October 2012
1 post
words of wisdom
from my head, books, family, road signs, advertisements, the future? (not the future)
“Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.”
take only what you need; give away the rest.
Breathe.
“Love people, make them tasty food.”
Play hard, work harder, sleep well.
Human beings, like all animals, sometimes need things.
Value truth, but also understand that truth is different...
June 2012
2 posts
Every single day is a reason to celebrate, so we tend to do exactly that. It feels like we’ve won. Our parents all picked an afternoon and taught us to ride a bike so that one day we would be where we are now. The past twenty years of my life have a been a series of lessons in the art of fruit picking, Mathematics, color coordinating, listening, saying “Thank you”, smiling at...
My apartment is the coziest. It’s been chilly and all I wanna do is drink tea, play Pokemon and listen to Brand New. It’s too bad I’ll always be a 12-year-old boy.
love,
Sam
May 2012
3 posts
5:04 a.m.
Writing in the Full House kitchen
and we're back
Ten months later, Leo and I have rediscovered sleonid. After ten months, it seems like we should take stock. But like visiting an old friend, it also seems unnecessary. Things occurred, time has passed, knees scraped. So it goes.
A person is supposed to drink eight cups of water a day. Sleep eight hours. Get sufficient exercise. Eat three square meals. We’re supposed to do our homework,...
If we were meant to do this, the sun would wait for finals to end before rising again. For a week, Wesleyan would sit in productive darkness, three thousand faces lit by blue MacBook screens and dim table lamps. Like robots, we’d be plugged into two or five electrical outlets at once, and with deadly efficiency we would—over and over and over again—memorize, skim, outline,...
July 2011
1 post
summer:
reading summertime books and running up mountains and reaching the top and noticing the sky and playing in the rain and the smell of the drops hitting the sunbaked concrete and watching wildfires from the top of a hill and working, which makes playing so much better and being so much better and loving a lot and being care-free and free and people watching and admiring people and not planning and...
May 2011
4 posts
So wonderful life is right now.
“Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” — Albus Dumbledore
My friends are throwing a Harry Potter party. Thus, making tonight potentially one of the best/magical of my young life. I just hope I am a Gryffindor. This is so nerdy yet awesome and therefore perfect.
LEO: This must/will happen at school. BECKHAM IS HOGWARTS. S’gon be so good!
2 tags
This is the kind of summer heat that makes Chinese...
I feel your pain, Beijing.
Friggin' Freegans
When I first met twenty-nine-year-old Zaac sitting in Wesleyan’s student center, I noticed he was still wearing a bike helmet, though his bike was nowhere to be seen. His shoes were makeshift—it looked as though he wrapped the bottom of Christmas socks with duct tape. On his back, he wore a bag wrapped in bungee cord. His left pant leg was patched and dangling next to it was an empty water bottle....
when in doubt, look for the truth.
April 2011
3 posts
Work obviously is slowly taking over me and Leo’s lives.. but today is a beautiful day. The birds are chirping, I’m awake super early and I’m spending the entirety of my day with people I love, so much.
Going to bed early. Yes yes yes yes yes.
class ends at 10:30
It’s cold(ish) and rainy. There’s no real pressing work.
Pants: off
Naptime: on!
I feel like I’m being judged by my thermometer. The silence before the beep lasts thirty seconds. The thermometer taunts me for that long, enveloping me in tension as I wait for the final verdict. He likes giving me strange numbers, and he especially likes watching me take my temperature again. He knows that whatever he tells me, I’ll think: that can’t be right.
It’s bad...
March 2011
23 posts
When in doubt (and face it, we’re always in doubt), quit coffee, call your Mom or your best friend, read some Cormac McCarthy and become convinced he is trying to express what you feel in the depths of your soul, make a list, reorganize your room, eat only fruits and vegetables, drink only water, take a little longer in the shower, paint your nails, take the paint off your nails, chew your...
McCarthy
“He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending to the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same recklessness deep of loneliness...
First Day Back From Spring Break
It would not feel right to sleep tonight without first recapping today. To begin with: today is the first day of the fourth quarter—it’s weighty and symbolic by default. It’s the literal beginning of the end of my first year of Wesleyan, the final stretch, as Kirby might put it. But it was more than that; everything today fell in place, and I could not hide my happiness all day...
to sleep or to work?
if i sleep, i can work later. if i work, i can sleep later.
SECRETS ARE FUN
Especially your own secrets.
Flitting from one place to another, touching a product lightly and considering it under the harsh lights, a older woman eyes me wearily and tells her charge (a green-eyed three year old girl in all pink) not to wander so far. Standing five feet tall in my kurta, I ignore her and consider my options once again and think: What in this planet makes conditioner so expensive? Can I just make it myself?...
“Just look to the eastern sky. The moon will look 14 percent larger, and 30 percent brighter, due to the orbit of the moon around the earth.” — Fox
I’m about to go out and lay on Foss Hill to watch the Supermoon tonight.
there's a reason
note: I’ve been reading melancholy essays by the best young Spanish authors all day, and this is what you get as a result.
Sage burns sweetly in the unusually warm night and the champagne is making me giddy. “I can’t believe this is happening.” I whisper, because often the things I try to convey to her are things that I think ought to be whispered. I look toward the sky,...
80/20: how to be more effective
80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the efforts.
That’s what Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Workweek and The Four Hour Body, argues. I’ve been reading more and more of Ferriss on his blog and I think it’s time for me to buy his books. He makes a good point.
Take for instance the gym. Most people work out every part of their body individually—chest and...
Kale Chips
So! I have been intending to make kale chips all week and yesterday, I finally did. There’s not much of a recipe. Destalk your kale, toss it with salt, pepper and a tablespoon of olive oil. Bake at 300. And you get perfect, crunchy, wonderful kale chips. Then we went a little crazy and made carrot fries, which is basically the same thing except carrots and no stalks to contend with. I have...
being a grown-up is really, very hard.
The Food Experiments: Everything Pad Thai
life in Santa Fe
We’re back from our week exploring the Southwest. We went to White Sands where it is perfect and untouched and if you hike out far enough (and we did), it seems like you are the only people left on earth.
After we came home last night and unpacked, we went to see one of the many bands who stop in Santa Fe on their way to SXSW. We Are Barbarians opened for Foster the People and it was fun....
Spring Break
Though the snow has melted, Wesleyan on spring break feels like winter—everyone is huddled in his or her own room as if a blizzard was coming. Before the weekend, people come out of their rooms and buy WeShop empty; they are stocking up. At night, you’d expect to walk by dorm complexes and see scattered lights, marking the few people who are on campus. Instead, lights are almost always...
The Food Experiments: Curry Chicken
It has been a tough seven months since I last ate my mom’s curry chicken. I miss the Indian-Chinese blend of spices, the tenderness of dark chicken meat, the big portions you would never find in a restaurant. It will be at least two months before I will be home. So today, I decided to make my own chicken curry. Was it the same? Of course not. Was it good? Absolutely.
Here’s the...
The Food Experiments: Asian Cucumber Salad
As a busy college student, I appreciate foods that are both quick to prepare and long-lasting—it’s frustrating to spend an hour making something I can eat in ten minutes, and even more annoying to save food three days to find it spoiling. That’s why I learned to make cucumber salad, an easy to prepare, long-lasting cold dish that is both an appetizer and a stand-alone dish.
As...
southwest roadtrip
I wish I had the words to describe the West. There was so much and so little and the sky was always huge. There is the feeling that you are doing something very important and following in the tracks of early pioneers and 50s beatniks and famous authors. I was reading On the Road on the plane and I imagined that I was seeing the same things that Kerouac wrote about. With all of the sky and all of...
on hunger in new york city
I’ve been in New York for a couple of days now—5 to be exact—and I’ve spent nearly $250 already. Some of it I spent on random trinkets in Chinatown, but the majority of my money I spent on food and transportation. The point being: I am broke. I am sitting in a random NYU dorm, unwilling to go out and spend more money. So far, I’ve only eaten two small Asian buns I...
PLANT SITTING
Leo’s watching my Bunyan tree while I’m away.
Rules/Intructions:
1. Talk to the tree! Companionship will make it grow exponentially faster and better. This kind of stuff is in every science book.
2. Water it whenever it feels dry/light, every three days.
3. Sunshine
4. Do not talk to the tree about weather or the New England area. We are trying to trick it.
5. Tell it plant/tree...
the butterfreez
UPDATES, before I leave tomorrow for Santa Fe and Spring Break:
- i don’t ever wanna leave wesHome, but i’m looking forward to sleeping and cooking and walking in nice weather (!) throughout break. i’m tired of work and snow and early sunsets and i can use a change and a nap or two and family love BUT i can’t help but realize i’m going to miss wesleyan so much. i...
less is more
less is more
less is more
edit ruthlessly; omit unnecessary words; try to shorten sentences
ask: what does reader expect? how can you correct that? what descriptions are necessary/not?
for story to be effective, who does the reader have to fall in love with? who does the reader care less about?
we all want to be almonds
WE’RE ALMOST THERE! and even though i am going to miss my WEShome so, so, so much, i have SO much more to look forward to. cooking every day (!!!) and reading things i want to be reading (like, all the time) and taking road trips to the grand canyon and i will be with things i love: my loverly sister, a dog, friends and warm weather. there will be no deadlines. i will never be required to...
February 2011
21 posts
busy busy busy
this week's breakfast
steamed brussel sprouts
Chinese stewed hard-boiled eggs
steamed Taiwanese sausages
teriyaki chicken
congee
can’t wait for tomorrow morning!
food inventory
because I need to make something and this list will help.
bag of dried mushrooms
4 dried bricks of mu er, black fungus
12 10 taiwanese sausages
2 cans pickled cabbage, to be prepared with shredded pork
assorted cheeses
FRESH PRODUCE
fresh garlic
fresh ginger
brussel sprouts
1 cabbage
1 onion
MEAT
3 lunch steak pieces
1 serving salmon
2 chicken thigh-leg
fish balls
2 servings...
~~~ lil bit o' india
Priyanka stood at just about the height of my waist—the perfect height to grasp my hand when we were getting ready to go outside or to look up at me searchingly when I attempted to teach her the alphabet with broken Hindi. She was beautiful, or as beautiful as a five year old girl is allowed to be. Her eyes were big and almond-shaped. Her hair stayed in place with the help of copious amounts of...
ESFJ
i would totally write some amazing prose/poetry about this rainy, cozy day or maybe about how this week wasn’t bad, but i’m glad it’s over and how all happiness and wonderment of the world lays out before us in the form of a rainy weekend and subsequent BREAK… but really, i’m too busy trying to put people in terms of the myer-briggs personality test. coolest thing...
15 min. massage: a summary
Along the spinal cord, outward motion push against the muscles left of the spinal cord; then repeated on the right side
After left arm moved behind back, an elbow dig into the left shoulder area around scapula with knots revealing themselves over time; then repeated on the right side
Left arm let loose hanging, then muscles from shoulder and upper arm down to forearm pressed; then repeated on...
I sit in my desk, pretending to work intently while Samantha (sitting in desk to right), Carlen (sitting on bed to left), and Maurice (sitting on bed to right) talk about attitude and princesses and Maurice in a tiara. For days, Mo has been resentful of being likened to a “princess,” but whenever he tries to defend himself, there is a pall of silence. His eyes dart from one person to...
woops
I didn’t write IN THIS yesterday, and neither did Leo. I can definitely assure you it was for all the right reasons. I wrote plenty about Garveyism and socialism in the African American community of the 20s, but reading it would just be depressing because neither would have worked out given the circumstances (but I did give some more propz to socialism because I am a filthy communist). I...
According to Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” a good writer will ask himself the following questions: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Favorite line from this article, on politicians and...
DEAR LIFE,
I just had the most epic cashew butter and banana sandwich ever. It was legendary. This day will never be forgotten.
Love,
Sam
UPDATE (10:03PM)
I was doing work but then I got distracted by the most wonderful things (see: here). So instead I am currently scouring all of my favorite cooking/baking/vegetarian blogs for all of the things that I will create when we are all a big happy...
focus
ocus
us
s
concentration
oncentration
ncentration
centration
entration
ntration
tration
ration
ation
tion
ion
on
n
Ode to Delorean
We trudge through the river, Delly in the lead. The water is freezing and the rocks are sharp and digging into the pads of our feet with every step. The water is crystal clear and the red desert rocks give off a cavernous effect. Delly playfully barks and yelps. He runs out in front and then returns promptly, making sure we’re all in the right form. As we near the rapids, created by rocks...
I didn’t want to neglect writing but it’s 5:45am and I am not feeling inspired.
here is a list of things.
dogs, alliteration, socks, today, tomorrow, children, cereal, ”gregory, the terrible eater”, granola, latin america, colonial modernity, hybrid animals, sister, volvo, hybrid cars(!), li-berries, pie, chocolate mousse cake, mice, “treacle tart”
