I thought you were the -

Check out Sweetest Kill from BSS' Forgiveness Rock Record.
I don't think I've ever heard anything like it.
It's so modest and overwhelming at the same time.
And vaguely reminds me of having the last fifteen minutes of my Monday night swimming lessons overlap with the syncronized swimmers' and wanting to just sit on the bottom of the pool with my legs crossed like genie and my goggles on. Just to hear what music could sound like when removed from air and how I could literally feel the music.

P-nut Party

Are you done?
This is a huge pet peeve of mine. ONE single blob of sandwich spread and the rest of the toast, dry. Look at it sitting all lonely. Like a jam factory in the middle of the desert. Anyone who knows me should know that I'm very particular about the way I eat my food. I'm not the type to just eat the rice, then eat the beans, then scoop some salsa into my mouth. I like to think that all the plates I dive into are made of components that were meant complement and to be eaten together. I usually cut a piece of the hardest thing on the plate, then have the softies meet on another side of the plate at a little merging of two rivers, and then have the hard thing staked to my prongs and then sort of lift everything else onto the better of the fork - the flatbed, you could say.
Would you really gnaw at the dry crusties while you're telling a joke to your friend, knowing that an oasis of - what is meant to be all over the toast - is just crying with loneliness while it stands awe-struck at how you distribute the paste.
This photo is my step one and I'd be embarrassed to possess traits that allowed me to finish here and walk away smiling.

I think it is safe to say that most people believe that men holding doors for women represents some kind of chivalry or gentlemanliness.
Men feel gracious and powerful when they do it, while women tend to feel flattered and or deserving.
I on the other hand have things to argue about this social reflex.
People should hold doors open for people.

This door-holding business imitates a sense of true aid. It makes it seem like the man is willing to help women in lots of different aspects of life. From standing on the car-side of the sidewalk to paying the bill to throwing his own laundry in the laundry bin, he may feel he is the absolute "man" and his lady would be nothing without those helpful little hands. (Where are the men when women need help with domestic labour, doing his laundry, making meals for the both of them?)

How dare a man who is holding two T.V.s in each hand while balancing a record player on his head and wobbling with a DVD player in between his legs let a woman open the door for him? *spits* And how dare he not drop everything to make sure her empty-handed self can glide through the door? Men tend to place these gallantries above the practical reality of the situation. The door-opening and other small services are intended for people who are generally incapacitated, burdened or generally unable in some way to do that thing for themselves. Wouldn’t this mean then that if a person was carrying something while approaching a doorway that anyone near should rush ahead a bit to open the door - regardless of gender? In this sense, it seems obvious that these tiny tasks (that even sometimes woo women) are actually just actions that reinstate their inferiority and place men as the only mover for the unmoved and the only ones willing to literally step forward and do something.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate when people hold the door open for me and never fail to say "Thank You". What I cannot handle is when I do hold the door open for a guy and he stops before he crosses the threshold so that I can walk away and he can open the door for himself to walk through. Another situation is when I stop walking to hold a door open and the man in question puts his hand on the door while he walks through (sometimes even using a whole forearm), as if I need help doing it. Then he says "Thanks", in a way that I take as a pitiful "Thanks for trying". Or maybe because he is insulted that I'd dare to doubt his ability to do it for himself - or his manhood in not doing it for me,. Just let me hold the fucking door open for you. I'll be fine, I know I will.

Bubble

"Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone."

-Miranda July from No One Belongs Here More Than You

Photo from FFFFOUND.com

Baby Madonna

The dying of childrens' imagination is so terribly sad.
So sad that I barely let myself comprehend how real it is. Our world doesn't let kids relish in the imagination that is so crucial to creativity and freedom of thought and speech that they also need to be in touch with later in life.
Kids used to play in the streets til it was dark out, playing marbles or drawing with chalk. Now they sit in front of Leap Frogs or PlayStations as their parents peer out the windows for child molesters.
Kids used to draw on paper and on the walls. Now there are coloring books to stay in the lines and Mr Clean Magic Erasers.
Hide and Seek to Hannah Montana.
This revolution is really brutal for me to just stand-by and watch as someone who was an impressionable child not too long ago and who understands - at least from a subjective viewpoint - that just being a dumb, rampant kid is so much more important than trying to figure out how to use a cellphone to tell the neighbour to meet at the sandbox in five.

I don't want to see "sexy" 8-year olds, or the very rigid outlines of gender in general,
I don't want to see training bras for infants,
I don't want kids to only know how to think "in the box",
I don't want there to be necessity for sexual education for kindergarteners,
I don't want kids to have calculators before they have paintbrushes,
I don't want a child's post-secondary potential to be determined by their reading capability at age six,
I don't want kids to have eating disorders and body-image issues before they even hit puberty, or see punishment for screwing up while experimenting with harmless but possibly "weird" things.
The list goes on and on.
Just some food for thought.

Erin McKenna is a Goddess, whatever.

I really have to share this recipe.
For those of you who don't know, I've been vegan for over a month now and am really enjoying it.
This is a recipe that I found online by Erin McKenna (raw, whole, and vegan food extraordinaire) who apparently worked on the recipe here and there for about six months before she got it right.
These "Brownie Bites" are wheat/gluten-free, and dairy-free and you will fool everyone in thinking that they are "normal".

Ingredients
Vegetable oil spray
1 cup and 4 tablespoons Bob's Red Mill gluten-free, all-purpose baking flour (organic, unbleached flour is also okay)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum (I used 3/4 teaspoon of corn starch instead)
1 cup applesauce (sweetened or unsweetened is fine)
1/2 cup canola oil
2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup dairy-free mini chocolate chips (Foley's is a good brand of these. I used the dark chocolate ones. You can also use Carob chips but personally I don't like the flavour of them very much)

Directions
1.Preheat the oven to 325°. Spray 2 muffin pans with vegetable oil spray. In a bowl, whisk the baking flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt and xanthan gum. In another bowl, whisk the applesauce, oil and vanilla; stir into the dry ingredients. Stir in the chocolate chips. Spoon the batter into the muffin pans, filling them three-quarters full. Bake for 15 minutes, or until set. Let the brownies cool in the pans for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

Recipe from Food & Wine

Mark Rothko meets Balenciaga

This Balenciaga skirt reminds me of a more refined Mark Rothko painting.
Rothko here:





The first time I saw Rothko paintings in the flesh was at the MOMA in New York. It might at first seem easy, without much knowledge of his work, to dismiss it as mindless and childish but after some time and information, you may find yourself feeling suspicion of them, and having them imprinted on your mind, several minutes after you stop viewing them. I realized that they're meant as instalments, not as an intention to imitate the physical realm of reality.
Other modern classic, abstract expressionists from the mid 20th century have more explicit imagery that can "be explored," so to speak.
However, this doesn't go to say that there isn't power in his work. "Real" art cannot possibly be characterized by the human ability to understand what it intends to implore.
After some dabbling in more literal forms of expressionism, he realized that post-war artists were polite and accurate in the assumption that at this point in time, the human body could not be fairly depicted unless it was mutilated.
From that point on, he reduced his literal forms to more vague shapes and images.
Eventually, he realized that all he ever really wanted to do was depict emotion anyways - grief, loss, ecstasy, etc which led him to his most unique and recognizable style.
This is the time when the above paintings were created.
Language cannot even precisely represent such a vague thing as emotion, and he really believed that painting was another medium through which to try.
People would weep in the face of his paintings, and those are the people that he painted for. He actually accepted a commission from the Four Seasons Hotel on the bottom floor of the Seagram building for $2.5 million, spent a number of years completing it, and after having one meal there, rejected the offer. He believed that nobody who would pay so much for a meal could possibly appreciate or even notice the effort of his art.
Say what you will about Mark Rothko (and please don't draw your conclusions based on these thumbnails), but he had such a breath-taking, bleak and sad angle of human emotion during a period of pop-art, that focused on human beings, not on the world at large.

Back from not being around.

I remember hearing in a Philosophy class;
A person has as many personalities as there are people on earth.
I found this dangerously interesting because how many times have I been told "Treat everyone the same" in my up-bringing?
Though I understand that the treat-everyone-the-same mentality is probably meant in the sense that we should treat everyone with the same respect, I can recall thinking, even in elementary school about applying the concept and it not seeming feasible (obviously).
Quite simply, you would not treat your best friend the way you treat someone you just meet. You would not treat your grandmother the same way you treat the person who sells you fruits and vegetables.

But do we really change "who we are" according to every interaction?
I think so.
Sometimes when I get people from different fields of my life together (ie. school friends with work friends), I can tend to feel torn because I know that each group is interested in different things.
Though I can get along with both just wonderfully in separate realms, it is a curious dynamic when they collide. They know different sides of me, they make me feel like interacting in different ways. This dynamic applies even to a level as minute as one person from each group.

This idea comes from a person who considers herself confident and self-assured which makes me believe that changing how you act and how you interact from one person to the next doesn't have anything to do with feeling unsure of yourself.

Maybe this is all a very obvious concept, but I just think it is very interesting to ponder who a person really is, (if a "neutral state" actually exists) when they're all alone with no other person to "shape" what they are in that moment.
Or maybe having no other persons around creates a single personality in itself!