Two Down, Two To Go

It's happened. School has started.

Painting, Ceramics, Design and Drawing. 9 am to 1 pm, Tuesday to Friday.

The getting up early part is not as bad as I thought it would be. I just go to sleep at 10 or 11 instead of 4 in the morning, hahaha. Painting seems like it's going to be a cool class. I'm a little worried because, like I've said, I don't know anything about painting, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. In the first class we just mixed colours and made a colour wheel, and the teacher gave us a bunch of paints and brushes. My first little project is a self-portrait, due in 3 weeks.

Ceramics... is such a bullshit class. First off, I was late for it. Toootally my dad's fault. I told him that I was going to take the bus, but he offered to give me a lift. Now I don't generally turn down free rides, but maybe I should have. I told him that I wanted to be on the road by 8:20. First time in a new class, I like to be early. So obviously we leave at 8:35 and get completely fucked over. Traffic like you wouldn't believe. I was silently raging in the car, and he was making jokes the whole time. I know he was just trying to make me feel better, but goddamnit, I was so angry. I'm going to apologize tonight. Anyway, I get to the school right at 9. No problem, right? Wrong. Big problem, because the Langara website told me that my class was in room A002, which apparently doesn't exist. So I ran all over the place like a maniac, asking strangers, and two professors where it was, and every person took me in the wrong direction. When I finally found what I thought was the class, I hastily walked in... only to slip on the floor and come crashing down, smacking my knee into the cement floor and getting the entire classes attention. So I hobble to the back, knee throbbing, and look at the sheets with the course outline on them that had been handed out. And lo and behold, it said "Introduction to Sculpture". I was in the wrong class. So I whispered to the girl, asking if she knew where fucking Ceramics was. Apparently it was in the classroom right next to this one. So I slipped out, not making eye contact with anyone, and got into Ceramics 10 minutes late. Grabbed a seat in the back, grabbed the worksheet, whatever.

My ceramics teacher is exactly what you would expect a ceramics teacher to be like. Mid-50's, long crazy hair, soft voice, total hippie. But not a fun hippie. One of those hippies that finds the time to slip incorrect social commentary into their sentences. While explaining that we shouldn't leave our belongings in class while no one was there, because we were an "inner city school with all the doors unlocked." Langara is in no way an inner city school, folks. It's in a completely residential area with an enormous golf course behind it. Later on, she reiterates that we should never leave our belongings in class lest our things be stolen, and reinforced this by saying (with a little laugh) "You know. City of thieves." At this point I don't know what the fuck this woman is talking about. Langara isn't even in the actual city part of Vancouver. She said a bunch of other annoying hippie things (organic is her favourite word) and proceeded to be a total bitch to Katherine, a girl I met that class. She thought the class started at 9:30, and got lost on top of that, so she showed up almost an hour late. Every time this teacher talked about class expectations and being late she would stop and look right at Katherine. Then, as we were lining up to receive huge lumps of clay, she told Katherine that she had to go to the back of the line because she'd been late, and that she'd speak to her after class. When I talked to her, I laughed and said that this class was really hard to find, and that's why I was late, and she said "Not really. Didn't you do to the orientation?" 1) I'm not a new student, asshole, I don't have to go to the fucking orientation. 2) They take you on a 15 minute tour on the orientation. They don't personally show you where every classroom in the school is. 3) Even if they had, it wouldn't have helped because the class ended up being in A006, NOT A002, you stupid fuck. So hey, guess who my least favourite teacher is? Anyway, project for this class is to make a pot, due on the 20th.

Tomorrow is Design, and I think the teacher is actually a customer at Famous Foods! I saw him in the classroom for it yesterday. He always looks kind of angry, so I don't know what to expect. I'm just going to go in with zero expectations, because I don't actually know what Design is going to be all about. The class I'm most looking forward to (Drawing) is on Friday.

In other news, I bought an easel for 50% off the regular price (regular it was $100!), so I'm pretty stoked about that. Also, going to sleep early is doing good things for me. I actually eat regularly and everything now. Feels good, man.

Finally Fall

Ahhh, finally. The first day of September. I've been waiting and waiting for this.

Why? For one thing, school starts in 5 days, and I'm getting pretty impatient. I want it to be here NOW. I do pretty much nothing in my spare time, so school will fill that void for me. Another reason I've been excited for September is the weather. It's actually starting to get cooler which I'm so happy about. Dressing for summer has always been a huge pain, because it's just so hot that I can never be comfortable. But in cooler weather I can bundle up and feel just fine. Also, fall fashions are infinitely better than winter ones. In H&M yesterday, with Rum, I saw about a million things that I wanted to buy. Unfortunately I had about $4 in total in my bank account, so I wasn't able to buy anything. But I did figure out what I was going to be for Halloween! I'm going to be a 1940's reporter. Trust me, it's going to be excellent. Fedora, suspenders, fitted pants, white blouse, tie, high heels and vintage glasses. I'll get to do nice, smokey makeup and dark lips, and obviously talk how they used to talk in old movies. Stoooked.

I've been drawing a TON now, which feels... really good. Mostly comics right now, though I am starting to miss just drawing things for myself. I'm sure once school starts though I'll have more incentive to practice.

Meh, another quick update. I just feel guilty that I haven't written much lately, but to be honest, it's because there's not much to say. When I say I've been doing nothing, I meant it.

PS. Found this on Facebook. It's a group called Grief Beyond Belief, which "Grief Beyond Belief is an online support network for people grieving the death of a child, parent, partner, or other loved one -- without belief in a higher power or any form of afterlife." While they're thankful that people were offering their condolences in the form of prayers, or saying things like "They're with God now", they're really just empty words to people who don't believe such things. I thought it was a really great idea, because that's how I feel too. I can appreciate the sentiment when people say those things, but it doesn't mean anything to me.

Days Off

I'm starting to think that maybe I spend too much time on my own. As much as I love it when it's needed, maybe I should start, oh, I don't know, calling people? I'm just starting to feel bored and depressed most of them time. Gee, ain't that fun?!

So I've been doodling more and more comics. Paul's given me some good ideas, and I'm thinking up some of my own. Now it's up to me to put them on paper. I want to make 10 solid comics before we continue with everything else (making a website, etc), and the going is... a little slow. It's mostly because I've just been so fucking bored today, I can't be bothered to focus. I have my room, my living room and my bathroom to clean as well, so I'm avoiding everything and playing Fallout, of course.

Max isn't back for another 12 whole days, and I'm so bummed out. Hopefully we can skype tonight, and oh my god I just grew the greatest picture.

I Don't Know Where We Go From Here

Happy news! I'm making a webcomic with my friend Paul! Now, normally I'm not one for group projects, since I always want to take control and make everything my own way. But maybe that's just Old Lisa talking. New Lisa is a little bit more self-actualized, and much calmer. I am a writer as well as a doodler, but I'm content to just do the drawings while Paul does most of the writing. That being said, I'm definitely going to put my own ideas in there, but I'll mostly be trying to focus on drawing.

Eeee, I'm so excited! While it would be fun to have my very own, just me webcomic, it's definitely going to be easier with another person. Maybe if I've got someone nagging me to get shit done, shit will, in fact, get done. So he gave me a couple of short scripts to work with, and I'm going to scribble them out and see how things go.

In other less cool news, Max is gone for two and a half weeks on a trip with his friends to judge and play in a bunch of Magic competitions. While I'm happy that he's going off to have a fun time, I'm mega bummed that I'm not going to see him for so long. Work has scheduled me a lot, though, so that will fill my time, and we've both got Skype now so it'll be easier to keep in touch, and see his nice, handsome face.

This is just a short, silly update, since I've been too lazy to do a proper one. I started to write one the other night, about serious stuff, but bah, who wants to be serious? I will have a lot to talk about soon, since school is starting up in a couple of weeks, and... yeah, that's all there is to look forward to right now. But I'm super stoked! It'll be a nice change to be back in school again.

Also, I've been trying to play Bioshock again, but I-I just can't. It is the fucking scariest game. I have no problem walking into a metro tunnel and talking on 20 feral ghouls in Fallout, or running up to a Deathclaw and shooting it in the face, but Splicers are oh-my-god the most frightening things. Peter thinks I'm a pussy. He would be correct.

Laugh Out Loud

Ah, I'm listening to Radiolab again for the first time in a long time. It's really just the best thing to listen to. Today I'm listening to a show about Laughter, which as you can probably imagine, is a lot of fun to listen to. There's babies laughing, people laughing, and rats laughing. Yes, rats.

There's a segment in the episode where they talk to a scientist named Dr. Jaak Panksepp who was watching a bunch of rats playing soundlessly together, and he wondered how they could be making absolutely no sounds at all while they were obviously playing so hard. So he put a microphone into their little rat box, and he found that on a level too low for us to hear on our own, they were making sounds. These cute, rapid little chirping noises. Dr. Panksepp and his grad student couldn't figure out why they were making these noises, and then one day they decided that they were going to try and tickle some rats to see what happened. And as they ticked these rats, with the microphones there, they were making the same sounds. Really, it sounds very adorable. And Dr. Panksepp realized "My god, what if that's laughter?"

People have, for a long time, thought that laughter is an expression reserved only for humans. Aristotle believed that babies laughed for the first time on the 40th day of their lives, and that was a sign that they now had a soul. In reality, most babies don't laugh exactly on their 40th day of existing, but I understand what was meant by this. It was like a sign that you were a person if you could express mirth. I don't agree that laughter is for people only, though.

A lot of people were critical of the idea that rats could laugh. But why? You don't think that animals find things funny? My dog, Macey, can't physically laugh, but it's very obvious when you play with her that she's having fun. It's a shame that she isn't capable of laughing because that would be hilarious. But to anyone who has had a pet, you must all know what I'm talking about. They have fun, just the same as we do, and the only thing limiting them from laughing like we do is that they're just made differently. Indeed, monkeys can laugh. It's been recorded, and I dare you to listen to the part of it in the episode and not hear that as laughter.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who claims that animals have souls. I don't even think that we have souls. I just think that if we can laugh, why can't animals? We are, after all, animals as well.

Ugh, I don't think I can type anymore. I haven't eaten anything yet, and the bright screen combined with hunger nausea is making me feel really sick. Until next time.

Finally

I was checking Post Secret today, and found this. It made me so happy that I almost cried, because I think I'm finally beginning what I was born to do too!

No real update today, just this. As I look out of this house's old windows and a cool breeze rolls in. I'm secretly happy though, because this is my favourite weather.

Just work work work for now, and Max tomorrow and Tuesday. Yessssss.

For The Love of Food

I want to share something with you, my children. It's a lovely chapter in this book I have called Eating My Words: How Marilyn Monroe is like a grilled artichoke and other food observations, by Eve Johnson. Now, I don't like to call myself a "foodie" because of the arrogant associations that come with the word, but I love food beyond the mere eating of it. I know saying "I love food" is kind of stupid; everybody loves food. Everybody loves eating, especially when everything tastes good. The difference between people who love food and people who love food is all in the preparation.

I love cooking. The eating is nice, but the cooking is mostly my favourite. When I cook or bake things for people, the joy I get out of it is in the process of creating, and seeing the reactions of people. I don't always enjoy eating the things that I cook myself, because I am always too critical of my results. It's much nicer to see someone sighing over your Blueberry Vanilla Cream Pie than to taste it yourself and realize it's not as nice as you were hoping it would be (though that pie was one of the best things I ever made).

The chapter in this book always sends my mind reeling into my own imagination. It's written so perfectly, and... well, let me just type it out for you. I hope there are no legal issues with me typing out a chapter from a book, word for word, and posting it here. I don't really see why there would be. I'm not claiming it as my own, I just want to share it with people who might appreciate it. It's long, but please bear with me.

--

WOOD STOVE

One summer I spent a week on an island too sparsely populated to support a store, perfectly content cooking on a wood stove in a cabin with no electricity and no running water. I came back half convinced that our kitchen don't ask too much of us, but too little.

That doesn't mean that I want primitive fixtures in my city kitchen. (A tiger's love for her kittens pales beside my love for my dish washer.) But once in a while, I like to reconnect with fire. For if cooking is a matter of reading labels and pushing buttons, then how important can eating be? If cooking means evoking the fire god and courting him through the tempestuous drama of roasting a chicken, then what comes to the table is an offering, and thanksgivings are due if it isn't burnt.

For visitors, the island is a place of gently enforced inactivity. People swim in the lake, or row out on the battered rowboat to see the family of loons at the other end. Or they go for walks along the path by the water, or through the fields that a big, hard-working Swede homsteaded in the 1930s. He planted orchards and fruit and vegetables, and built rock retaining walls around parts of the lake, and canned and ate his horse Lindy after she accidently hung herself in one of the apple trees.

Six people bought the island in the early 1970s and built some cabins. In mid-July, the family that has claim to the old farmhouse was there, a couple with two children. So was the property's caretaker, who farms a little garlic and keeps a vegetable garden. He lives there year-round in a cabin close to the old homestead. His son, a four-year-old wild man with hair to mid-back, like his father's, and a grubby fist forever brushing it away from his face, was one reason I wanted to make cookies. The boy had a Popeye doll, and a beaten-up plush parrot. When I held the parrot on Popeye's shoulder and croaked "pieces of eight, pieces of eight" at him, he looked at the parrot with desperate regret, and said, "I don't have those." I wanted more access to the world of a four-year-old. He had a sweet tooth, and I am not above bribery.

Going to the island means going back to turn-of-the-century technology, to wood stoves and kerosene lanterns. Our friend Jerome, known to his partners as Mr. Crisp for his fastidious ways, has a propane fridge that miraculously makes ice cubes. Small quantities of ice cubes, to be sure, but enough to clink in a glass at the end of a hard day's basking on the rocks and cooling off in the lake.

I brought to the island olive oil, basil and thyme from my garden, the pasta shells I like for pasta salad, sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, olives, sweet onions, Belgian chocolate, and, on an impulse, a little jug of real maple syrup. Blueberries, lots of lemons, oranges, apples, baking soda and powder. Smoked salmon. Sausage and cheese. A dozen beer, a bottle of Scotch. A roasting chicken, frozen solid, bought from the last big supermarket on the route. The dense, heavy sunflower-seed bread from the bakery down the street. And one litre of milk. If we hadn't had to carry the food on a trail that climbed from the ocean, then dipped into the lake, there would have been more milk.

As for the rationale behind the rest of the shopping list, I reasoned that we could always go to the next big island for staples. But we'd have to come right back to civilization before we found a store selling Belgian chocolate and sun-dried tomatoes.

I can swim and read and lie in the sun only for so long. I take a certain pleasure in hacking back salal so that a walk along the path after a rain doesn't soak the chins, but that's the sort of thing I want to for got only twenty minutes at a time, to clear my head. I had endless time for cooking. And because there was no store, I was blessed by limits. Except for the beans and beets, all coming ripe at once in the caretakers garden, the materials here were finite. What we had was what were were going to eat, so I was free to concentrate on the food at hand.

The first meals where simple, with a minimum of cooking: smoked salmon and cream cheese on slices of sunflower bread, with fresh thyme, a drop of lemon, a little black pepper and a slice of sweet onion. Then a green salad with olives and artichokes for heft, and sun-dried tomatoes for salty, concentrated flavour. Then fruit and chocolate for dessert.

Sometimes in the two years since Jerome had last stayed at the cabin, someone had borrowed the sugar. No one wanted sugar on the coffee or on cereal or fruit. But once we lit the wood stove, I wanted to bake. We had fresh flour. There was a copy of the aptly named Joy of Cooking on the shelf, and two flour-company cookbooks, the kind that are a monument to the marriage of commerce and cooking. My mother used to say: "They want to sell more flour, so everything in there is guaranteed to work," and she was right.

We first lit the oven to bake the chicken. And if the oven was on for chicken, then there was no reason, apart from the sugar shortage, not to bake cookies. I studied the Joy of Cooking, and with the help of the sugar substitution chart, made thin, crisp, elegantly coffee-coloured maple chocolate chip cookies, the chips cut from the clock of Belgian chocolate. They tasted magnificent. The chicken roasted to red-brown, crisp on the skin and juicy inside. I was in love.

I had never been in charge of a wood stove before. When I was a child, and saw them in my prairie aunts' kitchens, they frightened me. You would burn yourself if you brushed against one, which was not true of the electric stove at home. To me, wood stoves were just one more proof that the country is full of dangerous unknowns, and the city is safe. Later I stayed in cabins with wood stoves, but I was unsure of my skills. Besides, there was always someone there first, already weaving the dance of fire. Poke the fire, or add a stick or wood, and you would only throw them off their game.

My knowledge of fire is far from perfect. But I can light one, and keep it going, and modulate its temperature. As days went by, I studied the science of the damper, opening and closing it to feed air to my fire or starve it. I leapt to the pleasant challenge, at the end of baking time, of stirring up the coals just enough to keep the oven heat constant, without having to add more wood. I was playing with fire, a game made all the more because of the stove's defects. Rust had loosened the oven handle and opened a hole in the oven wall above the door, and another between the oven and the top of the firebox. When the fire was too hot, you could see orange flames rush over the oven roof. The required adjustments were minute but constant.

I never got around to learning to tell the temperature by the number of seconds that I could keep my hand in the hot oven. I'm told that's the sign of a wood-stove master. But I cooked, using a far bigger chunk of attention and skill than it ever takes to set a number on a dial. On the last afternoon, I made cinnamon buns. I had time to nurse the dough, and the classic place to let it rise: the shelf over the stove. When I lifted the bread bowl to put it in it's place, I felt centuries of cooks with bread bowls stretch into the past behind me.

I put the buns in to bake after dinner, while we did the dishes. We waited for them on the deck, drinking plum wine that Jerome had made seven summers before. Six rainy winters in the back of a kitchen cupboard can have good effects or ill. The wine was as clear and as rarefied and good slivovitz, the dry, slightly bitter, plum brandy.

The oven was warm and glowing. Too warm, I realized, when I saw through the hole over the handle of the oven door a stream of molten air, quick with sparks, flowing over the oven roof. I put a light pan lids in place to protect the buns, but it singed the top of some of them. By the time the dough was baked, the surfaces that weren't under the lids were charred.

From Jerome's deck, you can see lake through the trees, and hear loons on the lake. We drank plum wine and ate cinnamon buns brushed by fire and spread with the last of the butter. While we ate, the bats came out to trace the rapid kiss of their black shapes on the sky.

I have never since found myself with maple syrup, a need to make cookies, and no sugar, but I have made these cookies again. They're perfect cookies to make on a whim, a small batch that mixes up in the time it takes the oven to heat, and irresistible while they're still warm. I make them small, so they have plenty of room to spread on the cookie sheet.

Maple Syrup Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup very soft butter

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 egg

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 cup coarsely chopped Belgian semi-sweet chocolate

Preheat the oven to 350°F

In a medium mixing bowl, beat the butter and syrup together with an electric mixer until smooth. Add the egg and vanilla and beat until well mixed. Add the flour, baking soda, salt, and chocolate.

Using a teaspoon, drop the dough onto a greased baking sheet. Bake for 12 minutes, or until the edges are browned.

Makes 2 1/2 dozen cookies.

(I know, I know, it doesn't mention salt anywhere in the ingredients, but then makes reference to it in the directions. You could probably leave it out and it would be just fine, but a pinch of salt for good measure won't hurt a thing.)

Sigh. I feel like I've just returned from a tiny island with a cabin and wood stove myself. If after reading this you don't feel this deep longing to eat chicken and cookies and cinnamon buns cooked in a wood stove while drinking plum wine and listening to the loons on the lake, then I am saddened to have to be the one to tell you that you don't have a soul. My condolences.

I could personally read that chapter over and over and over again and still want to go that island. The cool thing is that the author is from Vancouver, so she's probably talking about someplace on the Sunshine Coast! I wonder if I can email her and ask where? I would love to go. It sounds to me like it's one of the ones around Saltspring, Gabriola and Galiano Islands.

Well, it's late now, so I bid you adieu. I hope I've given you some lovely brain fodder to mull around in your pretty heads.

PS. Still obsessed with that song by La Roux. It makes me want to dance all the time.