bee

Holy I didn't realize how poor my concentration is during the evenings until I watched this and could not compute the results at all. No wonder I felt I've been glossing over the latest books that I've read.

3Blue1Brown is such a gem of a channel

2021 clothes r1

 r0 / plan from beginning of year / covid sale check-in

Since I already set the theme for 2021, this will be a short check-in of everything I purchased in 2020 and comparison of the results against my plan from the start of the year. I have no wear count to update because switching phones made my lose the little data I had from barely getting dressed during covid. 

1. Abercrombie & Fitch lace dress - $52.83
2. Burberry two-tone trench - $1717.60
3. Sandro lace shift dress - $218.40
4. Frank&Oak wide legged pants - $76.35
5. Proenza Schouler PS11 chain bag - $545.30
6. Stuart Weitzman  lonnie boot - $484.87 
7. Babaton leather wrap skirt - $105.74
8. Vickyoung pleated pants*
9. HM x Giuliva pleated pants - $49.94
10. PH5 knit skirt - $220.50
11. Rebecca Vallance silk backless dress - $283.27
12. HM cotton backless dress - $39.99
13. Skye band collar dress*

*from Taoabao, waiting for me when I can make it back to China

**overflow from last year

Total: $3794.79 (guess this is where all the wfh savings went)

So I'm obviously over the 8 item limit that I set for myself, which really is ok but I can justify it as I decluttered several pieces of clothing when I moved. But the question I'm really asking is what is the point of setting a purchase limit? Is it because I want to spend less money? Not grow my closet? I don't actually know how useful it is to stick to a hard limit, but I will continue to choose a number as a guiding post. So let's try 8 pieces again for 2021.

I am pretty consistent in the styles that I buy, I guess I've settled into the elusive ~personal style~. Most of the items are also what I planned to buy, although the list of planned purchases at the beginning of the year is almost entirely irrelevant (aside from a different pair of Maguire loafers that I'd like).

bowl

December is nearing its end and I really haven't posted at all. 

2020 is nearing its end, and it feels like not much has happened but actually a lot has happened?

• Career is progressing: civ is one of those fields where you can experience by doing your tasks. I can clearly see how the expertise I gained from finishing a large restoration and forensics project apply to my work on other projects. I am immensely lucky that covid didn't negatively impact my job in any significant manner, in fact working from home has been great aside from ergonomics. 
• I'm not sure if wfh has made my sleeping habits better or worse, but it does seem that I need to sleep more hours compared to before. Now days I try to get 9 hours on weekdays and still end up sleeping more than 12 hours on weekends, and feel lacking in energy everyday. I wonder if this is something a long vacation will fix, if I just spend a whole month sleeping in everyday... but everyone wisely recommends that exercising is a far likely fix. All I can say from several failed attempts at consistently exercising is that it's not the most horrible activity, but I've also felt none of the joy that people describe from doing so. 
• Wfh has definitely reinforced my introverted tendencies. Just let me hibernate. 
• Hobby wise I've engaged the most with my interest in clothing and beauty. What this really means is I've watched a lot of youtube videos on these topics, mostly by mandarin speaking youtubers which has the added benefit that my chinese is a little better (at least vocab). I find there is several high-level differences between the content of fashion & beauty videos catered towards chinese vs western audience. For clothing, english speaking videos focus a lot on finding your personal style whereas mandarin speaking videos focus on how to pock clothing within a style that is flattering. Like picking a pant shape that makes your leg look straight. Extrapolating from this, it is reflective of the east vs west cultural difference of individuality and conformity. 
• A good habit I've picked up again is reading before bed, thanks to the Libby app. It has about 80% of the books I want to read, which is far sufficient to tie me over until covid ends. Aside from Alain de Botton and existentialism, I read several books on the subject of a minority group's experience in Canada/US, such as undocumented immigrants (Children of the Land), indigenous people (From the Ashes, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, All Our Relations), and queer people (I'm Afraid of Men, We Have Always Been Here). I'm not sure how much reading about their experiences has impacted me, but at least I know about the injustices these people have suffered and will speak up against the bias against them. 
• Aside from books, I read (both present and past tense) a lot of manga. The current series is dominated by the reincarnation theme, either in isekai (with the villainous sub-theme) or to take revenge. There's a lot of really mediocre stories in this theme, and they all have the same fault of the over-powered main character just blazing ahead, and if there is a love interest, s/he is instantly smitten. The better ones retain some vulnerability to the main character and have him/her develop meaningful relationships with the side characters. I suppose this underscores that relationships are the most meaningful part of existing.

fluff

 I think I broke my own record of longest time spent sleeping last night: 15 hours.

clasp

 

Things from Frontrow that I hope will be further discounted at the end of the season waaaaaah.

Children of the Land

I didn't feel like posting about the last couple of books I finished (From the Ashes, Hand to Mouth, How Proust Can Change Your Life), although it was not because they weren't impactful. It's because there weren't singular items that stood out, and I haven't given enough thought to form overall impressions (not that I explicitly undergo this exercise for other books either).

But here is a long quotation from Children of the Land that stood out. For context, the book is a memoire about the authors' experience being an undocumented immigrant. 

Going to La Loma was the only way I would unravel and return to the world of the living. It happened when I was young. I wandered in the woods of the Sierra Nevada in the warmth of the summer, when the small mountain flowers and mule's ear sprouts were lush, I tried to open. I yellow and yellowed and sang and chanted, but even the warm breeze felt like knives to an exposed nerve. And a few years later, I came close to that disentanglement again, but again there was nothing for me to hold on to, nothing of substance to replay the centre, so I buckled up and tried to drive my car into the river. I didn't want to come back. And once this feeling of emptiness at my core started, it wouldn't go away. It was too late and it felt like I was becoming smaller day by day, unthreading, I could feel how much of myself I left behind everywhere I went. I was almost reeling in it because I felt it as a kind of ecstasy - parts of myself scattered over an entire landscape. A little of me here, a little of there. My anxiety no longer mattered, my sadness, my invisibility, and my hopelessness felt foreign to me, which is to say, they were inconsequential. I withdrew and let the world move my body without me, I tumbled like dried grass. I didn't have anything like La Loma, with its thick walls built by my ancestors, to bring me back to reality. No semblance of permanence. 

I felt most of the writing, and the quotation above especially, has a poetic quality to it. The author is a poet, so that's some basis for my vague feeling as it'd be hard for me to describe what exactly is poetry (and not that I read any). 

If I were to make some generalizations about all of the quotations that I've noted down in my blog, the commonality in style would be this vague poetic quality and the commonality in theme would be...lacking in substance? 

stone

 A representative sample of my meals at home lately:

(the iPhone 12's photography capability really is a vast improvement over my 6s)

Bravely Second...second

via danbooru

I've now beat the storyline final boss, whoo! Was too easy with the ghost mage build, this combo is beyond broken. Now to cruise through the 3 post-game dungeons and optional boss. 

I previously complained about not feeling engaged with the story, and I'm happy to say that all the reconciliation of Chapter 5 did give me lots of feels. Perhaps because the theme is quite pertinent to the current times. Chapter 6 was when my Edea x Ringabel ship set sail!! Only to crash and mildly recover, like c'mon why do they not get an explicitly romantic ending mgrgrrr! At least Edea's growth in the story was satisfying. The other theme of having the courage to try again (aka the title) and to default on other's expectations is also welcoming. Of course it's great to finally wrap up the backstory of the first game, gamely how the great plague came to be. In a way this sequel has elements of a prequel to it as well. It's also commendable how many times they breached the 4th wall. Overall I don't get why the development team felt that they didn't do the series justice with this game. 

But the true purpose of every game review post is to display cute drawings of my fav ship:

all via danbooru (1, 2, 3, 4)

Bravely Second

I finally, and I say once more for good measure, finally started to play Bravely Second. Only like...5 years after I bought the game, which isn't even my worse record. 

I'm about ⅔ way through (50ish hours) and man this is a game that rewards grinding / engine building. But at least it's made more improvements to make grinding even more effortless. The new jobs are not bad though. However I can't get into the story / characters as much as the first game, maybe because my Edea x Alternis ship is even less part of the story this time :(

ray

 I've finally accumulated enough photos of Saskatoon for a post:

r

 Next time there shall be snow.

Reasons to Stay Alive

I suppose this isn't as inspiring as I hoped, but nonetheless a good glimpse into someone's experience with depression. 

Just one quotation (really the last sentence, but it doesn't make much impact without the preamble) to share, although I swear I jotted down another one but can't find it anywhere:

crunch

 The tiny bit of autumn colors that I saw this year, plus a goodbye shot of my downtown apartment.

Normal People

I really liked this book too, but that's perhaps moreso due to my bias towards this kind of plot. I'm tempted to say this is the fiction book that I've enjoyed the most this year, but Fraction of a Whole is also pretty good. 

snow

Machi machi's black milk tea with pudding is the closest to Easy Go's hokkaido milk tea with milk pudding. There is a successor! 😭😭😭

But woah is it much more expensive. Bubble tea prices seem to accurately reflect the increase in cost of living over the years.

A Fraction of the Whole

It's been a while since I've read a long book. Actually no, I was progressing through Don Quixote two months ago but it's honestly quite painful to read so I've put it on indefinite hold (in the company of Anna Karenina, which is a victim of poor timing).

But I finished A Fraction of the Whole and liked it and it was a pretty painless read for how long it is. No quotations to share, but the following praise is ample: some chapters reminded me of Dostoyevsky, some chapters reminded me of Vonneget, and a chapter even reminded me of Murakami. 

growth

 I'd like to say that I'm too busy moving to post, but honestly I just haven't felt like it. But here's a song:

Preconceived Notions · Arimyth X Mr Serpent - Coronado

encompass

It's such a first world problem to have trouble selecting an item for purchase in the near future. With lots of sales coming the next couple of month, I have an exceedingly short list of things clothing/accessory to buy (thankfully I'm not in the mood for more household items, tea, or photography gear). Perhaps it's a good thing that the list is short, but it sure isn't because I'm not tempted to buy, or have become any less of a materialist, or even for the lack of browsing. It's really that almost nothing fits my broad criteria of:

• affordable
• interesting design
• makes somewhat of an effort to be sustainable both (but at this point it's more like either) environmentally or socially
• does not have exorbitant shipping fee to Canada (and the high likelihood to be hit with duty). 

Coupled with the fact that I plan to be at home for the foreseeable future, it's really hard to justify buying anything. 

But today I found a jewelry brand that excites me! And it's a freakin miracle that they make interesting ear cuffs. Honestly I admire earring designs the most out of all the types of jewelry but have no desire to get piercings. Michi Liang is a Taiwanese-Canadian jewelry designer, her focus is on modern designs featuring pearls (I am ready for pearls to be trendy forever). 

1. Anya earrings
2. Odette ear cuffs
3. Odele bracelet
4. Violeta bracelet 

(I lucked out that the model photo is the color way I intend to get)

In other news, I am moving a set amount of money every month into an account set aside for buying my Grail jewelry. It will be a while. 

cube

After not playing any (non-mobile) games for...actual years (??), I recently finished Children of Morta with Jeff as well as the demo for Bravely Second. 

Oh no I lied, I played For The King as recently as last year. So after not playing games for months, I feel that this winter will be the season where I progress through my backlog! Will be taking my vita along, and then connecting my ps3 to my parent's recently purchased tv to finish off those 2 Tales games. 

I'm motivated to tackle my backlog because there's a few new jrpgs that are coming out on Switch, and I really can't justify buying a new device if I have so much games left unplayed (discounting Steam, ha...)

Diptyque Tempo

It's been a while since I posted a fragrance impression. Covid has effectively stopped me from acquiring more samples from stores, as well as wearing perfume on most days. But I finally picked up a sample of Diptyque's Tempo after having to make a trip to the mall to return some online order. 

I've been anticipating this fragrance since I acquired Eau Capitale, because someone said Eau Capitale smells like rose notes plus Tempo, and it's not the rose part that I absolutely love. You might have figured by my lengthly introduction that unfortunately Tempo didn't live up to my expectations. Sadly, not at all. 

Why is the patchouli not as strong here?? Why??????

The overall performance is lacking too, the scent effectively disappears on me after about 2 hours. It's pleasant while it lasts, it's aromatic and perhaps a touch woody. Just not the patchouli bliss that the dry down of Eau Capitale led me to believe.

:(

I'm Afraid of Men

This is a short but indeed insightful read on gender. The part that stood out to most to me is the following passage that I've trimmed down:

petrichor

 Cheers for side lighting!

No Mud No Lotus

 The title essentially says it all, but the slightly more expanded version is below:

The book stays pretty practical on the topic of suffering, ie. being light on the religious ideology. Actually the entire second half of the book is how to put mindfulness in practice, which I very much appreciate but am not super motivated to adopt. One idea I wasn't clear on is the distinction between joy and happiness, it was quickly explained as:

A mindfulness practitioner is able to generate joy or happiness. It is not hard. There’s a little difference between joy and happiness. Joy still has some of the element of excitement or anticipation in it. In happiness, there is ease and freedom.

I did notice, after reading de Botton's Religion for Atheists, that there was a lot of repetition. It was indeed helpful to learn new concepts. 

2021 clothes

There was a thread a while back on FFA about a user planning their aesthetic goals for the next year in September as their own September issue. I think it's a great idea and takes some pressure off January as the general goal setting time (not that I've kept that up).

I think for the couple of years in undergrad, my focus was to build a solid foundation of clothes, which I more or less achieved. The recent few years have been shifted towards picking out pieces with more design elements that I both like and flatter me (and sadly looking at the pieces that I like but aren't flattering cause I still wanna look good 😭). This process definitely still isn't complete, and the goldilock direction I want to focus on the upcoming 12 months are:

• Pleated skirts: a midi-length in faux leather or metallic colors. I've held off getting more pleated skirts despite loving this design as I'm worried that the pleats can easily be crushed or loosen. However I've been reassured that the pleats are very durable. I'm still trying to find the perfect midi length for me, and I theoretically think that it should be right under the calves. But overall I still like above the knee skirts the best, but alas it's less work appropriate and less dramatic of a silhouette.
• Wrap dresses: it seems like this is not a currently trending silhouette as I can't find many options :( why is an inherently adjustable piece of clothing not constantly popular!
• Pleated pants: I've been haunted by images on Pinterest of fluidly draped pleated pants and have not even seen product images that live up to my expectations. There also seem to be a conflict in me wanting 100% wool pants and the drape that seem to be only achievable in artificial fibres. Pants are already hard to shop for online, drape-y pants even more so. I've set my target on cream pleated pants in flannel, but am not placing too much hope on finding it. 
• Colour schemes of pink / grey for winter, lavender for summer: a big benefit of wearing a lot of black & white is not dealing with color inaccuracies when shopping online. Lavender is especially difficult, I've already returned 2/2 lavender items I've ordered online :(
• Hair accessories and hair styles: my hair is definitely the part of my appearance that I'm most clueless about and consequently most conscious about. Actually, it's more accurate to say that I don't want to heat style my hair at any regular frequency, and find my natural texture to not be the easiest to work with otherwise. Except I just discovered that it's a good fit for traditional Chinese hair styles, especially the half-up ones. I'm also super into elaborate hair sticks with lots of dangling bits, and so am slowly upping my comfort around wearing hair accessories. 
• Wear more accessories and jewelry in general: chiefly the whole bunch of small & medium square scarves 
• Not be tempted to buy more outerwear or shoes, but maybe another bag if I have leftover money 

The Sorrows of Young Werther

I'm surprised that I liked the flowery language of this book as I usually get very bogged down in those. It does match the main character's passionate tendencies and is well written / translated that it read very smoothly. In contrast, Dickens (okay not the greatest comparison but bear with me) was super laborious to read. Also surprising is that I don't feel very empathetic or sympathetic to Werther. 

green

 I'm no longer hung up over a forest green coat because I realized I must rather wear the color in a bag:

It's doubtful that I would purchase any of these, but imaging a shelf with these lined up is very satisfying.

navy

 I finally don't want a forest green coat anymore. More on that in the next post. But what better time to lust after coats than the passing of the autumn equinox? 

The reigning champion of my coat obsession has been Simon's Cifonelli coat ever since I saw them in his hat review. I'm pretty sure Cifonelli doesn't offer bespoke for women, and that I probably can't afford it for many years to come even if they do. But there's now at least two bespoke makers for women in London so I can fulfill my dream eventually. The other two images are RTW options, but honestly I wouldn't settle for either even if they are currently being sold. 

The next, also old, obsession is the pairing of grey and pink. I haven't come across a perfect pink coat yet, but I'm less exacting on the requirements for this so I should be able to find a RTW version. So far it needs to have peak collars and have a fairly slim but straight cut in the body, ideally knee length. 

bobble

I've been considering my sweaters for a long time now, probably since this time last year. It's at the awkward stage where I have more than enough items to wear, and I do like the items. Yet I've also found items that I like more, are better quality, and are chosen collectively to form a more cohesive wardrobe. But it's hard to justify getting rid of some of my current perfectly fine sweaters, since it's wasteful. Perhaps I'll finally do the deed this winter, or maybe next winter. 

Likely incoming pieces:

• IOAN undyed alpaca crewneck 
• Navygrey grey merino funnel neck 
• &Daughter navy cashmere rollneck

...

As of this month, I've also exceed the number of clothing pieces that I limited myself to purchasing for this year. None of the items are what I originally planned for.

The Course on Love

This is my favourite de Botton book, probably because I am the most familiar with the subject haha. 

My favourite quotation is below:

Some others:

He will continue to trust in the possibility of rapid, wholehearted understanding and empathy between two human beings and in the chance of a definitive end of loneliness.

That it is ‘unnecessary’ in the practical sense to marry only serves to render the ideal more compelling emotionally

But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhibit one reality with destroying the other.

Melancholy [...] is a species of intellectual grief which arises when we come face to face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

fortune

 A belated birthday cake for Jeff and I:

It's the peach cake from Daango, which is definitely my favourite cake shop in Toronto. Very tasty Asian flavours, and super cute too. We also got a bonus slice of durian cake:

I've yet to convert Jeff into a durian lover :( 

neighbour

 A couple of photos from time at mom's house that escaped:

I really enjoy shots of home interiors with a defined light source but otherwise very low light. Jasper, one of Edward's friends, take a lot of photos in this type of lighting and they are superb.

...

Somwhat abstract food photo two, this time featuring a strawberry & blueberry square (via Woks of Life). Insanely easy recipe, taste great (even better with softly whipped cream on top). Tho I do prefer lighter cake textures, chiffon and sponge cakes are my fav.

...

Sunsets are always nice. If only the house was one storey higher, the trees always block the best part.

Consolations of Philosophy

 Another Alain de Botton book, they hit a good balance of friendly, self-help tone and bigger ideas. 

Some quotations to remember:

But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosiest predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the worst comes to pass.

Wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquility. 

Friendship a minor conspiracy against what other people think as normal.

 

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

^this is definitely my favourite 😂

The art of living lies in finding uses for our adversities

^a commonly repeated idea but I like how this is worded the best

The last chapter features Nietzsche on the topic of difficulties and it being essential to success. I was very surprised that there was no mention of the existential theme. Then I realized the whole book is written in the way that you don't need to know anything prior about each philosopher to appreciate each chapter's message. Easily digestible philosophy is my favourite kind. 

sub specie aeternitatus

Another full revolution around the sun and I have mixed feelings about how much wiser I've gotten. The truth is I feel I've made a lot of progress and yet I could have known years ago. Why is this true, because I feel like the big ideas that I've sorted out in the past 1.5 years is all contained in the first 5 chapters of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I first read back in middle school. Granted that was perhaps a little early for the same ideas to really lodge in my head, but I did also find evidence that I was anxious about the same things from this doodle from early high school featuring one of my stuffed animals:

To summarize the lessons learned: gain perspective and make decisions.

wave

 A few weeks ago, I found the almost perfect painting that I would like to hang in my living space. Almost for 2 reasons: one is I'd prefer the scene to be the ocean at night, and two is I want a giant painting, like at least 4'x4'. Considering that this is 1 square foot and likely over $400 after shipping and duties, and that price and size is likely an exponential correlation rather than a linear, I was very motivated to pick up painting again. 

As much as I'd like to go straight to oil paints, it was hard to go to an art supply store in person and I wasn't ready to drop so much money on supplies. But I did find my old oil pastels and watercolours (tho I swear I should have another unopened set of watercolours) and ran with those. At this point I must admit that drawing and by extensive accurate depiction of form is my biggest weakness and I have little desire to improve my abilities. Light and color are the aspects of painting that I enjoy. 

I originally intended to do side-by-side oil pastel & watercolour for each reference photo, but alas my oil pastels are too difficult to blend. It was so much faster to just do watercolor. Also do forgive the wrinkly paper as I was too lazy to stretch my paper properly (and to buy heavier weight paper. 

near Durdle Door

near Durdle Door

Philosopher's Walk

西来古镇 (opps just realized I missed a lot of details in this one now that I'm looking at a larger size eference photo)

I do think I got progressively better?

the void is loud

 Another song, another week x2

Autumn In June · Autumn In June - Wandering Around (feat. MOONZz)

This is very easily stuck in your head

spire

I have two cookbooks dedicated to bread gathering dust on the shelves (I flipped through the pages of one of the cookbooks once, the other is unopened), but I am making some recipes that I've made before. Repetition is highly underrated for cooking. 

Made Honey&Co's bukhari bread (first time was part of a H&C feast). I didn't recall the bread being so dense the first time, it tasted much better toasted the following days.

I thought that it would taste great with a whipped and honey'd ricotta. Having read numerous warnings on the internet about the general poor quality of store bought ricotta (though I never verified this claim), I set to make my own after doing so a couple of times in Bath. Unfortunately the texture wasn't as great this time, a little too rubbery. I'm gonna blame the quality of milk here, even though it's the fancy in-a-glass-bottle organic milk. Makes me nostalgic for the super creamy jersey cow milk that Sainsbury sold for half the price of the organic milk ;o;

Also made pizza again (and will for the third time to use up the tomato sauce and cheese), can you tell the chorizo apart from the cherry tomato? The dough didn't crisp up as much on the bottom this time :( Will try to bake it for a minute more next time, or to lower the position of the rack. 

More Than This

I also don't have much feelings or thoughts about this book. I wasn't into the story at all until the flashbacks started happening, and was honestly more invested in finding out what happened before the main character stepped in the ocean than his current predicaments. That said, the ending is good and sends a clear message, so it's not a bad book either. 

hum

Another song, another week

Yung Shinra · Persona 5 - Beneath The Mask - Rain - LoFi [Prod. Yung Shinra]

tender

I've made Kenji's pan pizza 3 or 4 times before, but this is the most successful yet (from the bread's perspective at least):

My theory on the bread is having fresh yeast and cranking the oven as high as it'll go (unfortunately still only 500F) will get a good rise, while lots of oil on the bottom will get a crispy crust that contrasts with the airy interior.  I would skip the slices of large tomato for topping, it releases too much water. Halved cherry tomatoes are ok as the skin holds all the juices in. 

Overall effort is also quite low, so hopefully pizza will have a regular appearance during meal time. I do recall saying the same thing before, but hopefully it'll ring true this time. 

...

Also made some ice cream sundae on a different day with leftover fruits:

Chopped up some strawberries and cherries and cooked it with just a bit of sugar to make a fruit sauce. I really enjoy the taste of cooked fruits, in this case I think the sour and sweet is in better balance after a brief simmering. And by brief I mean I threw fruits into the pot as I chopped them and turned the heat off once I added all of the fruits in and gave it a good stir. I imagine a little bit of spices would also be great in the sauce. 

Want Not

I found this a really solid book: liked the characters, liked the structure with different PoVs that somewhat converge, liked the ending that is tied up not too loosely or tightly. 

syrup

 I tried making fruit tea and it doesn't taste anywhere near as good as bubble tea shop's wahhh.

...

In other news, my cream puffs are solid now. Creme diplomat really is the way to go.

Religion for Atheists

I read two others books by Alaine de Button many years ago and thought they were pretty meh, but enjoyed this one a lot more. Some of the selected topics were pleasantly surprising to me, namely pessimism and perspective, which are also my favourite concepts in the book. 

Some quotations to remember:

All buildings give their owner the opportunity to recondition visitors’ expectations and lay down rules of conduct specific to them.

Our vulnerability insults our self-reception; we are in pain and at the same time insulted that we could so easily be so.

Religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance - as secular educators imply - as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas we already fully understood at a theoretical level.

The benefits of neo-religious pessimism are no where more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.
[...]
These religions do recognize our desire to adore passionately. They know our need to believe in others, to worship and to serve them and to find in them perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects should be divine rather than human. [...] Faith has the good sense to give us angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.
[...]
Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.

During moments of frustration and disaster, [Spinoza] recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective [...] ‘under the aspect of eternity’ sub specie aeternitatus. [...] Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to to step outside of ourselves and practise submitting our wills to the laws of the universe, however contrary to our intentions.
[...]
Rather than try to redress our humiliation by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness.
[...]
Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place. It surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history, and the achievement of our fellow humans as the measure of all things - a grandiosity that’s plunges us into a swirl of anxiety and envy.

We are therefore in need of art to help our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.

sun

Making a big bowl of tomato salad is the right way to honour the first big harvest:

Featuring half and half of raw tomato with basil and cooked tomato with garlic & olive oil.

grad

 My mom rightly pointed out that I never leave the house when I visit her, and so have not visited any of the nearby parks. This is finally no longer a true statement. 

We went out for a walk around sunset and there were lots of people out enjoying the last of summer. 

The wet lands are great, should've waited here longer to see the skies light up. 

This is actually looking towards my favourite part of the nearby lakeshore, but my vantage point was too low to capture the cove nicely. This spot will make a dramatic photo on a stormy winter day? There'll be less grass blocking the curve at least.

choux

 My goal is to be proficient at making cream puffs before the end of the month. 

I thought my first attempt had gone really, really wrong when I was piping the dough onto the baking sheet. The dough was extremely wet and could not hold it's shape well. But alas they did spring up in the oven and ended with nice crumb.

I do still think the dough was too wet, it's hard when recipes can't provide an easy description for water content, unlike temperature. Not sure how I'm going to make sure the next iteration is less wet since the dough looks pretty much the same...and by the time I would realize it's too wet it's already too late. I also do hope that a drier dough will result in a taller shape. 

The filling this time was just whipped cream, which also isn't ideal. It squishes out too easily when biting into the puff. Think I'll go with creme diplomat for next time.