In 1900, a Swiss doctor named Maximilian Bircher-Benner created a revolutionary (and wonderfully raw) concoction of soaked oats and fresh fruit which he fed to ailing patients as part of a balanced diet. In recent weeks, his m
Archive for October, 2006
…as seen last Saturday while walking down Church Street (my neighborhood’s main drag) en route to the bus stop. (That’s Tim looking smart and stylish with the umbrella.) Rainbows make me giddy, and there’s nothing quite like London’s gray sky to bring out the brilliant arc of colors in their glorious spectrum of light and harmony. Let’s hear it for refraction!
It’s been three months and 12 days since I arrived in London, and months longer than that since I’ve seen a paycheck. But after 3 weeks of contract work, I finally received some hard-earned British poundage!
First (online) purchase:
Two film tickets to 37 Uses For a Dead Sheep which played last Sunday at our neighborhood movie theatre, The Rio, as part of the London Film Festival. A documentary about the life and (sadly) imminent death of the Kirghiz tribe in Turkey, 37UFADS manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and extremely touching. It really deserves an entry in itself, but don’t hold your breath.
First withdrawal of non-US money:
A friend who takes way better pictures than I do introduced me to xkcd today, a webcomic by Randall Munroe (”I’m just this guy, you know?”). I don’t regularly read many any webcomics but this one is going into the RSS feed. Smart, funny, and bittersweet - I love it!
What does XKCD stand for?
It’s not actually an acronym. It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation, said “ecks kay see dee”. However, my favorite suggestion so far has been “DuckX backwards, sans vowel”.
Meet Eco Warrior, a lovely pale ale from Pitfield’s Brewery. Served ice cold, this brew is extremely refreshing after a long bike ride. It was once brewed here in London on Pitfield St., but their home base has moved far away to the distant city of Colchester. Thankfully, the jolly brewers have been visiting our local Farmer’s Market (a bit of a wank-fest, with the exception of the “mushroom man”, a kindly bear who takes great pride in his impressive variety of fungal treats).
oranges piss me off.
who can tell from an orange’s sunny disposition whether it’s easy to peel? is there a trick i’m unaware of?
i’m under the weather this week, mostly in the throat region, a condition utterly uneased by the maniacle screaming woman across the street who kept me up last night (and whose throat is probably in worse shape than mine is).
no, i’m in no mood to be at work today. what better way to comfort my throat and my head than to nosh on a juicy orange?
i’m hesitant - that elusive peel.
but i buy one anyway and hope for the best. sure enough, a fingernail under the peel yields a mere fragment of aromatic flesh and i know then and there what i’m in for.
i could fight it, but the battle could take time. the clock is ticking and the rind is sticking to the anterior of my fingernails.
so fuck it, i get the knife. a pitiful blade, a butterknife disguised as a chef’s knife. but it does the job: six beautiful wedges. and one bisected seed. the glistening juice makes my throat even sorer in anticipation of sweet relief.
back to my desk i go. wedges are not as ideal as peeled sections for casual desk snacking. but what can i do?
i put the first wedge in my mouth, grab it’s corner to pull away the rind…
but it won’t budge.
and i’m left with an orange rind for a very drooly mouth.
juice is dripping down my face
down my hand
and down my arm
beneath the sleeve of my polar fleece jumper (would you believe i moved to London and didn’t bring a single sweater?)
i finally pull the peel away, too covered with shame and juice to enjoy the morsel of orange left in my mouth.
(god i hope nobody is watching)
Last month I was in the middle of the English countryside making lentils and dodging sheep poop. This month, I’m back in London, still making lentils, but dodging fumes instead.
I’m working a contract job in Parson’s Green, cycling two hours a day, and trying to keep up with my “get hard” gym routine. During the week, it feels like there’s only enough time left in the day to cook up some lentils, read a chapter of Catch-22, and fall into a sleep that would be much sounder if it weren’t for the crazies who visit the drug dealer across the street in the middle of the night.
Ah, London!
A day in the life…
05:45 - Wake up, pee, start kettle
05:50 - Drink a glass of water and a cup of coffee
06:00 - Put on some gym clothes, pack a change of clothes and my lunch
06:15 - Cycle to the gym
06:30 - Work out (weights on MWF, cardio on TuTh)
07:30 - Shower, change
07:55 - Eat some Bircher Muesli, read a bit of the paper and have a coffee in the gym’s lounge
08:10 - Cycle to work
08:55 - Work (grrrrrind)
17:30 - Cycle home from work
18:30 - Get home and head straight for the kitchen
19:00 - Have a yummy dinner and catch up with Tim
20:00 - Get the next day’s stuff ready: clothes, lunch, etc
20:30 - Think about writing something or doing something productive but end up surfing the internet instead
21:00 - Give up on productivity and read a book for a while
22:00 - Fall asleep
At first, the day’s events exhausted me. But I’m adjusting, physically and mentally. The evening spurts of energy have returned, and joyfully I’m driven to create something. Anything. A photo. A paragraph. A delicious dal.
Still, I feel like I’m living for the weekend, which frustrates me. I want every day to be meaningful, not just every 2 of seven. This means I need a job I love. I had a taste of this in Austin. It was delicious.
In November I start a new job with a big company doing cool math stuff. I’m very excited; it’s an opportunity to learn lots of useful math in a very profitable domain. It’s not the end all be all, but for the time being, I hope it invigorates me the way my last job did.
In the end, I need to be independent, have my own company, work for myself. How else can I take months off at a time to go on long hikes across the country? Or work from anywhere in the world I damn well please?
My ideal job: writer, of anything that isn’t technical documentation. So I should work on that, shouldn’t I?
In theory, this is good practice… that is when I’m not prattling on about my life issues that are not at all complicated but seem to stress me out anyway. In fact, with my optimism hat on, my world is pure bliss: I get to cycle across scenic London every day to work a job that’s not very hard and get paid rather well to do it. And there are lentils when I get home. Or omelets when I so please.
There’s also a strange dirt/grime build-up in my ears which I can’t really explain, and I don’t even want to think about what’s in my lungs.
Ah, London!
It’s 21:30… I’m late for my reading.
Speaking of surfing the internet, an article on “social neuroscience” in today’s NYTimes relays this interesting tidbit from a recent study:
The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.
Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.
Latest Comments