye, one ice blue). But she's home! Fantastic.

Not quite spring

Today was the first day that I believed that spring would eventually come. It seems like it's been raining and/or bitter cold for as long as I can remember. I've never seen my interlocutor (Philorum and Dialectic) without a big coat on. But today you could feel that spring is just around the corner - spring, the very most glorious time of year in Sydney, the time they put the Olympics on. The flowers burst forth and the sky is brilliant blue and the air positively sings with vibrance and happiness.

Not yet. But soon. Today I knew something had changed because I got half-way up High Holborn before I realised I hadn't buttoned my coat (I was just near the house with the shrine of a lit candle, water bowl and bone, and a poster with a photo of their lost dog, a husky who used to sleep on the porch all the time, day and night, and it apparently disappeared on Tuesday afternoon and it's so sad that I left them a note). And tonight I stopped by the pub near work where I often stop for a schooner of New and a packet of cheese and onion chips on the way home, and instead of the sign on the door saying, "Come on in! Warm inside," which I've pushed through on some nights when the rain was bucketing down in silver sheets at the edges of the awning, instead of that they had all the windows wide open and the big doors out to the balcony, and I went out there, with my coat unbuttoned, and had my drink and read the New Yorker as usual. It will be very nice in the summer there! I look forward to a drink out on the balcony instead of tucked in a table in the corner. I think it will still be a very easy place to have a drink after work by oneself.

There's three rounds to go before semi's in the footy (although my captain just got suspended for the Knights' last two games (bye in the last round) for swearing at a touch judge). Na-no-wri-mo coming up in November, when I was going to have my novel finished (d'oh!). A Christmas feeling due soon after that. Beaches. Light out when you leave work. Swimming? Warm walks on green grass. The earth turning.

Someone once said that the reason you get suicide-threateners to wait three months before they act is that within three months the seasons always change and you get a new perspective on things.

Not yet. But it will be spring soon.

Another candidate

Talking at Philorum last night about living a good life and "wanting what you have" and materialism, another candidate for defining the self occurred to me - the doctrine that "I am my stuff." I have probably had big moments of believing this. I am a collector, you know. I have been my record collection. When I got dumped and moved, I was all the detritus of the relationship that I was sentimentally clinging to, like the Jag (btw, if you're interested in a 1971 XJ6 Series 1 with a Series 2 engine, leave a comment here and I'll get in touch!).

So, "I am my stuff" could be "I am what I collect," or it could be "I am the designer labels I wear." I had a sad trip recently to the floor at David Jones where all the Alessi stuff is, moping past all of it and thinking, "I will never have any of you. I will amount to nothing. My life is over." (Feeling sorry for myself because discretionary cash is a bit constrained at the moment.) So, yes, I have probably had moments of defining myself as my stuff.

Besides the typical knee-jerk anti-materialist hippy arguments against this, the potential problems are vulnerability, because while you can take your values and your knowledge around with you in your head, stuff can sometimes be harmed. And just having a place to put it all! (Jag = $220 per month for the storage garage)

More on the meaning of life

There was an extraordinary meeting of the Philorum Dialectic yesterday which turned out to be a 12-hour marathon with just the convener and me. I've already mentioned my feelings about Philorum in general (see below), so I'll just report that we made some progress on the meaning of life.

We broke the question down into two - what defines a self, and what gives that self value (in other words, what constitutes a well-lived life). We floated a number of candidates to answer the first question:

• biology (you are everything inside your skin)
• achievements
• values
• ancestors (this might be more important in other cultures)
• relationships (this is very prominent on the Huggies web site, where all the members identify themselves in the forum as "Kaylah's mum" or "Tyson's mum" etc.

We started with achievements, which has been on my mind lately because of my old interest in Existentialism, but followed it through to find some flaws - if you define yourself through your achievements, you have to value those achievements, and either you stick to means-ends reasoning and have to come up with a overarching end to everything so usually turn to god or somebody, or you turn inside and rely on yourself to give value to your achievements, but then there's no objective ground for your value and everything is equally valuable and you end up paralysed with nihilistic angst.

So we started on values as a better candidate. My interlocutor's claim was that the purpose of life is to clarify your values and act on them as much as possible. He defined values as whatever you like. And a background debate was whether your self was discrete or was necessarily scaffolded out into the world and other people's selves. He resisted the scaffolded view because it threatened his individualism and belief in liberty. I questioned his definition of values as whatever you like because surely values are more than just personal preferences, like taste in food. '

So to test all those things we came up with the idea of someone on a desert island, raised by coconuts. There aren't even any animals around (to keep the story uncomplicated). We agreed the person would have a limited self, what with no social interaction or books to read. We agreed the person would have a limited set of values based on their limited experience (this person probably wouldn't have a view on whether gay marriage should be allowed, for example, because in his life it would never come up and he would never have to work out what he thought about it). In fact, his life might consist mostly of the decision whether he liked the taste of berries better, or the taste of coconut.

I came around to thinking that our island guy could have a self and a set of values and the potential for a well-lived live, in a reduced way to someone embedded in a social milieu, but not different in kind. My interlocutor came around to thinking that no, to be a full self someone had to exist in a social context, there were essetial parts of being a self that you couldn't get on the island alone. So, we swapped sides over dinner.

I think what convinced me was the point he made by saying, "Say he finds out he hates the taste of berries. If he spent all his time eating berries, that would be a bad way to live his life. That would not be a well-lived life." Well, no. Knowing that he doesn't value berries (even in the trivial way of not liking the taste of them), it would be a very bad-lived life if he didn't act in accordance with that value. Finding out the things he liked, even if it was just food and activities like swimming and things, and then living in accordance with what he found out, well, that actually started to sound like a pretty good life to me.

I'm sure there will be more on this.

postscript: I told my sister about the marathon discussion and said, "We made some progress on the meaning of life," and she started laughing hysterically, and realising how it must have sounded I continued, "If we get our grant approved and can get some lab assistants in, we should have something commercial available in a few years." She laughed harder...but we'll see who's laughing in a few years! :-) Ellen Watson, CEO of Meaning of Life, Inc.

Ok Go - Here It Goes Again

This is my new favorite thing in the world. My new favorite band, of course my new favorite video. I found the link in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald and stayed up until 3am watching it over and over, and also everything else online I could find by Ok Go.

Four guys, eight treadmills. Single shot, single take. Genius!

This is so incredibly inspiring. It's a great human achievement - it is really really creative, shows an incredibly lateral mind by the choreographer, must have taken unfathomably long to rehearse. They are just ordinary guys, but they dance really well, as together as an Olympic synchronised swimming team, and everyone at exactly the same angles and timing. And the song is good too! And the fact that the whole thing is kind of frivolous and silly makes it even the more inspiring. The fact that people are out there who will put this kind of effort and quality into something silly and exhuberant, and the fact that 2 million other people watch it for free online and email the link to their friends, it makes me love living in the world right now.

Have a look for yourself!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI

There's no such thing as casual sex

Quote from my very wise sister:

"People are just sticky and no damn good to get on you!"

No, don't worry, it's just a metaphor!