Sunday Seven III

[pax_athena]

I.
I'm in Venice - I met a colleague at the airport who suggested to take a direct taxi boat to the city instead of the bus + boat combo that my guesthouse suggested. We had to wait in line for half an hour (being too loudly upset about politics, but that's what happens when you put together an
Iranian-born Swiss-American and an Eastern-Europe born Jewish German) but otherwise it was the best decision ever. I got a bit of sightseeing that I do not expect to manage for the rest of the week.







I am regretting that I did not take my camera with me. But on the other hand: I don't think I'll gave time to look around much, anyway.

II.
That said: that review talk on Tuesday? Still not done. Ugh. And tomorrow will be a busy day. (Expect very exciting science results to hit the news; not mine, but it will still be full of excitement.) And I know, I am procrastinating now again, but there is only so much talk I can write given how tired I am by now.

III.
I know that I shop when I am stressed. I lost my black shawl while in Slovenia and it's such a staple that I needed a new one immediately. Also those new skinny dress pants I bought when changing airports in Paris really need different tops that the ones I own, so I now own a wide lightweight wooly sweater in grey and a black popover blouse. And since I was at it, also a set of rose-plated triangle earring (I mean, it happens so often that I find earrings that I live that are silver I had to buy them, right? … On the other hand, wtf my new fascination with gold-colored jewellry? Am I getting old?)

IV.
Also, new phone. Because my old one decided that I abused it too much. It's not fully dead but there was a pattern of guest-touch behavior that made it crash several times and I am not risking being without a phone with all the current and upcoming travel. Unfortunately, I missed that the successor model is half an inch larger when I ordered it. The old one wasn't small, but this one is giant. Well. I am trying to convince myself that whatever phone I would have gotten it would have been the wrong one because it's not my old one. (And I could not have just bought the old one again, I considered, but I ordered it using motomaker in a configuration that was only available from Motorolla USA, not from any resellers D:)

V.
Voltron really isn't a good series. But I keep watching. Because Lotor. And we are at the point when he actually becomes really interesting. (I even tried to go fanfiction, but ugh, nothing along the lines that would interest me D:)

VI.
I complained to sophiawestern (through whom I have one of my current favorite soup recipes) that there is no Kabocha squash in the Netherlands - I only found two sad kabochas at one market stall a few weeks ago. But now my local supermarket has them! Yeah! Take bets on who is going to eat all the Kabocha & chicken & pear salads!
I still have a ton of roasted kabocha and carrot soup in the freezer (the aforementioned favorite soup made from the aforementioned two sad kabochas), otherwise there would be some soup cooking forthcoming next weekend.

VII.
I'm not sure I agree with everything in this blog entry (I often find myself disagreeing with xykademiqz, the blog author), but the last paragraph is important (to realize for both kinds of people) and I absolutely loved the last sentence: I need to emit into the world, hoping the world receives some of it.

Now: bed. And finish that talk tomorrow.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Kabocha is great, agreed! Best wishes for the talk.

[pax_athena]

Thanks, it went surprisingly well! Yay for two very senior (tm) people I did not talk with before coming to talk to me afterwards and for bringing some results to the attention of people who should know about them.

It is! (I am also very open for recipe recs here!)

[thistleingrey]

Oh, that's awesome. It's lovely when that happens!

Hmm, I usually just split/scoop/roast them with a bit of water in the pan. My mother makes a kind of porridge (more squash than rice) called hobakjuk; this version is closest, but we don't add sugar at all. (Some internet recipes for juk suggest putting in 60 ml dry measure or more, which is more than I bake into banana bread, FFS.)

The cooked red beans added to hobakjuk are of a particular kind--p'at in Korean, azuki in Japanese. (Red kidney beans would fall apart into mush, I think.) They're sold canned, both plain (desired here) and sweetened. If you find dry beans and cook them, this post explains how--parboil, drain, then simmer with fresh water. The parboiling gets rid of the bitterness. These red beans aren't to be pre-soaked.

Some other things to do with kabocha: baking that I haven't tried, mostly. (I've modified this one successfully, no milk.)

[pax_athena]

Hobakjuk sounds like something I should try - it reads so comforting! (I wish there as a Korean restaurant here; it's definitely something I would enjoy to explore more. Alas ...) In any case: I did not realize that Kabocha was a staple in Korean cuisine. Here goes my ignorance ...

[thistleingrey]

I think hobakjuk is usually not restaurant food--at least, I haven't seen it on menus, whether in US or Germany. It's humble home food :) and yes, I do find it comforting in season....

(Kabocha = hobak (same word with different phonemes, borrowed in like cheese = Käse, which is ultimately from Latin) came to the so-called Far East with Portuguese traders, via Cambodia--though like all "winter squash" varieties, ultimately it's a Central American domesticate. :D I love quirks of food history almost as much as food.)

[seidenstrasse]

On the other hand, wtf my new fascination with gold-colored jewellry? Am I getting old?

^_^ Da hab ich mich aber sehr wiedererkannt gerade, unterschwellig habe ich auch so etwas schon für mich gedacht.

Wg. xykademiqz: Ich kann beiden Lagen etwas abgewinnen. Ich habe natürlich auch einen Job (oder zwei), bei dem viel von meinen eigenen Entscheidungen abhängt. Aber mir gefällt auch, bei meinem anderen Job einfach mal zu tun, was mir gesagt wird, ohne selbst die Verantwortung zu haben, ob das eine gute Idee ist, oder nicht. Das finde ich auch im Yoga-Kurs so entspannend - einfach mal mindlessly Befehle ausführen. Aber die ganze Zeit könnte ich das nicht und erst recht nicht bei Themen/Tätigkeiten, die mir wichtig sind.

[pax_athena]

Irgendwie beruhigend, dass ich nicht die einzige bin. Und Perlen - also nicht im Übermass, aber so Ohrringe trage ich plötzlich gerne. Und nach einem netten, zurückhaltendem Anhänger suche ich auch länger. Alter, maaaan XD

Ich finde das im privaten Bereich super entspannden - ich mag auch so super repetitive Aufgaben, ob Sticken oder irgendwelche Listen erstellen.
Mit ist es aber sonst irgendwie wichtig die Welt um mich herum zu beeinflussen; also auch nicht nur in die Leere "emittieren", sondern tatsächlich drauf hoffen, dass es irgendwie einen Einfluss hat (wobei ich natürlich nicht 100% sagen kann, dass der verlinkte Blog das auch meinte; aber mich hat es dazu gebracht, drüber nachzudenken). Ich merke das selbst bei so was LJ, was ich weniger als Tagebuch und mehr als eine Art Diskussionsplattform verwende.
Ich denke ja auch über mögliche berufliche Alternativen nach und ich merke einfach, dass neben dem "Sinnhaftigkeit" auch "Veränderung zum besseren Verursachen" ein ganz wichtiger Teil davon ist; wobei vielleicht bedeutet beides das gleiche.

[decemberthirty]

Just be careful not to eat any strawberries during the sirocco while in Venice.... ;)

I too have been wearing gold-colored jewelry more often as I've been getting older. I don't wear jewelry very often anyway, but it used to be that I would NEVER wear gold and now I think I actually wear it more often than anything else.

That blog entry about creativity and rejection is certainly interesting. Like you, I'm not sure I agree with all of it. Mostly, I suspect that the lines between the two types of people are blurrier than the blog presents them as being. Even within the category of writing, I do some writing that is very valuable for me that I never intend to show to the world, some writing that I am trying very hard to emit into the world but that the world seems quite unwilling to receive, and some writing (like what I do here on livejournal) that, to me, at least, seems to occupy a sort of middle space between those. And they all fulfill different parts of the creative urge for me.

I wonder too about defining what it means to have your work rejected vs. received by the world. I've certainly had my work rejected many many times, but sometimes even when the work is NOT rejected, publishing it feels like throwing a small rock into an ocean: a momentary splash followed by no discernible difference. Has the world received that work?

Anyway, sorry for going on so long! These are topics that I tend to think about.... :)

[pax_athena]

OK, I have to admit I had to google up whether it was that reference but it was :D

I'm wondering how much of it is taste and how much a certain social pressure to actually not appear quiet that young in my choice on clothing. My current place of works tends to a more conservative clothing style than previously (less academia, more corporate influence because of who we mainly deal with) but the change did not start with the move.

Oh, absolutely about the lines being much more blurry.

LJ/DW is the epitome of emitting for me - also influencing, I guess, which to me is almost the same as emitting in this context, because this is where I get an immediate reaction ... I also very much write it as something that is supposed to start conversation; I read many people who write more of a diary and while I enjoy reading their LJs/DWs, it's not something I could write. (It was similar back when I was younger and writing letters with pen-pals ...)

Your second to last paragraph - this gave me a lot of thought, actually. Scientific work is, in a way, easier - there is a direct measurement for how much the world received your work as citation keep trickling in, one by one, year after a year. Even if I leave the field, it would be easy to look back on a paper 10 years on and see if somebody still found it relevant in the meantime. For some reason I never stopped to think how different it is with literary writing - not that the writing is the same, but the sending out a piece of you own (mind? soul? thinking? ideas?) into the world, this one may be similar.

And you know that I love long comments, especially such long thoughtful ones that make me think.