affinity for henry chinaski

I finished Women, so I can cross that off of my list. I am still working on Portrait of An Artist, but I should be able to get that finished quickly. Women was brilliantly funny, albeit depressingly so. While I am not an alcoholic nor chasing after women, I related to Chinaski. He reiterates throughout the novel his disdain for humanity, yet seems to seek out companionship in many forms. People will screw him over many times (Bobby and Lydia), but he continues to take them back, so he must have the ability to see semblance of positivity in his crummy peers. After I get a few more books knocked off the list of thirty, I intend to read more of Bukowski’s novels with Chinaski in them. I attempted Post Office years ago, but never finished.

finally, a job.

I finally found a job at a newer restaurant/bar, I bar tend and serve which has been pretty good so far. Apparently business has slowly been picking up through word of mouth, because no advertising has been used. As far as restaurants/bars in this area go, I really could not have found a better place. It’s laid back, locally owned, and I make decent money. Things are looking up… finally.

crushing on stephen daedalus.

I have started reading A Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man by Joyce. I loved the short story “The Dead” and decided to start reading this to prepare me for Finnegan’s Wake in the not so immediate future. I have a list of about thirty books that I am going to try to read over the next year or so, and will continue to add more to it. There are loads of nonfiction dealing with diet, environment, and human rights that are not apart of the thirty, but will also be reading on the side. Let me know if I need to add anything, or if you’ve read any of them. I am using random integer to pick the next book. It chose Women by Bukoski. So far, the list consists of:

To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolfe

Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut

A Passage to India: E.M. Forster

As I Lay Dying: William Faulkner

All the King’s Men: Robert Penn Warren

The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemingway

The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton

Women: Charles Bukowski

The Rainbow: D.H. Lawrence

Women in Love: D.H. Lawrence

The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Robert M. Pirsig

Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy

Portrait of a Lady: Henry James

Tender is the Night: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Midnight’s Children: Salman Rushdie

Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen

The Lovely Bones: Alice Sebold

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel García Márquez

Oh, the Glory of it All: Sean Wilsey

Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Truman Capote

biscuits and wavy

Last night I made a batch of VWAV’s tempeh sausage, and it turned out wonderfully. I made a late night SOS with it. I planned to make biscuits for biscuits and gravy this morning, but the late night SOS sufficed my craving. I never knew that I liked biscuits and gravy until my mother made it right before I went vegetarian. She used home-made venison sausage and made the white gravy in a crock pot. Before this I had tried it in diners, but they were always cold or the gravy far too thick and gnarfy. Now I am a bit obsessed with the dish, but because of our current small town location I have to make them on my own. No diners/restaurants in town have faux meats except for some mock duck and a couple of places have garden/boca burgers.

I just did a quick 30 minute yoga practice, but it was sweaty and flowy. So, my body feels quite refreshed and some what flushed of toxins. Even though things haven’t changed on the job front, I am trying to stay positive, and exercise is helping with that. It really does help my moods, and in this current financial crisis I need it!

times are a changing

This blog has been quite sparse for a long while now, and at some point maybe I will regain some motivation to breathe some new life into it. I used to maintain a domain of the same name, and would redesign it all the time. I wrote about EVERYTHING in my life, but now I can barely find words. Oh, how the internet has changed! Now we have twitter, facebook, and all these programs that make our life constantly connected to others. When I first started making websites in 1997(?), people used IRC, AIM, and message boards. While these still exist, the personal website has changed immensely and so have our tools for connecting with others. I used to make graphics in my sleep, code all the time, but now I just use templates and cannot be bothered to code anything. The first site I had was up at AOL, containing bad angsty poetry and a diary of sorts and had no images as I had no scanner nor camera. I believe the second was probably a tripod site, then I moved to altern.org, mailsync.org, another one of these that i cannot remember, to ohsovery.org, then to plopfizz.org. Do any of you remember the whole hosting your friends thing that was big during this time? Like one person would register and maintain a domain, and then their friends (who appeared to mostly be internet friends) would have sites on their domains. It probably still happens, but the whole domain thing is really changing too. Personal sites are no longer the same, they used to be like electronic versions of personal zines, and now they are just constant updates of that person’s life. I guess I kind of miss those old days.

reading for fun!

I should say that I am reading and not solely for scholarly purposes. Currently I am reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and it is pretty heavy stuff. I should be finished with it by the end of the day, and I started it yesterday. It’s really, really good, but terribly bleak. After that I will finish Eleanor Rigby by Coupland. I’ve had a love affair with Douglas Coupland since high school, but in the past few years I have not stayed current with his novels. Since beginning university, I haven’t had much interest in reading outside of class requirements. This summer I am determined to read for leisure!

free giveaway

This amazing grosgrain dress is being given away to one lucky winner!

Go here for the details.

summer time, like the fresh prince

The school year is done, and I received 3 A’s and 1 B. The B was in a political science course that was heavily statistics based; at least now I feel confident interpreting data in social science-based scholarly journals. I still need to find a job, but I have not really been looking. There was a short period of time where I just got really discouraged, depressed, and all sorts of anxious, so I did not really do anything about it. My moods have brightened, and tomorrow I am starting the process all over again. The next two weeks are going to be filled with research and my study for my major project. Tomorrow morning I begin with my first subject, and I am a little nervous about being as professional as possible. I really want this to be an example of my capabilities as a marker to show what I’ve accomplished in my undergraduate career. It’d be nice to use it as a showpiece when applying for graduate schools in the fall. When I finally get a job, I will set up a date for the GRE. I’ve requested study materials through inter-library loan, because my library’s copies are missing. I am mostly nervous about the mathematics portion, so I will be really brushing up on that.

As for the cooking, we been eating a lot of simple foods, that are nourishing but inexpensive. We scored some really fabulous priced organic imported cheese from Holland, which ended up being around 4 dollars a pound. We’ve used it in plenty of things, and still have the two variations around. Apparently, we got a really good deal because the same product is available for like 20 dollars a pound at other institutions. Right now I have a pot of beans simmering along with another pot of wheat berries, which I am going to use both in a chili. If it turns out I will post the recipe. After this, I want to make a tater-tot casserole either with crumbled tempeh, tvp, or grillers. Oh, and I forgot that I checked out Vegan Soul Kitchen by Bryant Terry from my school’s library. It has made me rethink my aversion to cornmeal, grits, and polenta!

I’ve managed to stay active even though school has been out for one week and I haven’t found job. After going to subject #1’s house to begin the project, I am going to apply at about ten locations. Wish me luck! In other news, I am committed to catching up not only on some academic reading (for my project in nutritional anthropology) but also on for-fun reading. I am currently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is my first book by the author, and even though it is stark, grim, and demonstrates humanities capacity for destruction, it also speaks to the bonds of love, and a slight hopefulness in a post-apocalyptic America. If there are any followers of this blog left, would anyone like to participate in an online sort of reading club? I think it could be fun..

Alive and Well.

We have been cooking more and more, and I’ve been experimenting with different flavors. I am still obsessed with Indian cooking, but I do not think that will ever pass. School has really exploded in my life, and left not much time for leisure activities. As I write this entry, there are a million things that need to get scratched or checked off of my to-do list. This semester I am trying to stay on top of assignments, readings, and studying. Alas, like all previous ones I fall into the same routine of panic and procrastination. This semester is especially challenging because I am taking two theory based courses simultaneously. Normally, I thrive in theoretical approaches, but when they are back to back the reading can be daunting. So, that is why my posts have been lacking. Budgeting my time was never my strong suit!

celebrating the end of a national nightmare

I am drinking a Summit Winter Ale anticipating tomorrow, when we will no longer have President Bush, but President Obama! Here is to a greater America, in which we can accomplish greatness. Because I am celebrating the end of the Bush-era, I wanted to paint my toenails, so I searched for my blue nail polish. Instead of finding my blue nail polish, I found the social security card of a man who died in my old apartment….that’s what this post really is about..

So, in February of last year, I moved out of my place with Court because I needed space and time to think about where our relationship was headed, etc, etc..I am living with him again, in our tiny one bedroom and our adorable kitty. Anyway, I moved into another tiny one bedroom, which was oh-so-cute, but had a little bit of trauma unbeknown to me. Apparently the previous resident was bi-polar who had violent outbreaks and had recently gone off of the medication. Well, one night he broke into the upstairs apartment which then had three girls living in it–and hid naked until they came home. He attempted to rape one of them, and attacked her so badly she had to be hospitalized for her injuries. Fortunate for her, her room mate was able to call the police…well, long story short, the police ended up shooting and killing him. The girls moved out. I moved into his apartment, and found his social security card along with some ‘blood’ stained walls in the kitchen which are below where he was shot. I always felt a little off at the place, and then I found that out about halfway through my living there. That would really only happen to me.