Everything will be fine.

God, what a miserable few days of weather!

The heat is overwhelming. I wake up every morning feeling like I am being smothered. I want October.

I did have a yummy salad - asparagus, snow peas, and radishes in a dijon vinaigrette. Mmm. Next time I think I'll add some pasta.

Summertime and the livin' is easy.

And cheap!

There are many things I despise about where I live - the weather, the pretentiousness, the obsession with outward appearance, the irresponsible consumption and so much more.

However, I love summer produce. For $7.48 I just purchased:

3 cantaloupe

3 honeydew

2 pounds of green beans

5 pounds of peaches

20 pounds of potatoes

1 pint blueberries

3 pints raspberries

1 pint blackberries

Hooray!

I mentioned to a friend earlier when talking about food that there are a few food items which I think are always awesome. Sandwiches, "dumplings" (and I use this term loosely to mean "stuff inside of some sort of carby goodness", pierogi, calzone, gyoza, samosas, burritos, etc., and yes, having gone to culinary school I am fully aware of the actual definition of a dumpling, but so fucking what?), pasta and jacket potatoes are pretty much the best things ever. Just about everything is good in one (or all!) of these forms.

That said, there is absolutely no excuse for what I am currently eating, but cold leftover spaghetti sandwiches are tasty.

The hardest part.

I honestly have no idea how I feel about this.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

To assist you in eating more salad, I provide you with the following:

2-3 cups cooked rice, barley, spelt, pasta, potatoes, couscous, noodles, etc.

1-2 cups veggies and/or fruit - raw, roasted, steamed, blanched, frozen or even canned if so inclined.

1/4-1/2 cup "goodies" - cheese, olives, capers, dried fruits, dried veggies, nuts, marinated artichoke hearts, hard-boiled egg, meat, sun-dried tomatoes, avocado, herbs

3 tablespoons - 1/4 cup dressing - vinaigrette, barbeque sauce, pesto, citrus juice with oil, dijon mustard, your favorite bottled dressing, peanut butter

Think about flavor combinations you enjoy. If you like mexican food, make a salad with a spanish rice base, add black beans, corn, tomatoes, and a chipotle-lime dressing. If you like mediterranean flavors, mix couscous, fava or garbanzo beans, cucumber, tomato, chopped parsley and or/mint, and toss with a dressing made with tahini, olive oil and garlic. If you like greek, use couscous, olives, feta cheese, cucumber, and a dressing incorporating lemon, oregano, and olive oil.

See? Salad is easy.

Thought is suspect.

I don't post specific recipes here, but tonight's concoction was so damn good I couldn't resist sharing. Why am I posting this in the wee hours? Because it is so bloody hot here I can only cook in the wee hours.

Inspired by the bowl of key limes I had sitting on my counter along with some asparagus I picked up at the farmer's market this weekend I decided to modify a recipe for this japanese soba dish I saw once - and though I remembered the gist of.

The dressing:

2 or so tablespoons of soy sauce

2 or so tablespoons hoisin sauce

1-2 teaspoons of lime juice

1 teaspoon of agave (You could use sugar)

Sriracha to taste. I probably used 2 teaspoons or so.

(A tablespoon or so of peanutbutter would be an awesome addition to the sauce.)

So, I didn't have soba noodles on hand, but I wanted noodles, so I boiled up about 1/2 a pound of spaghetti, then rinsed under cold water, tossed with a splash of canola oil and set aside. I steamed 2 bundles of asparagus and then chopped into bite sized pieces. I seeded and chopped up a sweet red pepper, and then chopped a small zucchini into bite sized pieces. I mixed all the veggies with the noodles, poured the sauce over and mixed well.

Yum!

A sound that rushes over me.

I enjoyed the Coldplay concert - didn't think I would. In fact, I rather expected it to make my ears bleed. The tribute to Michael Jackson was unexpected and rather sweet. I think G had a good time, and that was the point. Her first concert being ANYTHING other than The Jonas Brothers will be appreciated greatly later in life.

Warm fuzzies: Souvenirs available included re-usable water bottles, canvas bags and bracelets from Made With Love.

Agitation: The venue was exclusively Coca Cola - and Coca Cola is evil. I'd wager that most of you have not read Mark Thomas' Belching Out the Devil, but if you should do so, I'd wager most of you would make an effort to never again consume a Coca Cola product - or soda in general, for that matter.

Live the unexamined life.

I remember learning a song when I was in school (no secret that I went to private religious school - if you know anything about the California public school system in the 1980s you know why) that still irritates me to this day. The only lyric I remember is this: "I'm a k-i-d, I'm a kid of a king, I'm a k-i-d not a monkey!" What the hell is that? Seriously.

I honestly don't remember anything about my science classes - except for one really cool biology teacher in junior high who, while a religious man, didn't attempt to shove his views down our throats. In a religious school that takes balls. Hell, this was a school where one of the most popular teachers ever was shunned because it was discovered she'd had a child out of wedlock. Oh the horror! Someone with such questionable morals obviously couldn't be trusted with the care of young and impressionable minds. <--- that was sarcasm, in case you didn't catch it.

Belief systems are great. I don't go out of my way to verbally eviscerate anyone's belief system (okay, well maybe Tom Cruise's - but who doesn't?), but I do get huffy when people have the audacity to espouse the scientific validity of "intelligent design." Science, my ass.

Fair play though, to Dr. Francis Collins who is a brilliant scientific mind, and also a theist and doesn't find any conflict between the two worlds. Kenneth Connor, however, can kiss my ass.

It's just a dying romance.

I've decided it is impossible to be in a bad mood when partaking of ripe summer nectarines. Mmm. Every week I go to the local farmer's market and pick up my produce for the week, and every week I am delighted to discover something new and delicious. This week I met a vendor selling "Super Sweet and Ugly Peaches" - made me laugh. Talk about truth in advertising! It's no secret I've gone back to my vegetarian ways, much easier to do in summer when the produce is abundant and not so easy to do the rest of the year when I can't rely on the traditional staples - legumes, soy, etc. because of having to limit my protein intake.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am well into the slow food movement. I was a disciple of Alice Waters and her ilk long before it was fashionable to be so. Watching the growth of this movement has pleased me. I was thinking about my food influences recently and this is what I concluded:

Thomas Keller is a genius, an inspiration and an Icon, Alice Waters and Mollie Katzen have had the most influence on how I shop and how I cook on a daily basis - but Peter Reinhart is my god.

In the 1918 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer wrote,

"BREAD is the most important article of food, and history tells of its use thousands of years before the Christian era . . . The study of bread making is of no slight importance, and deserves more attention than it receives.

Considering its great value, it seems unnecessary and wrong to find poor bread on the table; and would that our standard might be raised as high as that of our friends across the water ! Who does not appreciate the loaf produced by the French baker, who has worked months to learn the art of bread making?"

When a certain person (who shall remain nameless) first moved over here, his quest for "proper bread" was seemingly endless. I myself received many a queer look from people when I stood in bakery aisles poking loaves of bread trying to find one with a proper crust. (Neither one of us ever succeeded in the quest, by the way.) So, I bake. Fair enough, I did study culinary arts - so it would be appalling if I didn't, but that's not the point at all.

According to Fannie, "Bread is made from flour of wheat, or other cereals, by addition of water, salt, and a ferment." There's no polysorbate 60 or 80, propylene glycol or corn syrup in that list.

I understand the appeal of convenience, but at what cost?

It's not about win or lose.

Yeah yeah, I haven't posted in years. I've always been terrible about blogging - and by the way, how is that even a verb? It's like people using "party" as a verb. Eugh! But, anyway...

I chatted with my cousin this afternoon. (Yes, for all you cynics out there - I do have a family, I was not "spawned".) He's doing well and enjoying his Secret Government Job. Considering what deviants my brother and I are, it never ceases to surprise me that I have a cousin who is an FBI Agent and another with a Secret Government Job. I mean geez! I couldn't even pass the security clearance for an internship with a federal agency. That's fine, I'll just go work for the EU! Who needs the stupid State Department anyway? Hrmph.

Don't let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.

Grr. Argh.

You don't learn anything from the bang bang.

War stories are funny things really. We always want a moral. We want a point - we want some little kernel of "truth" to take away from the atrocity. Of course, that isn't what we truly want. We want to make sense of the senseless. We want to walk away with something that makes us feel better. We want, "oh that's terrible... but there's that silver lining." Most times there simply isn't one. We look to pithy expressions such as, "war is hell" and everyone nods in agreement. Yes, war is hell but there is so much more to it than that. Real war stories don't have a point. There is no moral to the story. They leave you with a profound"what the fuck" sensation, and that's how you know a real war story. If you walk away feeling uplifted, or positive, or anything other than confused and or dejected it wasn't a real war story. Because you can tell a real war story that never happened and be closer to the truth than you could ever hope to be in telling a war story that did happen. It boils down to the essence of truth. Reality rarely has much to do with truth. As someone who has spent what probably amounts to weeks, if not months, of her life looking at photographs of incomprehensible atrocities perpetrated by man against his fellow man, I still don't know how I'm meant to respond. There's a crisis in humanitarianism right now. We want Innocent Victims.We want people we can point to and say that these people are deserving of our help because they are Innocent. Innocence. Mm. It's a funny thing really because the one thing a totalitarian tyrant and a humanitarian have in common is that they both like being photographed with children. There's this mentality that if we portray people as Innocents - children really - ignoring entirely the fact that, in these crazy times in which we live, today's victims are tomorrow's perpetrators and today's perpetrators are often tomorrow's victims... that these people have political inclinations, they have thoughts and opinions and often act upon those opinions, we can foster a feeling of warm and fuzzy do-goodyness in the collective western mind. What I know is this: You don't learn anything from the bang bang baby. Not a damn thing.

Who is this terrorist?

This is just wrong. Wrong! Not in amusing way. No, in fact, it's wrong in an incredibly creepy "run for the hills" kind of way.

What a storm.

The opposite of death is birth, not life. So the question is, what is the opposite of life?

If the duality of both positive and negative defines our comprehension of damn near everything, and I think it does, how do we then define life?

Does it become am existential matter? Is life truly "what we make of it"?

Every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time.

I find it difficult to believe in the goodness of my fellow man when I read stuff like this. "Struck in the head 39 times with a piece of crown molding"... Or how about this? A mother allegedly throwing her three kids, ages 1, 3, and 6 into San Francisco Bay. It's like Susan Smith all over again. Sometimes I really do hate people.

For years now the headline every night has been about the "war against terror", these past few months the headlines have been hurricane/earth quake/big bad mother earth juju related, with the odd blip here and there about the Supreme Court nominations (mostly you hear about that kind of stuff on the specialized "in depth" commentary shows).

So in a world with all this going on, what asshat decided this was front page news?

Misanthropy is understandable, don't ya think?

It's enough to make me nervous.

Meh. I do the dumbest things. I know that I'm a reasonably intelligent person, but you wouldn't know it by my actions sometimes. Maybe my cousin was right. Maybe I really am Pinky and The Brain co-existing in the same body.

Do you think those childish impulses ever go away? And if not, do you think that it's possible to develop better impulse control (without the aid of medication)? Because damn, my impulses have been getting me into serious trouble lately.

It seems fitting that the house is in escrow. My living space is in limbo just like my life. We match!

You've gotta be 2,000 places at once.

I've never been big on the whole "to do before I die" list thing, but there are some things I'd like to experience. this is one of them. How amazing would that be, seriously?

Of course I also want to wander around "Byzantium" and pretend that I'm the emperor. Heh.

I don't have an obsession with power. Honest!

We just want to keep on breathing.

Because it is always a good time for Yeats I share with you the following:

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

-W.B. Yeats

No hyperbole to hide behind.

"a global struggle against the enemies of freedom". My ass.

It's who I am, it's what I do.

Four years of Uni. Three terms per year. Five classes per term. 60 grades: 58 A's, 2 B's.

Is that the measure of a life?

Soon you'll find your own way.

I finalized my schedule for the semester. I honestly don't see the point, but oh well.

Randomly, the kidneys make up approximately 0.05 percent of total body weight. Pretty impressive that something so small is so darn important, isn't it?