Post-mortem

It was worth the wait. To hear two genuinely moving speeches that didn't sound too pre-rehearsed, tweaked, or edited. The rest of the Oscars had its moments, I have to admit- Tina Fey and Steve Martin should totally co-host next year's Oscars, I loved the Judd Apatow directed short with Seth Rogen and James Franco, and I hope everyone saw/heard Best Animated Short director Kunio Kato's a brilliant haiku of an acceptance speech (he thanked his pencil! And domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!) But our favorite new twist on the award ceremony was how they replaced the snippets of all the acting nominees' film with a tribute from past winners in the category. For the most part, it was a really nice touch, to be commended by the actors who had come before you, and to be given personal validation. We wondered if the past winners had written the tributes themselves; if they did, then you could tell for sure who who didn't seem to mean what they said (I'm talking to you Michael Douglas), and who did. Like Robert de Niro:

How did he do it? How for so many years did Sean Penn get all those jobs playing straight men? Being a movie star can get in the way of acting. But not for Sean. Sean Penn the actor loses himself in every role so we can discover a man named Sam, Mystic River Jimmy Markum, the surfer dude Spicoli, a dead man walking, and Harvey Milk. Sean brings the same commitment to his off-screen life; you see it when he campaigns for human rights, respectfully advises world leaders, and gently, gently reasons with the paparazzi. Tonight, it's important to be a great actor; in life, it's more important to be a great human being. That's my friend, Sean Penn.
-Robert de Niro's, 2009 Academy Awards

Sean Penn returned the gesture with an acceptance speech that had the perfect combination of graciousness, humor, self-awareness, gravitas, and political righteousness (especially in light of his role and the current status of Prop 8 in California):

You commie, homo-loving sons of a guns... I did not expect this. And I want to be very clear that I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me often. But I am touched by the appreciation and I hoped for it enough that I scribbled down the names in case you *were* commie, homo-loving sons of a guns. [thanks a bunch of people...] Finally, for those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think it's a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone. And there are these last two things, I'm very very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man as president and a country who for all its toughness creates courageous artists and this is in great due respect to all the nominees. But courageous artists who despite a sensitivity that has sometimes brought enormous challenge, Mickey Rourke rises again and he is my brother. Thank you all very much.
-Sean Penn, acceptance speech, 2009 Academy Awards

In the nick of time...

This is probably the latest I've ever posted my Oscar choices for the year but it's a tradition this blog has maintained over the years, and so nothing, not even two naps, a pot-luck dinner, and more sleeping, is going to get in the way of me putting this up- even if it is an hour to the awards... Besides, this is one of the few years where we've watched most of everything that's been nominated so there's particular excitement in the outcome :)

Best Picture
* Slumdog Millionaire

Director
* Danny Boyle

Actor in a Leading Role
* Sean Penn

Actress in a Leading Role
* Kate Winslet
It's about time!

Actor in a Supporting Role
* Heath Ledger
As srah noted in one of her Facebook/Twitter updates, everyone in her Oscar pool chose Heath; if he doesn't win, there might be a worldwide riot...

Actress in a Supporting Role
* Penélope Cruz

Original Screenplay
* Wall-E
The fact that my favorite film of 2008 (and possibly my favorite animated movie ever, next to Tombstone for the Fireflies) wasn't nominated for Best Movie means that I'm going to root for it for almost every category it's nominated in.

Adapted Screenplay
* Slumdog Millionaire

Foreign Language Film
* The Class

Animated Feature
* Wall-E
Duh...

Original Score
* Slumdog Millionaire

Original Song
* 'Jai Ho'

Art Direction
* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Cinematography
* Slumdog Millionaire

Costume Design
* The Duchess
For the past few years, I've gone with more iconic, understated fashion statements like in Atonement, but I've come to realize that when it comes to Costume Design, it's almost always what's most elaborate, most intricate.

Makeup
* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Documentary Feature
* Man on Wire
For the first time in a long time, we've actually seen a nominee in this category and Man on Wire was beautiful. Elegiac because of the context of Philippe Petit's feat, but also a wonderful testimony to persistence, inspiration, and just the living out of one's dream.

Sound Mixing
* Wall-E

Sound Editing
* Wall-E
I know these are very unconventional choices and I've never had very much investment in the sound categories, but apart from the fact that I believe Wall-E should win everything it's nominated for, did you see the first 30 minutes of the movie? It's all about the sound, people!

Visual Effects
* The Dark Knight

Film Editing
* Frost Nixon

Short Film, Animated
* La Maison en Petits Cubes

Short Film, Live Action
* Manon on the Asphalt

Documentary Short Subject
* The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306

Yew(s) are pregnant!- Part Deux

So as the dust settles from our little announcement, after receiving almost 150 congratulatory emails, messages, and comments (thanks everyone!), and having had our first doctor's appointment and coming to terms with the fact that yes, come August, there will be indeed someone else sharing our lives, I thought it probably is a good idea to share a little about how things have been evolving these past month or so. So Jude and I actually found out about the little kiddo on New Year's Day itself. It was a wonderful way to usher in 2009 :) First there was surprise (in an extremely good way of course...), then euphoria, and then a deep profound panic when I realized I had had a ridiculous amount of raw salmon and tuna sushi the night before. What if the baby ingested too much mercury from all that raw fish???!!! Then there was more panic at the thought that I would no longer be able to have coffee for the next eight months. Oh the agony... For Jude, it was more like, "OK, we so need to get some books..."

Since then, things have been slowly changing around the house. Our shopping habits are definitely different, for one- instead of scouring for earphones or music online, Jude's been looking at strollers and cribs instead. It's adorable, really... :) We're trying to be really good about the kinds of food we're buying so that I can eat healthy, although, that's been the biggest stumbling block so far. Not the eating healthy part, just eating at all. As Jude likes to say, I've been almost always hungry, but I actually feel little inclination to eat. Food just hasn't had the same allure these past months. What an irony... Oh, I'll eat because the baby needs to eat, but I haven't been deriving much pleasure from it. Honestly, if I could eat the fortified cereals from Trader Joe's or Kashi with milk for every meal, I would. And of course, there's the whole coffee thing. I haven't even been taking much decaf. I think I love coffee so much that going decaf is like some kind of infidelity... I'd rather go without it altogether than to compromise.

Physically, I've been completely fatigued out. It's getting better now, but initially, there were days when I actually took TWO naps, on top of a solid 8 hours of sleep at night! It felt overindulgent and almost ridiculous until someone put it in perspective for me that I'm making a person in my body- I am literally someone else's life support system and that's hard work! Besides, once the baby arrives, neither one of us will ever be able to get that much sleep again so I'd better savor that as much as I can now :)

Right now, it's just taking little tiny baby steps (pun FULLY intended...) towards preparing the house and ourselves for August- buying a new mattress, planning on how to reconfigure our house for baby furniture, registering for classes (because really, despite what many people think, no one is a born parent- it's a learning and growing process...), reading up on as much as we can (for both Mommies and Daddies), slowly buying some baby clothes, and leaning on the wonderful support of our family and friends who've been such lifesavers!! Thank you for all your warm wishes, advice, and recommendations- you guys are the awesomest best!

Right now, our baby's only the size of a peach (although it already has teeth, a spine, and this week, fingerprints!!) but it's already very real to us. When I heard its heartbeat this week, I thought my heart was going to burst and I almost starting crying...

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
-Elizabeth Stone

Interesting followup to Serene's Trader Joe's post

Just found this article on the Freakanomics blog about the owners of Trader Joe's:

So, let me ask those of you who fall into categories 2 and 3: Who owns Trader Joe’s?

1. Some great California family full of surfers and gardeners.

2. A small band of communal farmers in Oregon.

3. A huge German discount-grocery chain best known in the U.S. for no-glamor stores often located in marginal neighborhoods.

Yeah, it’s No. 3. The company is called Aldi and, though I’d seen one or two of its stores in the past, I didn’t even know it was a grocery store. Then I read this very interesting Wall Street Journal piece about the company’s ambitious new plan for the U.S., which calls for 75 new stores this year. The article claims that Aldi is so good at selling cheap goods that WalMart couldn’t compete with it in Germany.

I did a little more investigating about Aldi. Apparently, Aldi specializes in running low-cost, discount stores - mainly selling house brands - in marginal neighborhoods in the US. But in Germany, according to Aldi's wikipedia page, :

95% of blue-collar workers, 88% of white-collar workers, 84% of public servants and 80% of self-employed Germans shop at Aldi.

That's some market share!!!

Would it be safe to say that Trader Joe's has cornered 80% of the YUPPIE market? A lot of people we know shop at Trader Joe's. Do you? Let us know, it would be interesting to find out ...

Song of the week: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - A Teenager in Love

A Teenager In Love - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

A wonderful new band that I discovered via pitchfork. Just because ...

Yew(s) are pregnant!!

:)

The anti-valentine's day mix

I waited till valentine's day was over to post this mix - didn't want to be lynched yet still wanted to maintain the street cred of this here blog. I found this mix on stereogum and found it too good not to reproduce here.

Florence And The Machine - "Kiss With A Fist" (MP3)
Black Lips - "Starting Over" (MP3)
Vivian Girls - "Where Do You Run To" (MP3)
Handsome Furs - "I'm Confused" (MP3)
Lissy Trullie - "Boy Boy" (MP3)
Papercuts - "Future Primitive" (MP3)
The Decemberists - "The Rake's Song" (MP3)
Julie Doiron - "Consolation Prize" (MP3)
Ferraby Lionheart - "Dear Corinne" (MP3)
Port O'Brien - "Is This Really What It's Come To" (MP3)
Neko Case - "People Got A Lot Of Nerve" (MP3)
Bon Iver - "Your Love (Live)" (MP3)
Nick Thorburn - "Used To Be Funny" (MP3)

Valetine's mosaic

To love...

My Funny Valentine
Sweet Comic Valentine
You Make Me Smile With My Heart
You're Looks Are Laughable,
Unphotographable
Yet You're My Favorite Work Of Art
Is Your FigureLess Than Greek
Is Your Mouth A Little Weak
When You Open It To Speak
Are You Smart
Don't Change A Hair For Me
Not If You Care For Me
Stay Little Valentine Stay
Each Day Is Valentine's Day

-"My Funny Valentine", Chet Baker

Oldie but goodie...

So as you can see, dear readers, ghetto of our mind has reverted back to Blog Template #4. Blog Template #5, a.k.a. Birds on a Wire met an untimely demise when the header image disappeared on us. I suspect either the template designer deleted the image not knowing that people were using it or their image hosting account got deleted. I should have known better and saved the image on our own. But oh well, the pomegranates are still adorable I still love the fresh, clean aesthetic of the design. It was our longest running template so there has to be something enduring and endearing about it :)

Ode to Trader Joe's

I love this video so much it's ridiculous :) Everything we love about our wonderfully quirky favorite grocery store where we find all the stuff we need and then some we never knew we'd like but now adore. Things are always fresh, easy, healthy (most of the time), delicious, and most importantly, interesting. And often value for money too.

Things in the video that appear frequently in Jude and Serene's shopping cart:
- organic milk
- bread (we just discovered their naan and it's wonderful!)
- peanut butter filled pretzels
- chocolate covered nuts
- soup in cartons
- 2 buck Chucks (Charles Shaw wines)
- Thai Lime & Chili Cashews
- bananas sold singly (so we can buy just three if we wanted to...)
- peeled baby carrots (I never eat them whole but I'll chop them up into tiny pieces and throw them into stews or soups so I'll get the nutrition but I can't really see that they're there)
- Fuji apples
- Mochi ice-cream (mango, of course!)
- organic eggs
- cereal (because their cereal selection rocks!)
- $0.99/can tomatoes
- flavored lemonade
- Airbourne (nothing staves off an imminent cold/flu like this Vitamin C booster)
- mini watermelons (perfect for just two of us)

I could go on about our other favorite TJ products like their frozen Orange Chicken, guacamole, pear sauce, frozen tamales, pasta sauces, cheap cremini mushrooms and arugula salad, interesting simmer sauces like Chicken Marsala or Cacciatore, cheapest saffron anywhere, and so many many, much much more. And just like it is in the video, we never pass up the food samples, always take a small cup of their coffee or tea, and have had the handles of the TJ paper bags rip on us so many times, we now bring our own shopping bags. I have to say though, that the only time I've had problems finding a parking spot in the TJ's here was the day before Thanksgiving last year. And really, I should have known better...

What's your favorite thing about Trader Joe's? :)

Let the river run

Sometimes, nothing beats an old song to remind you that classics should always have a place in your playlist. By some quirk of the channel-surfing karma, I watched the last hour of Working Girl again yesterday after a really long time. It's all '80s in it's big-hair, shoulder-pads glory, and in a time when Harrison Ford still looked like he could play Indiana Jones without getting a cardiac arrest. The acting isn't the greatest-- least of all Melanie Griffith's-- but the last scene is worth it all.



I think it's the combination of how director, Mike Nichols pans out of her office into a panoramic view of the cityscape and Carly Simon's uplifting "Let the River Run". The song hits such a euphoric note that it gets me every time. The movie may be dated but the song definitely isn't. Moving, inspiring, and triumphant, it's a call to dare, to dream, to desire, to demand, and to declare.

Listen "Carly Simon let the river run"

Download for free "Carly Simon let the river run" mp3

Silver cities rise,
The morning lights
The streets that meet them,
And sirens call them on
With a song.

It's asking for the taking.
Trembling, shaking.
Oh, my heart is aching.

We're coming to the edge,
Running on the water,
Coming through the fog,
Your sons and daughters.

We the great and small
Stand on a star
And blaze a trail of desire
Through the dark'ning dawn.
-Carly Simon, "Let the River Run"

Coraline

Oooh! Oooh! Neil Gaiman! Stop-motion animation! Henry Selick! It's like The Nightmare Before Christmas meets Mathilda meets Alice in Wonderland!



And check out the most wonderfully delightful (albeit slightly macabre) website :)

You're about to enter a world where everything you'll see has been created by hand;
Like a forest of cherry blossoms made from painted popcorn;
500 handmade scottie dogs that fill an entire theatre;
And 3500 handcrafted flowers that all light up.
-Coraline website

Comforts from the kitchen

I know from reading our blog, it sometimes seems as if I'm the only one who does the cooking at home, but really, Jude's a pretty mean cook himself. Especially if you get him craving something enough, or inspired enough, he'll take over the kitchen and whip up something so cool, it'll knock your socks off :) Like a couple of weeks ago when I was fighting a cough and cold from the crazy weather- he wanted to make me something soupy and also happened to be craving Soto Ayam after reading this NYTimes article about soups from Southeast Asia. So what does my husband do? He puts me to bed and orders me not to get up till he tells me to, and 3 hours later, I wake up to this:


It was delicious, comforting, evocative, and just most wonderful. Really, there is no better cure for the flu than your husband making you any kind of soup, especially one that almost immediately floods you with memories of home :) It helped too that we have the actual book from which the recipe comes: James Oseland's Cradle of Flavor, a birthday present from Jude a couple of years ago.

Tonight, we decided to try recreating another soup from home from the book. No, neither one of us is under the weather; just greedy and missing home during the Chinese New Year season. Besides, for some reason, we've been craving this one particular soup for the past couple of weeks. Itek Tim is a tangy Peranakan duck soup simmered with salted mustard greens (kiam chye) and preserved dried plums (sng muay). This is one of my favorite soups from home and I beg my mom to make her definitive kick-ass version every time we're home. Unfortunately, we couldn't find fresh duck here (we're going to check out Plum Market tomorrow) so we used a combination of chicken and pork ribs. Once again, the force was strong in Jude, and he was prepping the ingredients before I even had a chance to step into the kitchen. He bruised the ginger and nutmeg, I chopped the chicken; he measured out the seasonings, I washed the mustard greens. Following Oseland's recipe almost to a T (we didn't have brandy and had to use whiskey instead, though...), between the two of us, I think we pulled off a pretty decent version. My mom would be proud :)


The soup has to simmer for an hour and a half but by the hour mark, the two of us were finding it really hard to resist the delicious smells wafting through the house. It's a wonderfully complex tasting soup- the combination of the flavor of the meats with the sweet-saltiness of the vegetables, mingling with the tanginess of the dried plums, and then there's the added layer of that certain something something that dances at the back of your throat from the nutmeg, pepper, ginger, and whiskey that was used to briefly marinate the meats.

Truly, people, it was pure soup bliss... :)

25 Random Things About Me

Because I've been tagged too many times on Facebook to not do this...

1. I'm making this list because I'm clearly bad at resisting peer pressure: "But mom, all the cool kids are doing it!..."
2. My favorite fruit is the mango.
3. I love Oasis even though Jude thinks they're the ah bengs of Brit rock.
4. I have no wisdom teeth. The dentist took them all out when I got braces at twelve.
5. Accord to a personality assessment report, my literary counterparts are either Hero in Much Ado About Nothing or Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes series.
6. I haven't had a sip of caffeinated coffee in the past month.
7. I make a pretty mean roast chicken.
8. If I had to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life, it'll have to be sushi.
9. Jude and I first bonded over The Virgin Suicides- the novel, not the movie.
10. I never buy bottled water unless we're traveling.
11. I've met and spoken to (sort of...) two of my favorite writers, Nick Hornby and Salman Rushdie.
12. I've seen four of my favorite bands live- U2, Coldplay, Broken Social Scene, and Death Cab for Cutie.
13. I sleep on the right side of the bed. Even when I'm sleeping alone.
14. One of the best decisions I made last year was to take my running more seriously.
15. I don't eat carrots unless they're too difficult to remove, like in spring rolls or coleslaw.
16. 1999 was my favorite year in movies because it gave us The Matrix, Iron Giant, Fight Club, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
17. My favorite color could be green, orange or lavender, depending on my mood and the context.
18. I look more like my mom than my dad.
19. I'm shortsighted like my dad. My mom has perfect vision.
20. When I was six, I danced in my kindergarten "graduation" ceremony. The song was "Morning Has Broken" and I was a purple orchid.
21. My first Hollywood crush was Ke Huy Quan, the little boy in Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom and The Goonies.
22. The first car I ever drove was my dad's silver Mitsubishi Galant.
23. My favorite TV day is Wednesdays because it has Lost at 9pm and Top Chef at 10pm.
24. I love polka dots.
25. I hate celery.

恭喜发财, 牛年快乐

Another year of not being with the folks and family for the Lunar New Year. And another year pining for crumbly pineapple tarts, melt-in-your-mouth kueh bangkit, and sweet-salty bak kwa. We've become used to spending mellow new years here, but it doesn't mean we miss home any less. Like any other huge holiday, Chinese New Year is a big deal for my family- apart from my parents and sisters (and now brother-in-law!), it's also about my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and army of cousins, nieces, & nephews; it's about just being with them and basking in the warm glow of family.

We ushered in the Year of the Ox quietly- there was a Chinese dinner at Middle Kingdom on Saturday with Lian, Kabi and Rick, and where our server recommended a gigantic steamed whole walleye for auspicious reasons ("fish" sounds like "prosperity" in Mandarin). Despite there being only five of us, we gamely ordered it anyway and practically cleaned the entire dish on top of everything else we ordered :) "Reunion" dinner last night was at Macaroni Grill, most decidedly un-Chinese and deliberately so. We figured all the Chinese places would be crowded so pasta it was. Besides, we could just about pretend we were having traditional Chinese New Year noodles for good luck (even though I ordered bow-tie pasta which look nothing like long, thin noodles...) And today, on the first day of the new year, instead of a day-long affair of jumping in and out of the car visiting relatives, stuffing our faces silly with new year goodies, and playing cards with the cousin, I'm bound to my desk, triple-backing-up data, transcribing, and trying my hand at website design.

All in all though, we are hopeful for the Year of the Ox- it's my dad's zodiac sign, and if nothing else, that suggests good things to come :) Here's wishing all of you who celebrate the Lunar New Year many bovine blessings for the year, whether that be wealth, health or just all-round good cheer!

The 7-month wait is finally over!

No prizes to the person who guesses correctly what we'll be doing tomorrow at 8pm EST :)

Feels like the Arctic? Then live like in the Arctic

Look what we saw on our walk around the neighborhood this evening:


Love it! :)

Crazypants weather...

The forecast for tomorrow-

In Fahrenheit


In Centigrade


The weather report says something about "LONG DURATION ARCTIC VISIT." What the heck does *that* mean? A visit? Who invited the Arctic chill? Is this a long-term stay or more an illegal squatting situation? Does it understand how unwelcome it is?

Mr. Bus-Driver Man II

After six years of living in family housing and having taken the internal Blue Bus shuttle almost everyday all this time, Jude and I like to think that we know almost all the bus drivers who drive our route. We don't know each of them personally of course, but six years is long enough to develop an opinion about each of these individuals who are responsible for getting you to school in the most inclement weather (a.k.a. This Past Week). There's the lady who's always a little gruff with you but is really a softie when it comes to babies and old ladies; that one guy who never seems to be in the official UM PTA uniform but wears a sweatshirt instead and only talks to undergrad girls; the Bus Driver From Hell who NEVER stops in front of the bus-stop but several meters away just so you have to walk for your ride even if it means trudging through 10-inches of snow. And then there's Mr. Bus Driver Man. Almost four years ago, I had blogged about the same bus-driver and how he had plucked flowers for his wife while waiting for his scheduled time to leave. It's been a while since I saw him and I thought maybe he had retired.

But no, I realized today that it probably has more to do with the times I take the bus- I usually leave the house at 9-ish in the morning and catch the late evening bus home. But because of the weather advisory today, I thought I should leave school early and actually made it out of the building before 3pm. Lo and behold, I hop onto Mr. Bus Driver Man's bus :) He looks exactly the same and just as sweet. Despite the cold and snow, he personally stood outside his bus to wait for people who might be rushing for the bus just so they'd know he was waiting for them and he literally jumped off the bus when it looked like a girl who had just alighted had sprained her ankle. If he could, I really think he would have taken her to the doctor's himself.

I know it seems odd to blog about a bus-driver who hardly knows who I am but it was moving to see little acts of kindness unfold before you. Especially from people who are so much a part of your everyday life that you don't often stop to think of them as individuals...

Day One

So today marked the first day of the second half of my dissertation data collection. I worked with the children in Singapore all through our time back home last summer and it's now time for the U.S. half of my study. It was actually my first time in an actual U.S. classroom (well, three classrooms, specifically)- I've been in and out of preschool classrooms the past six years but until today, I haven't stepped into an all-American K-12 school.

Some things are different from home- architecturally for one, schools in the U.S.-- or at least the ones I was in today-- are more enclosed. I'm so used to schools being constructed around a quadrangle, classrooms arranged along open corridors, sunlight flooding in from everywhere and things just being really open. Here, classrooms open up into labyrinthine indoor hallways, with exits only at specific points at the end of them, and little outside light except from main entrances, designated nooks, or one wall of windows in the classrooms. I know this paints a picture of schools here being dark and depressing, but quite the opposite. Every wall is covered in children's art-- and there's A LOT of wall space, teachers' decorate their classroom doors, handmade public service posters are everywhere and it's obvious that children are encouraged to personalize their school in ways that extend far beyond school-sanctioned notices or sanitized, laminiated displays of the multiplication table.

Children everywhere are fundamentally the same though- a ten-year-old in Singapore and a ten-year-old in America may wear different things to school, have very different choices of food for recess, and are educated in some very profoundly different ways, but at the end of the day, they respond to humor, they think celebrities are more famous than politicians, and when given the choice, they will happily choose to welcome a researcher into their classroom and subject themselves to her crazy questions than do any actual real schoolwork.

If today's an indication of anything, the next six weeks look like they're going to be fun :)

Tune of the week: Alfie - People

How have I not heard of Alfie?

Alfie were a short lived (2000 - 2005) but much loved band hailing from Manchester. Love this description of the band on their last.fm page:

"none of these albums sold particulary well so the band did their best and put together their 4th long player, ‘crying at teatime’. this record was much bolder but still bore their, by now familiar, lacadaisical, unpretentious, soothing, yada, yada, yada sound, soooo… as this was supposed to be their debut into the pop world everybody decided that it was all much too odd, all round, so they did the decent thing, (rather than bending to the celebrity ruled world of a.o.r.) and split up."

I have not carefully listened to Alfie's other output yet, but I do love this track - having found it on the edition of Late Night Tales' compilation featuring tracks chosen by The Flaming Lips.

Advice for writing in the age of distraction

If you are like me, constantly checking email, facebook statuses and worse of all getting sucked into chasing the latest online deals, then perhaps Cory Doctorow's advice for maintaining writing productivity might help. I've summed up his main points below, but you can get at the original blogpost he put up here.

* Short, regular work schedule
When I'm working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I'm working on it. It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there's always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn't become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day's page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you've already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

* Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.

* Don't research
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

* Don't be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.

* Kill your word-processor
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.

* Realtime communications tools are deadly
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

What's cooking?

Ever since the fiasco of the latest season of Project Runway (which if people were observant enough, I didn't even bother blogging about... Don't even get me started about Kenley and how no one-- *no one*-- should ever be rude to Tim Gunn), I was beginning to have my doubts about Bravo's reality-TV formula. Admittedly, their less than imaginative production of Project Runway might have to do with the fact that they're losing the show to Lifetime this year, but still, you'd think that for the swansong season, they'd do something more inspired that making clothes out of car parts or based on zodiac signs.

But since the new Top Chef season began-- and every week since-- my faith in my next-to-favorite cable channel is being revived. I love this new season, make that *adore*. Each challenge has been fun, exciting, and unexpected-- who would have thought Foo Fighters and Thanksgiving?! ("No more barfait!"- Taylor Hawkins) But the episode that really sealed it for me was the Christmas one where no one got sent home because everyone had chipped in to help Radhika and Hosea who's food had gone bad the night before. There was a genuine camaraderie and respect for each other that I hadn't seen in previous seasons. Even smarmy, arrogant Stefan admitted that it does him no good to compete under such unfair circumstances. It was nice to see that kind of momentary selflessness in a genre of television that is not known for forgiving relationships between competitors.

The addition of Toby Young this week as the new judge was a touch of genius- the show really didn't need the bland and boring Gail Simmons anyway. Acerbic, brutal and funny as hell, he made Jude and I cringe and cackle all the show tonight. My pick to win is Fabio, the Italian Stallion :) I love his accent, the way he talks about his food, his grandmother, the judges, and his fellow cheftestants. Like tonight about Jamie making scallops again, "This is Top Chef, not Top Scallop!"

The UN Inspectors were looking in the wrong place. I have found the weapons of mass destruction and they are in this dish.
-Toby Young, Top Chef

Tweet tweet...

Goodbye pomegranates.


So to usher in the new year, ghetto of our mind has taken on a new look again. It's been close to a year and a half since the last change (the post describes the evolution of our blog) and with little to do while we were in Wisconsin, I occupied my time by searching for, finding, tweaking, Photoshopping, Illustratoring, and tweaking some more this final blog template you see now. As some of our more frequent readers know, this birdie design has been up for about a week or so now-- a soft release if you will ;)-- but from then till now, there have been little things I've been playing around with, like the tree image at the bottom of the page, the letter and line spacings, the blockquote code, fixing Jude's last fm widget, etc... But as of 4.47pm, 1/2/09, I think this is about as final as it's going to get for now. For a while, I got a little obsessed with correcting every little quirk, error or flaw I noticed in the formating till it frustrated even me. But like Emilee said, there's a bit of a obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist in every PhD student, so I'm just going to have to embrace that side of my personality whether I like it or not.

Besides, I really don't mind putting a little work into the blog. Ever since we started it, it's become a fairly important part of my life in terms of putting into words thoughts that would otherwise have remained internal. It's probably as much for myself as it is for the people reading, sort of like therapy if you will. And for that I thank you, our dear readers, for allowing us to inflict on you all our verbiage, no matter how mundane or banal :)

Retrosepctive

These were the things that defined the blog-- and by extension, us-- this past year. Thanks 2008, you've been good to us :)

[click for larger image]

Thanks to wordle.

I Believe in a Thing Called Love

It was a rollicking good time watching and laughing through VH1's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs last night. Some of it was just so ridiculously silly that it actually became entertaining :) Do these people take their rock personae that seriously? And our favorite had to be The Darkness and their video for "I Believe in a Thing Called Love". In the words of MTV, the band struck enough classic and cliché heavy metal poses to make Mötley Crüe look like Oasis. I'm convinced I've heard the song on the radio before, but the video is a whole other crazy creature altogether. A spot-on parody of the glam-rock '70s, it's like a lovechild between Queen, David Bowie, and Van Halen. It is magnificent in its complete and utter ludicrousness :)

And we haven't stopped watching it since last night...

[when asked if they're a parody rock band]
"We're not a 'parody' of anything. Don't use that word...We're the fresh new sound of rock music."
- Justin Hawkins, frontman, The Darkness

"You will never go hungry..."

...something Emilee & Rick failed to mention when they invited us to spend Christmas with Emilee's family in Wisconsin. Over the course of a week, there was *never* a moment when I was genuinely hungry. Peckish, maybe; greedy, for sure; but a real, honest-to-goodness level of starvation? Nope.

Monday
Lunch: Double mushroom-swiss burger at Culver's off the Oshtemo exit. Best Culver's I've tasted, worst Michigan town in terms of ploughing (or lack thereof).
Dinner: Homemade chicken pot-pie and biscuits (plus lots of holiday snacks strewn everywhere...)

Tuesday
Lunch: Mushroom-pepperoni pizza from Rocky Rococo and one-and-a-half pound of wings from Sentry, a Wisconsin-based grocery store.
Dinner: Sweet sour pork with fried rice. Did I mention the holiday snacks? Cranberry pretzels, white chocolate peppermint bark, red and green M&Ms?

Wednesday (this is when the holiday eating madness begins...)
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with bacon. One-and-a-half pounds of bacon, to be exact. Plus buttered toast. Of course.
Lunch: Fresh cheese curds and more wings from Sentry. If you haven't realized by now, Sentry has some fairly profound chicken wings.
Dinner: Homemade lasagne (yummmm...), garlic Texas Toast, Caesar salad.
Desserts (yes, plural): Homemade chocolate cake with mocha frosting and Grandma Wolfe's ridiculously addictive date bars.

Thursday
Breakfast: Skier's french toast and sausage fried in bacon grease. Because nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like complete abandon in the cholesterol-counting department.
Lunch: Really, lunch? I had room for lunch? I didn't but I had Brie and crackers anyway...
Dinner: Surf & turf Christmas dinner- steak, crab claws, scalloped potatoes (Rick using an Elise recipe is always foolproof and delicious!), and corn. And desserts from last night. Plus lots of Asti Spumante.

Friday
Breakfast: Oatmeal, bacon, eggs, toast, grapefruit. It was like being at an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, a.k.a., foodie heaven.
Lunch/Dinner: Friday fish fry at 4.30pm at the 5'O Clock Club, so it was something in between lunch and dinner. It was our first taste of the Wisconsin tradition and completely transformed my conception of seafood in the Midwest. Lake Perch- gooooood...
Supper: Watching the extended Fellowship of the Rings makes a person hungry, and makes five people even hungrier (don't question my logic!). It was 9.30, we had just finished watching the first disc and pizza was in order. Even if it meant placing the last order for the night and Beth having to drive to Rocky Rococo's to pick it up herself.

Saturday
Breakfast: English muffins. Yes, I know, how modest in comparison. But we had all set our alarms to wake up early to start The Two Towers and slack was not to be cut for breakfast. Although the smell of eggs and bacon sometime in the middle of Disc Two was magnificently distracting...
Lunch: More Culver's. Fried chicken. And ButterBurgers. Plus fries, cheese curds and coleslaw.
Dinner: Rader anniversary dinner. Rick & I made dinner of grilled pork tenderloin and mac & cheese. 3-quarts of mac and cheese to be precise. That's 12-cups, folks. Made with close to six cups of milk and four pounds of cheese. Black Diamond Cheddar rocks. More Asti Spumante.
Dessert: Homemade banana cream pie. Because Emilee's dad hadn't stopped asking for it. It was definitely pie worth waiting for.

Sunday
Breakfast: Homemade pancakes and more bacon than should be allowed on a breakfast table. And really good Trader Joe's maple syrup.
Lunch: Jude and I *had* to make a pit stop at La Pasadita in Chicago on our drive back to Ann Arbor. *Had* to. Yes, it is a physiological need, people. We could barely contain our excitement as we exited I-94E into the city. You'd understand if you've tasted their awesomest tacos...

Top that with a copious amount of Mario Karting (this is one area where mediocrity is okay with me...), the extended LOTR trilogy, lots of dog giddiness (we are now intimately acquainted with the routines and habits of the canine species), and tons of laughter and good cheer, and you have our wonderful Christmas holiday with the Raders. With the exception of going home to Singapore, I really can't think of a better way we could have celebrated Christmas :)

[click for photos]

1. Jude and dogs action shot, 2. Grandma Rader loving her white elephant present, 3. Serene wondering what's inside, 4. Sisters hiding, 5. Opening presents, 6. Table setting, 7. Present corner, 8. The Raders' beautiful home, 9. Christmas Eve dinner

Happy, happy holidays!

As I type this, I'm watching whirling snow come down like powdered sugar over Emilee's parents' place in Wisconsin. They generously invited us to spend Christmas with them and we're glad we get to be with family-- even if it's our friends'-- rather than no family this holiday. And we're even more happy that we made it here before the insane snow storm Wisconsin is going to get today- 6 to 10 inches apparently. Driving through west Michigan was harrowing enough yesterday with stretches of unploughed freeway and being able to go only at 20/mph...

But we're indoors now in the Raders' beautiful home and are looking forward to a week of doing absolutely nothing except watching the four dogs drive each other giddy with playing, eating lots of good home-cooked food, playing cards, Taboo, and Scrabble with Emilee's grandmas, and watching the beautifully insane snow come down while keeping warm and dry.

Jude and I want to also wish all our blog-readers an equally wonderful Christmas and New Year! Here's our greeting card this year- it was Jude's awesome idea to create a video greeting on his website. Happy holidays to all!

[click for card]

Guess what came through my fatwallet feed tonight?

Ever the consummate (and addicted) online shopper, I noticed the above ad that came through the fatwallet feeds tonight. All I can say is WOW! And notice the recommendations that come with this product ...

Movie quote meme update

1. Meet me... in Montauk. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- guessed by Jude)
Every time we see this movie, I notice something new to love. It's just beautiful and wonderful and lovely. Jim Carrey at his heartbreaking best.

2. Shania hates mayo all right, and she can't eat chicken salad, that's no joke. We gave it to her once, she threw up in the limo - the lady hates chicken salad. (I Heart Huckabees- guessed by Stella)
One of the first blogposts I wrote in 2004 was about I Heart Huckabees and like I said to Stella, it's a polarizing film. You either love it, or hate it. Until today, I have a hard time justifying to my adviser why I think it was one of the best movies of 2004.

3. The shit hath hitith the fan... ith. (10 Things I Hate About You- guessed by Alfie)
C'mon, you have to admit that that's funny! I remember laughing sooo hard when I first heard it :) And in a movie that succeeds at being both a great teen movie and an inspired take on Shakespeare.

4. Um, this is Zeus. I'm not home right now, but you can leave a message and I'll get back to you. Please start speaking at the tone. (Mighty Aphrodite- guessed by no one)
An underrated Woody Allen film if you ask me. I love the nudge-nudge-wink-wink theatricality of it all, and the Greek Chorus totally sealed it for me :)

5. Sushi? Sushi? You think this is about sushi? (Monsters Inc- guessed by no one)
I'm actually surprised no one got this one. Until Wall-E, this was my favorite Pixar film. Plus it was one of the last animated movie I watched with Sam I think, so it has a very special place in my heart.

6. Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians. (High Fidelity- guessed by Rick)
I still think the book's better but the movie was saved by John Cusack and Jack Black. Which means completely watchable over and over and over again. The quote I really wanted to put was "Autobiographical." from my favorite part of the book and movie. But I thought that would have been too obvious ;)

7. I have to help Wayne with his bogo pogo. (Strictly Ballroom- guessed by Matt)
I thought no one would guess this one but it was Matt Bietz to the rescue :) I'm almost sure I was the only person in my neighborhood who rented the movie from the video store, which also means I'm totally responsible for wearing the VHS tape down. If you loved Moulin Rouge, you need to watch this to see how it all started. [Comment from Matt: "I love it too - and I realized what it was when I couldn't say "bogo pogo" without the accent. :)" ]

8. They say taupe is very soothing. (Ocean's 11- guessed by Alfie)
While I love many movies, there are few I can almost completely recite by heart- You've Got Mail, The Matrix, Love Actually, Jerry Maguire, and.. Ocean's 11.

9. We're gonna bring this party up to a nice respectable level. Don't worry, we're not gonna hurt anyone. We're not even gonna touch 'em. We're just gonna make 'em cry a little, just by lookin' at 'em. (Some Kind of Wonderful- guessed by Jenn)
Only our favorite 80s movie ever! I wanted to marry Eric Stolz and have him give me a pair of diamond earrings too. And another movie I've only ever seen on VHS or as a re-run on TV.

10. You can feel it. This desk set wants to fly! (Dead Poets Society- guessed by Olivier)
*sniff* The ending still gets me every time...

11. A Mo-Jo, it's a very high-tech machine that transmits pages over the telephone! It only takes eighteen minutes a page! (Almost Famous- guessed by Elaine)
This is actually not my favorite quote from the movie, but it was one I thought was the lest of a giveaway. The greatest lines are spoken by Frances McDormand: "This is not some apron-wearing mother you're talking to. I know about your Valhalla of Decadence, and I shouldn't have let him go. He is not ready for your world of compromised values, and diminished brain cells that you throw away like confetti. Am I speaking clearly to you?... If you break his spirit, harm him in any way, keep him from his chosen profession-- which is law, something you may not value but I do-- you will meet the voice on the other end of this telephone. And it will not be pretty. Do we understand each other?... I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it. Now go do your best. "Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid." Goethe said that. It's not too late for you to be a person of substance, Russell. Get my son home safely. You know, I'm glad we spoke."

12. Cows! I hate cows worse than coppers! (O Brother Where Art Thou?- guessed by Alfie)
I remember watching this at Jude's place one night when he was having a stomach flu. It was not the best conditions under which to see the movie, but I think it helped to make him feel better. And for that, I thank the Coen brothers :)

13. Michael Jackson didn't come over to my house to use the bathroom. He was about to. But his sister did. (The Goonies- guessed by no one)
A definite favorite from primary school :) It was either this or a quote from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

14. I used to eat there. Really good noodles. (The Matrix- guessed by Jenn)
I chose the most un-Matrix line of the whole movie just to make things a little interesting. Jenn had the best comment for this: " It's one of my favorite quotes because it's totally the essence of Keanu Reeves."

15. And in conclusion may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. (Clueless- guessed by Alfie)
Jude doesn't understand why I will watch this over and over again, no matter how many times it re-runs on Comedy Central or VH1. It's more than 10 years old but seems ageless to me. I love it for the same reason I love #3- witty teen movie meets literary classic. And the clever screenplay predates movies like Juno and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. [Other favorite quote from Clueless: "Mel: What the hell is that? Cher: A dress. Mel: Says who? Cher: Calvin Klein."]

Thanks to everyone who played- this was awesome!

Movie quotes meme

Via srah

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search or other search functions

1. Meet me... in Montauk. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- guessed by Jude)
2. Shania hates mayo all right, and she can't eat chicken salad, that's no joke. We gave it to her once, she threw up in the limo - the lady hates chicken salad. (I Heart Huckabees- guessed by Stella)
3. The shit hath hitith the fan... ith. (10 Things I Hate About You- guessed by Alfie)
4. Um, this is Zeus. I'm not home right now, but you can leave a message and I'll get back to you. Please start speaking at the tone.
5. Sushi? Sushi? You think this is about sushi?
6. Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians. (High Fidelity- guessed by Rick)
7. I have to help Wayne with his bogo pogo. (Strictly Ballroom- guessed by Matt)
8. They say taupe is very soothing. (Ocean's 11- guessed by Alfie)
9. We're gonna bring this party up to a nice respectable level. Don't worry, we're not gonna hurt anyone. We're not even gonna touch 'em. We're just gonna make 'em cry a little, just by lookin' at 'em. (Some Kind of Wonderful- guessed by Jenn)
10. You can feel it. This desk set wants to fly! (Dead Poets Society- guessed by Olivier)
11. A Mo-Jo, it's a very high-tech machine that transmits pages over the telephone! It only takes eighteen minutes a page! (Almost Famous- guessed by Elaine)
12. Cows! I hate cows worse than coppers! (O Brother Where Art Thou?- guessed by Alfie)
13. Michael Jackson didn't come over to my house to use the bathroom. He was about to. But his sister did.
14. I used to eat there. Really good noodles. (The Matrix- guessed by Jenn)
15. And in conclusion may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. (Clueless- guessed by Alfie)

[I double-posted this on my Facebook so some are going to get struck-out because people got them correct there.]

What has Jude been up to lately?

So some of you, dear blog readers, might be wondering - what the hell is Jude up to these days?

Well, in case you were wondering, I can tell you that he's been plenty busy, thank you :)

And just what has he been busy with?

Over Summer 2008, he had the great fortune of being able to go back to Singapore on an NSF fellowship to work at the Communications and New Media Dept. in NUS. While there, he worked with Giorgos Cheliotis and the great folks from the Participatory Media Lab. A project that kept him busy most of his time in Singapore was a study of participation patterns found in ccMixter, an online community focused on the remixing of Creative Commons licensed music.

Well, that was Summer. In November, Jude was back in Singapore for 2 weddings. But in between the weddings, he managed to squeeze in more work at the Participatory Media Lab. And what you see below is the culmination of all those months of effort :)

Yesterday, we finally submitted the paper you see here for the 2009 Communities and Technologies conference at Penn State University in June. There will be a couple more papers coming out of this same project, so watch out for them :)

*UPDATE*
A librarian friend from the antipodes advised me to take the paper down since it hasn't been published yet. Please feel free to email me if you would like to view a copy of the paper.

Let there be light

So during today's dark, rainy, pre-winter solstice evening, instead of cursing the darkness, Jude and I lit candles.* Well, made candles, actually, and with the Cooks and Cooneys. I have to say, it was one of the most soul-satisfying experiences I've had; there was something about hand-making one's own source of light (although we're not sure if we'd use our candles anytime soon- right now, they're too precious...) that moved me very deeply. And the significance of us doing this during the last few longest nights of the year was not lost on me.

Regular beeswax candles are expensive (I calculated, Jude and I now have the equivalent of about $100 worth of beeswax candles) but Dan managed to score a great deal on raw beeswax at a local farm and so we had 16 pounds of beeswax to work with today. I now understand why these candles are so coveted- for one, the smell of melting beeeswax is awesome- like a cross between honey and sunshine :) And they're supposed to burn brighter and longer too.

Making candles must be one of the most painstaking tasks in the world- the dipping of each individual layer of wax, dripping, waiting, dipping some more. Until what starts off looking like Pocky slowly evolves into this sturdy light-bearing vessel, full of promise and brilliance. Surrounded by good friends, good food, the sounds of laughing children doing all the wonderful things that children do, it was one of the most inspiring and rewarding ways anyone could choose to spend a gray and dreary winter afternoon :)

* From Adlai Stevenson's eulogy of Eleanor Roosevelt: "She would rather light candles than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world."

[Photos here.]

Christmas presents 2008

[click for album]

Two dozen eggs, four cans of coconut milk, six (or more) cups of sugar, a dozen half-pint mason jars, colored and raw twine, and twigs from our backyard. Christmas present 2008, all done! I quadrupled the quantity I made last week and tweaked the recipe a little by adding some caramelized sugar at the end. Jude tasted a little as the vat was cooling down and pronounced, "Yup, that's kaya." :)

Not only are homemade gifts less expensive, they also capture the spirit of holiday giving in a way that purchased gifts simply can't. And if you consider the ubiquitous traffic and holiday crowds, a leisurely morning spent baking breadsticks or whipping up a batch of homemade marshmallows seems positively Zen-like by comparison.
-L.A. Times, "50 ways to make your holiday gifts homemade"

A dog's life

1. Frisbee fun, 2. My favorite photo of Ursus, 3. Caught it!, 4. Tugging at the same frisbee

Rick and Emilee are in Paris and we're dog-sitting Ursus for them. Jenn's got Kumo so we thought it would be a good idea to have the brothers hang out for a bit at the dog park in case they missed each other.

Our camera-- thanks to a new lens-- captured some great moments :)

Writing spaces

So last night, we stumbled upon the BBC's cool slideshow featuring Eamonn McCabe's photographs of writers' rooms. It's a fascinating insight into the working environments of writers like Beryl Bainbridge and Roald Dahl. Some are austere (like V.S. Naipal), others are more genteel (like Margaret Drabble), and then there are those whose rooms are exactly how you would imagine them to be- Roald Dahl's, for one... Can't you just picture him writing while sinking into that comfy old armchair, surrounded by quirky odds and ends? :) My favorites, though, are Seamus Heaney's and Martin Amis'. For no other reason than the flood of natural light that comes in through their skylight.

While we aren't writers in the purest sense of the word, as graduate students, writing has become a huge part of our lives. And until that slideshow, I hadn't really thought about my writing space very much. It's just a place where I work and because it's also in our bedroom, it's not like it has some independent identity of its own like a real study room. But I should probably take more pride in my writing corner- it is after all a space of labor and thought, a space of creation, even if the product is a mundane dissertation.

Jude's writing space is in the smaller of our two rooms and while he does have a larger table, he shares the table with our printer, and the room with our guest futon and three huge shelves of all our books combined.

One day, we will have a large room devoted just to our books and our writing. It will have built-in shelves, generous working tables facing each other, a corner-to-corner-floor-to-ceiling white board wall, and preferably a skylight to let in as much natural light as possible. Yes, one day... :)

What does your writing space look like?

Homemade kaya

It's that time of the year again when I start planning Christmas gifts for our friends. For the past few years, we've done cranberry hootycreeks and hot chocolate in jars, and chocolate truffles. This year, for some reason, I thought maybe we'd do something a little more reminiscent of home- kaya. It's an egg custard jam popular in Southeast Asia made from coconut milk, eggs and sugar. Perfect on crisp buttered toast and a cup of black coffee, places that sell kaya are now a dime and dozen all over Singapore. But here, the only kind of kaya comes in a can and as any self-respecting Singaporean knows, those aren't nearly close to being in the same vicinity as real kaya.

And so this afternoon, I embarked on my first kaya-making attempt. I figured I'll make a small batch and try out the recipe first before making a whole lot to give away. Kaya is humble food and the ingredients are as simple as they come- sugar, eggs, coconut milk, and pandan (screwpine) leaves for that extra flavor. It would have been ideal to have freshly squeezed coconut milk of course, but this is Michigan- who are we kidding?...

Making kaya is a labor of love. It has to cook slowly over low heat and requires constant stirring so that the eggs don't curdle or scramble. Which also means it was an exercise in patience for me, standing over the double-boiler for 45 minutes doing nothing else but stirring. And listening to Jude play around with his iTunes playlist.

You can see here that the kaya is thickening up, reward for all the care you're taking. It transforms from what was a runny, eggy yellow mixture into a lovely pale golden curd.

After 45 minutes, the kaya is ready. A faintly sweet pandan scent hits you as you decant the kaya out of the pot. The texture is almost voluptuous, fuller than I what I'm used to, but in a good way- thick, luscious, but not heavy, like a lovechild between custard and pudding. And it has beautiful flavor. You can taste each and every ingredient so distinctly because it's just so fresh. The only thing though is that I would have liked it to be a deeper color. I might add some caramelized sugar to it when I make my next batch.

To complete the experience, Jude and I spread some kaya over buttered toast for tea. I'm happy to say, it was like I was home :)

[Recipe modified from here.]

Shadow Art Fair

We love the Shadow Art Fair. Started in July 2006 as a prequel-- and tongue-in-cheek competitor-- to Ann Arbor's over-hyped, overcrowded, and overpriced art fairs, the SAF in Ypsilanti-- the town next to us (some call it Ann Arbor's poorer cousin)-- is now pulling its own weight and drawing a loyal group of followers to the Corner Brewery twice a year. An eclectic mix of local and regional artists and designers doing their own wonderfully whimsical thing, I love the SAF for its unpretentious indie vibe and the awesome coziness of just a bunch of people happily cramped into a pub rather than the sprawling monstrosity that is the Ann Arbor art fair which not only disrupts the whole town every summer, but doesn't even really sell much art (no one can convince me that sunglasses or toaster ovens constitute art).

And so today, Jude, Jenn, and I braved the gnarly snow and spent the afternoon at the SAF. It was like being at an etsy sale- handknit winter hats and mittens, $1 haikus, quilted shopping bags, handpainted "art cakes", handprinted tees- I thoroughly enjoyed everything :) It helped that I got to sip some delicious hand-roasted coffee (and made a couple of new acquaintances in the process while waiting for my latte- some guy told me how much he loves my name and how he might just name his future daughter "Serene" now, plus I got a crash course in how to make those lovely milk foam patterns...), fell in love with what has to be the world's cleverest and most adorable "foodie" greeting cards, and bought some hand-appliquéd tea towels from Handmade Detroit for Christmas presents. But my favorite purchase today has to be Jude's choice of this illustrated print from Kill Taupe:

It's just so sweet and delightfully strange (especially in the context of the rest of his work) that I can't wait to frame it up so that we can put it up on our wall with the rest of the prints we've been collecting :)

Some photos of our haul here.

In Florida

In Florida
Originally uploaded by ghetto of our mind

I'm in strip mall hell. Surrounded by a Harley Davidson store, a Walgreens, McDonald's (with a giant lit-up pack of fries up front), Popeye's, two gas stations, the world's largest Checkers restaurant (apparently), and a place called Bargain World which according to some tourist website, sells discounted Floridian apparel (what Floridian apparel is, I don't know...) I'm also just off the freeway and two exits away from Universal Studios.

Yikes...

I'm in Orlando for a conference for two days and looking at my surroundings, it looks like I'm going to be staying in the resort the whole time. Jude helpfully informed me that there's actually a mall two miles away, but honestly, trying to get there would probably be too much effort. Not that staying on-site would be any better. The resort I'm in is kind of weird- lots of fountains and pools you can't swim in, I had to get driven in a buggy to get from the lobby to my room, it actually looks like some kind of motel-- the kind you drive up to-- and in the middle of nowhere, there's suddenly an ice-cream parlor. Plus, I also had the WORST possible dinner ever at the hotel restaurant- some sad excuse for grilled salmon and saffron risotto. No good ever comes out of dry fish and gummy, gloppy rice.

The only saving grace is that the room is more than adequate and they have good coffee. So it looks like the next two days will be spent session-hopping, sitting in my room, sipping coffee, and doing work. Or if the weather gets warmer, sitting by the pool, sipping coffee, and doing work. Let's hope it's the latter.

Christian the Lion

How could I have not known about this? Apparently, it was quite the phenomenon earlier this year, with 17 million people having watched the clip on YouTube already. But until this morning, I had no idea. I was catching up on last week's Screens Issue of the NYT Magazine when I came upon a section where they got an eclectic bunch of bloggers, celebrities and media personalities to write about their favorite screen moments of the past year. Starlee Kine, my new radio idol next to Ira Glass, called hers "the most solid reason for why the Internet should exist..."

Christian the Lion was a little lion cub that two young guys saw on sale at Harrods in London in 1969, back when department stores sold these kinds of things. They took him back to their flat, where he got into their sock drawers and played with balls of string. They befriended a vicar who let them use a local churchyard as a playground for the cub, and at the beginning of the video (which someone pulled out of an old British documentary and posted on YouTube last summer) there’s Super 8 footage of them frolicking about. Then text appears on the screen explaining that once Christian got too big, the boys had to take him to Africa to be with his own kind.

A year later they decided to go visit him, even though they were warned that Christian had become a full-grown lion with a pride of his own and wouldn’t remember them and would perhaps attack them if they went. They went anyway, these two tall, floppy-haired guys whom I admit I am seriously crushed out on, and the next thing you see is this grainy footage of them standing in the African sand, calling Christian’s name silently, because there’s no sound. Oh, and I’m sorry, did I forget to mention that Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is playing in the background, and that as you see Christian appear and are still unsure what’s going to happen (my friend Heather was convinced she was going to witness the two boys’ deaths; she couldn’t understand why else I was freaking out so much when I made her watch it) you hear Whitney sing, “I wish you joy and happiness, but above all this, I wish you lo-uh-ove,” and then Christian is running toward the boys, leaping onto his hind legs (“Watch out!” Heather screamed at this part) and the music is all, “And I will alll-ways love you,” and you see that Christian not only remembers them but that he loves them, dearly, desperately, he is hugging them with his enormous lion paws? And one of the guys, who looks a lot like a young Roger Daltrey, actually, has this huge smile on his face and you can see him choke back a sob. It’s just the most solid reason I’ve seen yet for why the Internet should exist. By the way, the video isn’t nearly as effective without the Whitney Houston song. I’ve tried watching it both ways and, really, you need the song in order to experience the full-blown effect.
- Starlee Kine, NYT Magazine, November 23, 2008

I challenge you to not choke up at the display of pure, unadulterated love and happiness... It's wonderful.