every day is exactly the same

it's not fair. i accidentally navigated away from this page and everything went kaput. it all sucks so bad. i would be screaming right now if i weren't at work.

to paraphrase what i said before:
ha ha, it's funny that i still have a blog, blogs are epically navel-gazing and self-promoting. how exciting is your life, really, if you have time to take photos of and otherwise document every single thing you do, and then post it on the internet? yet people can't resist hearing what other people think, and particularly what other people think about them. question: would there still be blogs if there was no built-in way to comment? i doubt it in the extreme.

then i said:
my mother and i saw this amazing bird the other week. it was poking around under a bush and looked like a m-fing kiwi, except that we live in the northeast u.s., and not new zealand. turned out it was a woodcock. it has a long skinny beak for foraging for earthworms on the forest floor. it's very shy and isn't often seen by people except during its mating season, when it does a special dance. it was a strange orangey color, and it froze like a deer in the headlights and then took off when you got near it, although we managed to follow it to two places before it flew off into the woods. my mother saw it again one other time. then this morning she saw it a third time-- it was dead in the driveway to the condominium garage. she couldn't bury it because the ground was frozen, so she had to wrap it up and put it in the dumpster. there's some kind of horrible metaphor in all this-- like as soon as you notice something beautiful and strange, it dies.

to continue, then i started making a list, entitled: Things I Do Every Day That Depress Me Because I Do Them Every Day and They Remind Me of How Much Today Is Exactly Like Yesterday:

[theme song for this list is, "Every Day is Exactly the Same," a nine inch nails song i recently discovered. good old Trent. i wonder what happened with him, he's lost a lot of his fire. i wonder if he got married or is just totally exhausted with life, instead of crazy-mad at it. i'll have to research that...]

on with the list...
* Hauling myself out of bed
* Standing in front of the closet, staring at my clothes, as i figure out something to wear
* Put assorted dirty dishes in the sink, and see the pile of dirty dishes that is already in there
* Figure out where i put my coat, and put it on, looking at it and thinking how it's too old and kind of grody looking, and how i need to get a new one, and should i hold onto it until next year, which means i have to get it dry cleaned for like $30 when its already sort of beyond salvaging
* Listening to the radio in the car, and hearing the same commercials and same horrible songs. There is a radio show that i like, but there is so much crap and so little talk. then i think about putting on my ipod, but i hate almost all the songs on my ipod, and then that would make me depressed in itself
* Throwing my crap in the drawer of my desk. i usually use this particular leather purse, which has sort of a stiff handle that gets caught in the drawer when i try to close it every. single. day.
* Hanging up my grody coat in the closet
* Emptying my Junk Email folder of the constant stream of spam that fills it over and over again all day long
* Driving home from work and going down this particular street that has innumerable manhole covers, which i usually am unable to avoid, which makes me think about my tires, and how my tires probably need air in them, and is the rear passenger side tire leaking, because it's usually about 4 pounds lighter than the other 3 tires
* Changing out of my work clothes. In particular, taking off my trouser socks, and re-arranging my pants so that the creases are on the sides so i can clip them back on the hanger and hang them in the closet
* Brushing my teeth. it. is. so. boring.
* Thinking about flossing and feeling guilty if i don't.
* Getting into bed and turning over onto my right side, in my usual beginning sleeping position. that one is the worst, because it signals the end of one day of this and the beginning of another one, endlessly bleeding together into eternity.

in conclusion: Type A personality much? Anxious much? Obsessive-compulsive much? yes, yes, and yes to those!

things

things.

i hit a squirrel the other day. last week. it was suicidal. it ran under my wheels before i could stop. all i saw was a gray flash in my peripheral vision and then i felt the back wheel go bump over something. i looked back and there was a squirrel body in the road. i felt bad, but somehow not quite as bad as i thought i would feel, i guess because there really wasn't any way i could've avoided hitting it. it was my first casualty. i hit it near a graveyard, or should i say a memorial park, the kind where the gravestones are all flat panels on the ground so as not to blemish its parklike aspects, and when i drove by they were digging a grave. today they were raking the leaves into piles. i couldn't help but look for the corpse the next morning, but i didn't see it. i can only hope it was dragged away by some kind of scavenger and not that it was mortally wounded and managed to drag itself out of the road.

last night i had a bad night. sometimes i feel totally stifled by cohabitating. i feel like it really is identical to being married. it certainly feels as oppressive as i would imagine marriage might. i vacillate between being perfectly happy with things and thinking, what the hell am i doing? i don't know how people my age cope with the endless hyperanalysis. we're still just young enough that we can doubt every choice we make and we still have few enough roots planted that we can yank them up and go somewhere else. yeah, it's the quarter-life crisis, i guess. the tipping point between settling (literally and figuratively) and not. i need more peers that don't live thousands of miles away to discuss these things with.

mutilated

what can i do to keep one day from endlessly bleeding into the next? i feel like it's groundhog day sometimes, except i've never seen that movie, except for little bits and pieces of it when i'm flipping through the channels, and except that i can't really change anything that happens, i just keep having the same day over and over again. is everyone depressed by working full time? i have trouble motivating myself to do anything that seems like work-- even this. somehow i got inspired to work on this again after setting up a blog for work.

and now for something else.

last night i saw the last half of dr. 90210. there was one of the usual i-love-my-new-cleavage stories, which jarringly segued into one of the doctors doing pro bono work on this guy who was totally mutilated in a car accident. his face is all plasticky looking and there are huge scars across it, and he basically has no nose. the doctor is going to do surgery to create a new nose for him. then another doctor comes in, and he takes off the guy's glasses, and it turns out (you couldn't see this at first because of the glasses) that he only has one eye. so the doctor takes out this sort of large clear contact that is sitting in his empty eye socket, and starts pushing the guy's head back and opening up the socket as wide as he can so he can peer into it. so then there's a commercial and a little more fluff, i think the part about the two doctors, the one with the blonde skinny wife who you can't believe actually completed medical school, babysitting the other doctor's kid, and then we're suddenly back again to the mutilated guy. it's the day of his surgery. the doctor is explaining to him how they have to take a piece of his rib out to make a new bridge for his nose, and how it's going to be very sore afterwards. and how they have to take it from the left side because he basically no ribs left on the right side. then she marks where his ribs are so she can take a piece of one out. before they can start the surgery, they have to insert a breathing tube into his throat because he has so much scar tissue or something that there's the danger that he might suffocate during surgery. so the anesthesiologist has to stick the huge needle into his neck up to the hilt, to make his throat numb. then the anesthesiologist sticks one of those cameras at the end of a tube down his throat, and the whole time the mutilated guy is gagging and wretching horribly, despite the anesthetic. and then the episode ends abruptly, in the middle of the gagging and wretching and shoving things down his throat, and it's like a cliffhanger for next week's episode. i don't know why, but i found this all very disturbing. maybe it was just the juxtaposition with the perkier boobs and the trials and tribulations of rich plastic surgeons. i also didn't catch it the beginning to see under what circumstances the car accident actually happened. so i don't know why it found it so upsetting... the guy was also very stoic and subdued about the whole thing, almost like he'd stopped caring about anything. the doctor said he'd probably had by now over a million dollars worth of reconstructive surgery, and one probably need two more operations.

Construction Ahead

I'm re-doing my template, so things may look a little funny until I get all the colors right.

my forays into japanese cuisine.

i started with some incredibly painstaking zen food, which i didn't take any pictures of, because it just looked like a blob of brown stuff over rice. it required many obscure root vegetables like lotus and burdock, each of which required painstaking individual preparations, such as blanching and soaking and peeling and scraping. the main dish was this odd combo of vegetables and some tofu served over sushi rice (another painstaking process), with a side dish eringi mushrooms served with this miso, carrot, and nut dressing. oh yeah, and this tofu that marinated overnight in the fridge. none of that was too thrilling, and it kind of made me want to eat something really unhealthy when i was done, like a huge ice cream sundae.

so i got a different book, something like quick and easy japanese food... too bad it wasn't that quick or easy. i made noodles with mentsuyu broth (which is created from scratch by boiling together bonito flakes and a large hunk of kelp and a couple other things), with udon noodles and various vegetables, topped with panko-crusted chicken breasts. i also made a salad of daikon and bacon, with a lemon vinaigrette. none of this was too exciting, either. i felt like i could've just made a packet of higher-end (e.g. not the supermarket kind) instand noodles and have very much the same result.

then i got this book washoku, by elizabeth andoh, which was frighteningly obsessive in its details, especially considering it was written by a white chick who married a japanese guy in the 60's. i made still more complicated recipes, but they all came out tastiful. however, i was so tired by the end, i was almost not hungry anymore. :P first was some sushi, which was composed of soba noodles, japanese cucumber (which, btw, tastes kind of bitter and nasty. you're supposed to perform some arcane ritual on the cucumber whereby you extract its bitterness [the bitter element itself has an actual name, which i've forgotten], but i didn't do that, i just put some salt on it), radish sprouts (which were real spicy but made me feel like a murderer because i had to tear them out by the roots from their little growing medium in the bottom of their plastic container, and they were so adorable), and wasabi. they were real tasty! and i couldn't find my sushi mat, so i rolled them up using plastic wrap. i discovered that the more stuff you cram in the middles, the better it looks when you roll it, and it's also easier to cut.

i also made japanese eggplant stuffed with ground chicken and scallions, which were not very photogenic (dare i make a comparison to some kind of soft interal organ with its insides sort of bursting out? no? okay.) next were delicious tofu blocks coated with egg and then cornstarch and then black and white sesame seeds. i wasn't quite as zen about the sesame seeds as i should've been, so there was a little intermingling between the sesame seed varieties. (note the black specks on all the white sesame seed ones) anyway, they were yummy. the stuff in the middle is more cruelly executed radish sprouts, which i put in there as a pretentious culinary flourish.


i also made some korean food recently, but i didn't take any pictures of it. i made mandu (dumplings) which were good and contained everything but the kitchen sink. i also made kimchee from scratch (which was super-good, except that it's a lot of work, and then when you take it out of the jar you have to look at all the little sardine heads and bits floating in it, but hey), as well as some or other version of bimbambop (spelling?), pickled hot peppers (also yummiful), and then kimchee soup, which was so hot i could hardly stand it. even brian's korean dad admitted that it was "a little too hot." i have plans to someday make bulgogi, because even though i don't eat red meat, i know someone who does. i've been eating kimchee on everything, though, including hot dogs, which actually in retrospect maybe was not the best idea.