Category Archives: Play

Enchilada Dinner

August 10, 2017FoodMush

In which there’s yum.

So today I made pinto beans, brown rice, enchilada sauce, salad, and spicy crumbled tofu, and here it all is assembled into a meal on a plate.

Electric pressure cookers are amazing for making beans and brown rice, by the way. You can do beans from dry in 35 minutes and brown rice in 20. It’s freakin’ amazing.

It turns out that spicy crumbled tofu is pretty decent in enchiladas. The texture is a’ight.

I made some to use as taco filling, you know, like, tofu taco filling or whatever, one time, but it turns out that it sucks in tacos. And so it was leftover, and I had enchilada sauce and not much cheese, so I was, like, what the hell, and I put it in an enchilada, and it was totally edible.

I mean, cheese ‘n’ onion enchiladas are the best, obviously, but this is totally a decent way to use up the rest of the tofu you bought for stir fry. You just crumble it into a pan with some olive oil, and stir in a bunch of the same sorts of spices and herbs you’d use for taco meat, like cumin and oregano and such, and fry it until most of the moisture is gone, and roll it into a tortilla, drown it in chili gravy and top it with some grated cheese, and there you go!

So that’s what I made today.

Oh, and the bed. I also made the bed.

Breakfast

August 5, 2017FoodMush

In which this is my first meal of the day, so it’s breakfast!

Pink pinto soup and a brie sandwich on baguette.

I didn’t get up until nearly four o’clock this afternoon. I was supposed to have gone to meet my aunt for lunch, but I was still asleep when she called around eleven-thirty, and she graciously let me off the hook.

The soup is the liquor (plus a few whole beans I held back) saved from the pot of pinto beans I refried last night, plus a couple spoonfuls of my last batch of salsa, and some heavy cream.

Sandwich is baguette, mayonnaise, brie, leaf lettuce, red onion, and tomato.

And now that Flickr finally has a photo editor again, I can go back to tiltshifting the hell out of everything for no good reason.

Super Cheesy Mac ‘n’ Cheese

July 11, 2017Food, RecipesMush

In which there’s white trash refined carbs!

There are a lot of ways to make macaroni and cheese. Most of them are stupid, if you’re tryna get a meal on the table and not fuck with getting a bunch of extra dishes dirty, because they want you to do shit like make white sauces and bake things in the oven.

Here’s a quick one-pot version. It’s fantastic.

Mac ‘n’ cheese

1 c. uncooked macaroni
a big pot of boiling water with salt, a Bay leaf, and a glug of olive oil in it
1 Tbsp. butter
1/3 c. heavy cream
1 c. shredded cheddar
2 slices of American cheese
a pinch or so each of powdered garlic and onion powder, to taste
1/4 tsp. paprika
salt & pepper

Boil macaroni 6-8 minutes, or to package instructions and your taste. Drain. Discard Bay leaf. Return to pot.

Add the butter and heavy cream. Stir, until butter is melted, to coat. Add the cheeses and stir until they melt. Add the garlic, onion, and paprika.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve immediately with a bunch of other delicious shit!

New Hampshire!

July 11, 2017Spiritual, TravelMush

In which there’s travel!

We went to New Hampshire! In a plane!

We stayed in a hotel! This was the view!

I wrote about it in my traveler’s notebook!

Amma’s programs were in another hotel, so I had to walk back and forth twice a day! My Google Fit app told me I walked over 10k steps per day! Here’s a frond I saw while walking one night!

Here’s a food I ate!

Flying is kind of exhausting but still better than driving! Driving to New Hampshire would take forever!

The TSA is still a massive waste of the nation’s time, effort, and money!

(The Amma experience, as ever, was supremely amazing and more or less impossible to put into words. Even my private diary sounds like a cross between the parts in Yoga Vashista where Devi and the king’s wife time travel extensively, and some mildly drunk Kerouac. The outcome, though, was a profound deepening of Self, an indescribable release of stress, and a renewed desire to continue pursuing meditation, japa, and scripture.)

My traveler’s notebook

June 4, 2017WritingMush

In which I’m just saying stuff I’ve already said because it’s Sunday afternoon and I have nothing better to do but repeat myself. I mean, this is literally just a re-do of a post I’ve already written, only with newer pictures!

Step one: Don’t have heard of Midori traveler’s notebooks or bullet journaling. Live in ignorant bliss.

Step two: Hear about Midori traveler’s notebooks and bullet journaling. Fall down a rabbit hole of Instagram, blogs, reviews, walk-throughs, YouTube videos, and stationery stores specializing in Japanese imports.

Step three: Judge the shit out of the entire thing. Be offended by the waste. People with stacks of journals, massive collections of pens, inks, adults with sticker sets, washi tapes! Tons of unnecessary crap! All you need is a single writing utensil and a $2 notebook!

Step four: End up a few months later with three notebooks, gel pens, pen cases, a large set of colored pencils, watercolor paints, binder clips, a set of highlighters, a cheap fountain pen, book darts, washi tapes, a washi tape dispenser, numerous inserts from several suppliers, kraft folders, sticker sets, writing boards, lead pencils, and repair kits, and feel like an asshole.

Especially about the off-brand stuff you no longer want you bought because it was cheaper than the name brand. Because honestly, the Midori stuff is superior. It really is so simple and well-designed and a pleasure to use.

Step five: Realize over and over that you adore your traveler’s notebook, and that it makes you happy every time you handle it or even see it. It’s taken months and a lot of switching things around, but you’ve finally got it just right. Admit that this particular rabbit hole has, yes, separated you from some of your disposable income, but it’s also provided you with hours of enjoyable writing, sketching, drawing, and painting.

It gets you offline.

You end up doing an Instagram doodle challenge, even though you have no artistic training or talent! It only takes a few minutes a day, and it’s fun!

I now have four inserts in my MTN. The first one is a kraft paper folder for loose items and pad of Midori sticky notes. Then there’s a custom dot grid insert for my journal, a Midori monthly calendar insert for my work schedule and travel plans, and a ruled insert I use for my spiritual diary. I also have sticker pockets inside the front and back covers, a pen holder, an OM pendant off an old necklace, and a binder clip. The thing is finally exactly how I want it, and works for my needs.

I also have the knock-off September Leather cover I bought first, basically set up the same way (sticky notes and all) except it’s totally empty. I don’t need it and I don’t use it, and I’d happily give it away if I knew anybody who wanted it. The calendar insert is weekly, rather than monthly, but it’s basically a duplicate.

I do currently use a Midori insert for sketches and painting, but it’s not in a notebook because it’s easier when it’s flat. When I’ve filled it, I’ll get a block of regular watercolor paper unless my life is radically different than it is now and I’m on a massive travel schedule or something!

The wrong magics

May 31, 2017Food, Introspection, Soapbox, SocialMush

In which I continue to try to figure out why I care so much about people being wrong.

today in the shower i gave an imaginary person a lecture about chiropractic:

“chiropractic doesn’t do anything but separate people who can afford it from their money

“there are one or two adjustments that actually do something, apparently, but you can get those, when indicated, from any physical therapist. if you get them from the chiropractor, you probably didn’t need them anyway

“when people leave the chiropractor feeling better, it’s placebo. because most of the time they don’t go for the two demonstrably effective adjustments in chiropractic’s arsenal

“chiropractic is a scam, probably not a deliberate one (i’m sure most of its practitioners are sincere, if deluded by their training), but a scam nonetheless because we know that ‘subluxated’ bones don’t cause disease, period, and interesting but ineffective cracking sounds don’t get muscles to move bones ‘back’ where they ‘belong’

“the whole concept is bunk; i mean, it was a cool concept in its time. but, alas, a totally and completely wrong one

“point being you should probably spend your relaxation money on a licensed massage therapist, a sex worker, or an hour in a hot tub.

“and definitely avoid neck adjustments. once in a huge great while, if certain things come together in a certain way, you can be dead of the stroke caused by that neck adjustment even before nightfall!”

NOW:

since chiropractic is almost entirely harmless placebo, why do i care about it?

I DON’T KNOW

i don’t know why i care about any of the rest of it, either, from raw milk to chemtrails to alkaline diets

none of it affects me directly! it doesn’t matter! i don’t know anybody who is refusing chemo for kale ‘n’ chlorophyll smoothies, and if i did i’d probably be like, fine, if that’s how you want to die, i respect that, but please get yourself set up with palliative care asap

last night i got drunk on pinot grigio and wrote a post about raw milk or some shit, and apparently posted it without a title or anything, because some roos on facebook were telling me things that are all absolutely untrue, and drunk me HAD TO WRITE A THING but didn’t want to get in yet another pointless comment war with people who want to be wrong

plus i know it doesn’t matter

if you’re healthy and hale and want to drink raw dairy, fine, whatever, you’ll probably live,

but OMFG WHY DO YOU HAVE TO ARGUE SO FIERCELY WHEN YOU ARE DEMONSTRABLY FACTUALLY INCORRECT

i can show you these claims have all been refuted by experts!

and you’ll do what people do, you’ll say dumb shit about ‘dairy shills‘ and trot out baby-tier conspiracy theories in which pasteurization was not, in fact, a scientific breakthrough that made a measurably vast improvement on the quality of human life, but is, in fact, just like vaccines, THE MAN tryna PUT US DOWN

another friend recently started posting about chemtrails, of all things. CHEMTRAILS. the first time she did it i responded with “lol” because that’s what you do when you’re not crazy, but she wasn’t kidding

and IT DOESN’T MATTER, it’s ultimately harmless, really, if people want to believe that water vapor is a vast government conspiracy of mind control/poison/weather manipulation/insert batshit insane crazy nonsense here, and i don’t know why i give a shit

BUT I DO

it drives me nuts that people want to be stupid

it drives me nuts that people get so violently angry when you show them that what they believe is incorrect

it drives me nuts that people want to base their very identities on shit that isn’t even true

somebody got super pissed when i said the ‘50% of marriages end in divorce trope’ was never true. i remember enjoying having learned something new, when i learned that stat was a lie, but other people do not enjoy learning something they’ve “always known” is wrong. it infuriates them and they attack you like their very lives are in danger, which, according to brain scientists, is how it feels, i guess

whenever i find myself repeating something ‘everyone knows’ i tend to go look it up now, because a bunch of it is wrong. the divorce rate peaked at 40% in the 80’s and has been in decline ever since. the average human utilizes about 64 ounces of water a day, but it comes from the food and drink we consume so there’s never been any need to pour an additional 8 glasses of water down your gullet. body heat radiates from everywhere equally, not mainly from one’s head. glass is not a liquid, it’s an amorphous solid. if you touch a baby bird to put it back in its nest, its mother will not reject it.

and so on.

i have given up “believing” anything at all about, for example, human diet. i was rabidly low-carb for awhile, but humans ate carbs for ten thousand years before the obesity epidemic started, so it’s not just carbs, or even refined carbs, because we were eating those for hundreds of years before we all got fat, so i just don’t know. and it’s okay for me not to know.

i used to believe that vegetarians were healthier and longer-lived because some diet book or another told me so when i was 20-something, but since then i’ve learned that those things are not true.

and in general i don’t care what you eat, unless it’s something stupid, like smoothies

other friends of mine post their morning beverages on instagram and they have an old-fashioned juicer that spits out the fiber pulp of the fruits and vegetables they’re juicing (so they’re basically drinking sugar) and they drink chlorophyll daily and “believe” it’s healthy

except it’s just another health food trend in an almost infinite line of them that does nothing measurable but get your cash out of your wallet rather neatly

but they’re very healthy people with low risk factors and they do use the fiber in their diets elsewhere so it probably doesn’t matter IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAY if they feel their morning juicing ritual is good for them, but it just makes my fingers itch

because at best it does nothing, and at worst it gives one of them type 2 diabetes since taking the sugar out of whole fruits and vegetables and ingesting it all at once causes blood sugar spikes normally regulated by the fiber the juicer takes out and if you’re going to take risks shouldn’t they at least be in the form of wine or downhill skiing or something fun rather than a beverage ritual done because people think it’s “healthy”?

if i’m going to have that much sugar, it’s not going to be some fruit and vegetable combo that tastes like sweet dirt, it’s going to be a chocolate malt. at least the dairy fat may mitigate the sugar the tiniest bit, and i’m not going to delude myself into thinking it’s “healthy”

“healthy” is the opposite of diseased. it’s not something you can get better at. like, if you’re healthy, you’re not going to get somehow “healthier” if you do a few weird things to your diet

i take no supplements. zero. none. haven’t for a decade at least, because i learned that they do nothing at best, and poison you at worst, plus they’re expensive and i’d prefer to spend my money on pinot grigio and chrome baskets for my bicycle and vacations

DOES IT MATTER IF PEOPLE BUY SUPPLEMENTS THAT DON’T DO ANYTHING AND ARE GENERALLY HARMLESS?

um, no, i have to say, no, it doesn’t really matter

they can afford it, it makes them feel like they’re doing something, most supplements aren’t toxic or anything (although some are, and will fucking put you in organ failure)

it just BUGS THE SHIT OUT OF ME anyway

why is my species so gullible, so prone to magical thinking about the wrong magics, so fiercely violent when you tell them they’re incorrect?

and why do i care?

I DON’T KNOW!

i “believe” less and less as time goes by, but the world isn’t less magical. i don’t know much of anything about “being healthy” because NOBODY promulgating diet advice ACTUALLY DOES. i don’t take pills or drink smoothies or buy kale, because those are all dumb fads.

fermenting? well, i don’t know, and neither do you. the WHO says it’s linked to stomach cancer, so maybe ferment with restraint and very, very, very clean equipment. the discovery of a second ‘brain’ in the gut does not necessarily equate with anything going on in the fermenting movement. the bacteria that like to eat the sugars in your ferments are not necessarily the ones you want in your gut biome, plus a lot of the bacteria you eat don’t survive the acids in your stomach, plus some of your biome is yeasts, plus nobody knows yet, and probably won’t in this lifetime, so what you ‘believe’ about your ‘healthy’ ferments and your gut biome is mostly made-up nonsense and your results are more likely to be placebo than anything you’re actually doing

what i do is eat a varied diet of less-processed foods and monitor my caloric intake. brown rice, whole wheat flour, beans and legumes. lots of fat, because fat is delicious. i do not drink 64 oz. of water daily, but i do have at least a glass.

i’m overweight, which we know increases numerous risk factors, so i assume my diet and lifestyle are not ideal. but it’s also true that every female relative i have looked about like this at my age, so there’s definitely strong genetics here as well, and hey, most of them are very long-lived anyway. and i prefer moderated enjoyment of a variety of foods over fear and guilt and magic rituals involving blenders or fermenting jars.

so, most of what everybody ‘believes’ is harmless, even if it’s wrong, and i know that but it’s DRIVING ME NUTS to be constantly bombarded with bullshit. no, milk is not filled with pus. no, vaccines do not cause autism. no, kale isn’t a ‘superfood,’ because ‘superfood’ is a flawed concept to begin with (if you have scurvy, a lemon is a superfood; the rest of the time it’s just a lemon. kale has never cured anything, as far as we know, except hunger, temporarily). no, the alkaline diet does not cure cancer. no, chelation therapy is not effective ‘against’ autism. no, vegans aren’t healthier. no, no, no. i know it doesn’t matter that you’re wrong, but you are, and it drives me nuts that you WANT TO STAY THAT WAY.

your mind is the only tool you have. the only one. you cannot get enlightened without a mind. you NEED the fucking thing functioning properly, which means you need to be able to use it to discriminate between reality and unreality, truth and lie, fact and fiction. letting it fill up with shit is just a bad idea, i guess. clear it out, throw that shit away, just be with what is, rather that what you think you need in order to shore up your ego. get rid of beliefs rather than collect them.

be wrong.

let go.

listen.

Summer reading list

May 22, 2017Reading, Sci-fi, SpiritualMush

In which I’m not Bill Gates, but I have a book list, too!

I’ve finally started Cloud Atlas. I bought it months and months ago and it’s just been sitting five screens deep on my Kindle Paperwhite:

It is absolutely goddamned brilliant. No question.

A Calamitous Chinese Killing is still in the pile. Inspector Singh is adorable, as ever. I’m about halfway through:

The Dark Monk is next. I bought it because the book’s design looked cool. The cover is black and gold, and the pages are torn. It’s translated, so hopefully it’ll be a good read, as sometimes translations can be a little flat:

Contact, by Carl Sagan, because I really like the movie and I’ve never read the book:

Still reading my abridged 1970 copy of Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna with the gilded ink on the spine and cover and the ribbon bookmark. Might be reading it again, actually; I really don’t know if I’ve ever finished it, as I frequently set it down for months then just open it at random:

The Outpost, by Mike Resnick. Came part of a sci-fi humble bundle that remains, to date, mostly un-read:

The Shelf Life of Happiness. May not finish this one, depends on how it unwinds:

The Heretics of De’Ath:

The Sheep Look Up, because it was a Nebula finalist:

A Gitanjali re-read. I bought a physical copy because it’s so beautiful and maybe the power will go out or something and I’ll need something that’s not electronic to read:

There’s more unread stuff on my Paperwhite and on paper both, but these are the titles I care about now. My reading habits have become so erratic in the past couple of years that we’ll see how many of these I actually finish, and how many non-listed books I’ll read instead.

What’s on your summer reading list? Anything I’d like?

I’ve invented Chipotle!

May 11, 2017Domestic Goddess, Food, RecipesMush

In which I cooked, like, all afternoon, basically.

Today, I made two salsas:

A hot poblano-corn relish:

Spicy black beans:

Mexican brown rice. That weird cottage cheese guacamole I make. And shredded chicken, for him.

Cheddar, sour cream.

There’s leftover queso blanco dip, so I heated that up, too! What the hell!

Look at that. Fuckin’ delicious burrito bowl.

And I didn’t even have to put on pants!

Anti-semitism

April 24, 2017Memes, WebMush

In which there’s a clarification.

In case you don’t know, internet parlance uses “jew” to mean the 1% far more often than the race. It’s extreme stereotyping parody.

Is it still racism, to hyper-attenuate a quality typically associated with a particular race and use that word to mean certain financial activities?

Is all stereotyping racism?

Blogging

April 21, 2017Memes, WebMush

There’s still a blogosphere, sorta.

Entirely by accident — I was looking for recipes for leftover fried fish — I found a blog written by a middle aged white woman. I read a couple of her posts (one entirely about a jacket; another, about internet anxiety and unfriending people on Facebook and not really using certain platforms), and then I clicked through her blogroll.

The blogging experience we all had ten or fifteen years ago, and think of as “over”? Is still happening.

I clicked through to one and the author’s been dead of breast cancer for two years. Another featured a year-old post about how the blogger’s giving up blogging because of fatigue and a fucked up family. But another was current and about buying and using makeup. Another was also current, with brilliantly written little posts about everything, about anxiety and a sort of timidity about enjoying things.

And they all link back to one another and all have or had non-ironic readers who comment. They have layouts and themes even older than this one. It’s so great.

It’s also really weird, because every blog I read back in the day is dead… most of the links in my blogroll haven’t been updated in years, and three of the domains are expired.

I remember blogging earnestly and non-ironically. I remember how the internet was, in various corners, before the wonderful and terrible shit-show that is social networking and trolling and painful awareness of privilege. I remember it so well that now I keep an analog diary now and rarely post here, even though I pay for the hosting and the domain year after year after year, even though nobody reads it but me and maybe Stanley.

I love goblinbox, though, and my dad still blogs here, so it’s worth it just to host that.

As for my “what should I be wearing at my age” question, apparently middle-aged white women wear skinny jeans, expensive shoes, expensive tee shirts, leather bomber jackets, carry an expensive handbag and, for a pop of color, wear name-brand red lipstick. So, that’s me in sweats forever, then.

goblinbox.com

blogging for no apparent reason since 2001