Spontaneous ∂erivation

It’s an odd thing. But making bento had managed to drag me into work (as opposed to working from home) every day I’ve made it. Even the days where I spend part of the morning on the floor, wondering how I can have everything I want but still have really, really bad moments. There are times when I identify with Lord Peter Wimsey, and those are some of them.

Anyways, today’s bentos are exactly the same as yesterday, except the applesauce is replaced with hummus egg salad. Store-bought hummus, but I tasted it, and it was okay.

I thought the 20 minutes of bento-making before the commute, with maybe some prep time the night before, would get bothersome, but it’s become therapeutic instead. “I made something to look forwards to later! Take that, my twisted psychology!” It’s a good way to focus on the present and future, and lessens the impact of whatever random PTSD crap my brain wants to inflict today.

I can’t believe I’m still suffering the aftershocks of Wednesday (if you follow my Twitter, you’ll know that heading out into the early dark stormy windy morning after dreaming about my father’s face and finding my garbage can moved discombobulated me… a bit).

Fortunately: yay ferry ride!

Well, the prospect of making bento does get me up and, subsequently, out the door in the mornings. I think it’s just that I can have a relaxed breakfast on the ferry, rather than one rushed at home or something expensive and greasy in the ferry galley.

Also, never underestimate being able to eat a lunch both cheap and dry in the heart of Seattle.

Breakfast Bento: I found a way to make the cereal work!

Plus mandarin oranges and grapes. The rice milk is in an off-screen Lock&Lock. I did try some yogurt last night, but it didn’t work out for me taste-wise.

However, hummus is apparently also a complete protein, so I want to try that next week. And I know I like hummus.

By the way, this is one of my older bento kits, from Zojirushi, who also makes the Mr. Bento bentos. Its components looka little like the ones for either Mr. or Mrs. Bento, but they don’t stack in a single column.

A spoon (or chopsticks) fits across the top, and then I gather it and click the handle like so.

While this is compact, my eBags and Laptop Lunch combo are still thinner. However, it works on the ferry.

Lunch Bento:

Honey bread, peanut butter, strawberry fruit sandwich in the Extra Large container. Apple slices (sigh), goldfish crackers (yay!), and applesauce with cinnamon (didn’t work for me, but I think that was because the apple sauce brand sucked).

I really do like my Laptop Lunch box. But I need to vary the menu more (not that my eating out menu ever varied much…).

I’m thinking rice dishes next week. Maybe make a curry over the weekend for meals next week, since I picked up some Native Forest non-BPA-lined cans of coconut milk. I need to freeze the last of the veggie soup and bisque.

Bake some different bread… go home more, workaholic less… crazy times.

… for gods’ sakes, don’t give other people $20,000 to do it. Or even $600.

And especially, if they say they’re helping you to self-publish, you definitely should not give them royalties. Especially if all they do is sell you expensive copies of your work to try to sell yourself.

Real self-publishing: the money made forwards is all yours. That’s part of the fucking point.

Even now, in the darkness, I hear her speak. My sister, my angel, who I knew but slightly; who I should know more about, but now she is gone. She and so many others.

“Focus, V.” echoes a voice , different, in the darkness of my mind, disturbing the nervous meditation that is waiting for everyone else to leave the archive library—though the term stretches the normal definition here. As does everywhere else here.

I love the Academy for all the wrong reasons, but you might as well say that drinking water is wrong, killing innocent micro-organisms. Everything that is the Academy is also me.

The last on has left, locking the door behind—a sweet but lethal guy, Atmospheric Winds, who hails from the last tribe of Eskimos when we lost the entire West Coast to the dreaming insanity. He is eagle-eyed—and that’s no exaggeration; extreme body modification is run of the mill here.
But eagle eyes won’t penetrate the camoflauge that enfolds me. That is a shape of wrongness on this world. But I made a bargain.

And that’s why I’m leaving as soon as possible.

I riffle through the computer files while another part of me (no; a part of brain tissue that he resides in) traces and disables, using interfaces meant only for the fleet of thought by the true Artificial Intelligences. He cuts through defences and encyption like butter, but leaves no trace behind. Cutting water, as Mushishi once said.

He isn’t one of them—I mean, not a true AI. I’ll tell you later when we get out the hell out of here.

He nods at one point (his temporary visual imprint on my brain. I must remember that he is not I. What did my sister do, when she was in my position? I don’t know, and her legacy keeps his own secrets, liked and barred… somewhere).

As we make our escape into the flooded backstreets of New York—too easy, a mere climb through a window, so there must be a mole in the so-called tight ship that the Iron Driller runs… I wonder what side of the current Academy schism we’ll approach next. More like a dodecahedron at this point, after the final and quite confusing collapse of the Westomythos war.

Actually, I don’t care that much. I want to see my sister again.

I’m not sure what he wants, but during our relatively uncomfortable days-long journey to some location only he knows, there are times when our thoughts touch, in sync, over memories and impressions. In those moments I gain purpose, but unfocused (can it even be called purpose? Enthusiasm?); what he feels during those moments he does not say.

One night, I stand on a cliff overlooking the academy grounds. There is something beyond their single-minded purpose. Which did not include my sister.

His plans do. And I am tired of losing connections, over and over and over…

Perhaps one will pay for all.

I turned my back and went back to the embering campfire with a single roll and a single meal cooking.

It wasn’t always this way.

Literally. Only breakfast. Have to head out into 5:30am traffic now. ETA to office: 2.5 effing hours.

Notes on Contents, Post-Effing-Meeting:

• two mandarin oranges, peeled and put into square Wilson silicon baking cups to separate them from the…
• apple slices (Fuji, which I’m sick of by now by the way, later this week I’ll start on Gala apples)
• sliced boiled egg with pepper and salt (the best way to put it in the box)
• “Explosive Pizza” goldfish crackers, which go really, really well with apples, even if you’re tired of apples.

Maybe I should add some Asian pears or something instead.

By the way, during the meeting I turned over my Ziploc divided container thingy and saw that each compartment had a marking of how much it held! Very nice: large is 2 3/4 cups (which is a bit big for me, but roomy for fruit and sandwiches), the next is 3/4 cup, and the smallest is 1/2 cup. In ounces and milliliters as well: 22 oz, 6 oz, 4 oz; or 650 ml, 175 ml, 100 ml.

To give the meeting credit, that wasn’t the only interesting part of the meeting, but it was damn close.

Session the seventh with my psychologist.

I got to say hi to my psychiatrist during the wait. He’s not just a great psychiatrist, by the way, but also hot.¹ Sadly, my life is not a romance novel, and that would be a really bad relationship to start up anyways.

So… I actually did not talk to my psychologist about the thing I thought I should talk to him about, because right now I’m going slightly crazy with the holidays approaching. It’ll get worse. I try to ignore what day it is but somehow I subconsiously remember that it’s almost time for the hell weeks in which my father used every single holiday stress excuse to beat, control, and dominate the crap out of me and my mother.

So. We talked about that. He poked a bit with “why did he act that way, do you think?” (My psychiatrist remembered that my father didn’t need alcohol in his system to be an abusive monster.)

And actually, I don’t know why he did all that. I mean, obtrusively it was because my mother and I never celebrated the holidays correctly, and this disappointed him into senseless rage. He wanted Martha Stewart perfect holidays, which are even more impossible when your family came here directly from Vietnam and thus have no American holiday tradition knowledge. At all.

I think he got all his ideas from television. Like, several contradicting lines of ideas. It was impossible to meet his standards, in large part because he never let you know what they were until he was slamming your head against the wall for doing something wrong. Also, he kept changing the rules—I can only imply this because he’d run the door over your toes because you didn’t do X, and then the next day he’d cut your hand because you did do X.

My psychologist and I figured it was completely irrational chaos, “almost psychotic,” he said.

Every holiday tradition, my father poisoned. It’s so horrible that I can barely do anything during the holidays except, when I can, knock myself out with something, or find some series (fantasy, SF, mystery, anything long and immersive and with at least a little humor and upbeat endings) and read hell for leather.

(Before my Kindle, or frankly Amazon Prime shipping, these times were incredibly bad. You think my local bookstore’s hours are horrible? They really hit the skids during the high shopping season. Like, gods forfend if people buy things from them. And if I finished whatever on Christmas Eve….

I must sound like a worthless little whiner to people who look down their noses at fast shipping, the Internet, or ebooks. Hmmm. How much do I care. Not very much.)

Anyways, we talked about some ways to possibly overcome the bad memories this holiday, but books seem the only reliable answer, as my only IRL social friend is not going to be here for the holidays. Well, that and connecting to other people….

… except that I am very shy and tend not to trust people. Part of that is because during the time when I was on the immediate run from my parents, well, it was just so strange that they kept finding me during those years…

… and it was a friend (another one, now an ex-friend) who was feeding them information about me. It’s even more complicated than that: he was the first guy who creepily sexually hit on me. When I was 17. I didn’t know that it was wrong at the time, and he implied it was all my fault because I kept sitting in sexy positions. (ETA: no, I didn’t know that they were sexy positions, and I wasn’t trying to seduce him. I didn’t even know of sex in any way but in terms of my father raping my mother. Not at all romantic or sexy.)

Actually, I found out that two friends were helping my parents stalk me. One of them was at my University department’s office, so she fed them all the forwarding information.

Yeah.

And then it got worse.

So. Um. It’s hard for me to start relationships.

I really don’t look forwards to the holidays at all. And other than that… I got nothin’.

1. When he’s not wearing his crazy plaid blazer jacket. Ye gods. [↩]

Today’s bentos were slightly different. I have a lot of soup to eat….

Breakfast bento: Cereal, goldfish crackers—because I couldn’t think of a good protein that early in the morning :) —and apple slices. Lemon juice is awesome.

Thursday I’ll implement Rosa’s suggestion of yogurt. With some berries, that would be yum.

(Wednesday is no bento day, I think. It is an 8am meeting day, which means I have to get up at 4am. Traffic peaks at 6:30am on the island and is Seattle morning traffic after that. Joy.)

Lunch bento: Random vegetable soup (it also has beans for protein, though it doesn’t look like it), rice cooker pasta (got home a 9pm last night, and wasn’t up for much else), apple slices, humongous grapes.

This was just the right size when I got to it, around 3pm due to an appointment with my psychologist, which I’ll blog about in a little bit….

I’m not imaginative, but by golly, I… uh… get in the major food groups¹ except for dairy.²

Breakfast bento: cereal³, grapes, hardboiled egg, rice milk (to be poured on the cereal). Ziploc divided box plus a round tallish Lock&Lock.

I discovered that the texture of a hard-boiled egg didn’t go so well with the cereal n’ milk. Will have to figure out another protein for the cereal bento (the mini-bagel bento, on the other hand, is just fine).

Also, I don’t need that much cereal….

Lunch Bento: a Laptop Lunch box; grapes⁴, apple wedges, honey bread⁵, and Winter Squash soup, which is a kind of bisque.

Those went well together. And it almost wasn’t too much; one apple slice over.

As a showing of the extreme lack of sense the human race can express at times, I almost included the beef stew instead of the bisque. Beef stew with a lot of BPA in it (Campbell’s tomato soup alone in the ingredients is really all kinds of bad all by itself). And also over one week old. Either way I probably would have felt sucky if I ate it.

Bisque: much better.

Also, that lidded container really is water-tight when you seat the lid properly.

The Laptop Lunch went quite well in my slim lunchbox from eBags.

I thought about taking along a snack bento, but I thought that would be a bit too much bento. I did want a bit of a snack though…. Perhaps I’ll pull out my amusingly Engrish tiny snack bento tomorrow.

By the way, I’m not sure what it is about honey bread, but it preserves better and longer than bread using sugar as a sweetener. Honey is teh awesome.

I’m on my way home and contemplating cooking some rice for dinner (rest of dinner undecided). And any leftovers I’ll convert to some simple⁶ little rice pancakes tomorrow evening, which are teh total awesome, and the only reason I’ll drag out the griddle.

New food processer tomorrow, but too bad the vegan country-style pate (which incredibly tastes like the meat version) takes a few hours for me to make. Hours free don’t exist in the middle of the week.

1. Which are all under dispute currently. [↩]
2. I’m lactose-intolerant. I think, apart from calcium that can be supplied by supplements, I’m not missing much. Take that, dairy industry who angles to make their own major food group in the pyramid. [↩]
3. Frosted Mini-Wheats, which are the healthiest a sugar cereal can be while still having too much sugar. [↩]
4. These are huge, some an inch long. Very tasty, and I didn’t need a drink at lunch, they were that juicy. [↩]
5. Baked in my Zojirushi mini home bakery machine, using the basic honey bread recipe that comes in the manual. It was way tastier than market-bought bread! [↩]
6. Seriously; no flour, just egg, pepper, rice, and fresh-grated parmesan, one of the few cheeses I can stand. [↩]

Waking from shattered
dreams is no way to start the
day; I’m so sorry

My mind is like the
vase one bought to admire
knocked off by the cat

I rather wish my
holidays did not start like
a new, broken vase

With almost everything, one wonders how to substitute something canned for something fresh. But with tomatoes, the question is reversed; almost every recipe I’ve seen in a cookbook or online that deals with tomatoes will almost always referred to the canned version. And since tomato product cans always use an epoxy lining that contains BPA, that may bother one.

It took a while to find this advice, thus I’m blogging it for the future. I got it from cookingclub.com, almost randomly:

Can fresh diced tomatoes be substituted for canned ones?

Yes. To substitute fresh diced tomatoes for a 14.5-ounce can of undrained diced tomatoes, use approximately 1 1/4 cups of diced fresh tomatoes and 1 cup of liquid. If your recipe calls for a 28-ounce can of undrained diced tomatoes, use about 2 1/2 cups of diced fresh tomatoes and 1 cup of liquid. Use any liquid that seems appropriate for your recipe, such as water, broth or tomato juice.

And now I think I can make some stew and curry in peace.