In which there’s film!
I follow a bunch of photography folk on bsky, because not only are cameras cool, posts about enjoying analog hobbies are much more nourishing than the goddamn inescapable political doomscroll. (At this point, if I could not know about DOGE or P25 or this idiotic venal disgusting fucking war, or, indeed, about 98% of anything the current administration is doing or saying, it’d fucking great, even if lacking in civic responsibility.)
So anyway, the photog group I interact with most is called Shitty Camera Challenge. (A shitty camera is one that’s instant, disposable, Soviet commie, rangefinder, fixed focus, low res digital, or in general mass produced and mediocre: basically my whole camera collection.) Every so often a challenge is announced and then people post pics that meet the parameters, which are generally along the lines of ‘use a shitty camera to shoot instant’ or ‘use a shitty camera to shoot black & white’ and it’s really very nice.
Anyway, a member—who lives in Hong Kong, and knows the Camera Film Photo people who released it—decided he wanted to help create some buzz around a film called Kikipan, so he bought a bunch and did a giveaway!
Four cameras on the kitchen table.
Kikipan, named after a Kiki the cat, is a grainy black & white film that comes in a box covered in cat graphics (so naturally people take a lot of pictures of cats with this film). The only string attached was that recipients were asked to agree to post at least one photo taken with the film, and even I should be able to produce at least one good shot off of three rolls!
After chatting with another woman who received this film, I think I’ll shoot a roll through each of my 35mm cameras: the brick, the Yashica my dad repaired for me last year, and the Minolta from my uncle Gale.
Just a cool thing.
I haven’t purged my closet in so long I can’t remember, and have far too many clothes I don’t fit or wear. So far I’m about a third of the way through a thorough sort, and am looking forward to being able to find things again. I’ve already found four items I hadn’t seen in so long I’d forgotten they even existed (but which still fit and are still wanted), which is functionally like getting something new, and dumped a whole bagful of stuff I haven’t worn since we’ve lived in this house.
It will be particularly useful to get rid of all the non-viable socks and underwear stuffed into the drawers. Some socks I’ll mend, but most aren’t worth the effort, so there’s no damn reason to keep them. The last couple times I went to grab a pair of socks I couldn’t find anything because it’s all shit that needs thrown away.
Went to Home Depot today and got tomato and herb starts! Whoo!
In which I took a Saturday off.
When I got hired, I said I’d be happy to work Saturdays for as long as needed, but not forever.
Well, now it’s basically been forever and I’m still scheduled every Saturday; the only way to get one off is to schedule it. I picked today at random.
I was hoping to maybe do something fun with a long weekend. Go for a drive, spend a night out of town maybe. Instead I slept for fourteen hours. Didn’t get up until two thirty! Must have been tired. Can’t really summon the energy it would take to either drive off on my own or convince what’s-his-face to actually do something out of the house.
Gonna cook and eat, meditate, make myself go for a walk. Maybe find a movie and watch it the old-fashioned way: without my phone in my hand.
Starting to worry about stuff. Like: it never got particularly cold this winter but my utility bill was still a lot bigger than it was last winter. How will I afford air conditioning season if the prices keep going up? Like: should I be hoarding coffee? It’s 30% more than it was a year ago, the market is idiotic, the administration is a joke. Will coffee soon be for rich people? Like: should I just let the entire lawn die instead of watering it? Can I afford to water the goddamned lawn? There’s no snow pack. Half of the country’s already in drought (my county is in ‘extreme drought’) and it’s fucking March! Like: should I be hoarding food? With the war situation gas, which moves everything, is going up. Everything will get more and more expensive, right? I know a lot of members (of what’s left of) the upper middle class are doing so; I see people online talking about buying up stuff they expect to go up in price soon, like appliances and toilet paper.
On the other hand, there’s nothing I can do about any of it. The powers that be are venal fucks and I have no influence over them or their ridiculous AI or their wars or their racist cops; if the shit does hit the fan I certainly don’t have enough wealth to hoard enough to make more than a few weeks’ difference in outcome. If water rationing is necessary I’ll follow local expert advice. Best I can do is be a good person who isn’t a wasteful shithead. Compost, recycle, eat the stuff in the fridge before it goes off, manage the sun this summer with blinds and drapes as well as I can, etc. Worry doesn’t solve anything, it just makes one unhappy.
Reports show that today’s No Kings is possibly the biggest protest in U.S. history, more than 8 million people at more than 3,300 events. People are pissed about a lot of things: book bans, the death of science, that Kennedy idiot, DOGE, abortion care, vaccine policy, inflation, Iraq, the Supreme Court, propaganda, concentration camps, the death of due process, the takeover of the Fourth Estate, oligarchy in general. Things are a mess. It seems so obvious to me that instead of funding war and racism we could just, you know, fund health care and housing instead? But that’s not what the people in power do, they just double down on causing unnecessary human suffering. You really do wonder what the fuck is wrong with those people.
There’s a tulip in bloom in the backyard! Must be just about Easter!
In which there’s a first time.
Okay, like basically everyone on earth, I’ve heard of scones with clotted cream, but I’ve never had it because I’m American and the only time I’ve ever set foot in a fancy tea room was as a performer and not a patron.
Last week one of my co-workers told me there was some expired heavy cream if I wanted some, so I brought home a half gallon of heavy cream and stuck it in my fridge.
It occurred to me to make clotted cream, so I read up on how and did it: a dish full of cream in a 170F oven for twelve hours.
after nine hours
It was still fully liquid when I took it out of the oven and put it in the fridge, and I thought it hadn’t worked, but it set up as it cooled. The next day there were solids floating in the top half of the dish!
I started with slightly over half the half-gallon container of heavy cream, and ended up with a pint of clotted cream.
one pint half and half, one pint clotted cream
The leftover “whey” is fine in coffee. I read so many recipes I don’t remember now where I learned that, but I’m glad I did or I might have just poured out the non-clotted stuff!
I spent my entire weekend sick in bed, which sucked, but at least leaving something in the oven and then in the fridge was the right speed.
Today I made scones. I read a bunch of recipes, finally picked one I liked, and did it. Made a big old mess of the kitchen counter, and didn’t get the height I wanted, but they taste nice.
a scone! with clotted cream!
The point, I now believe, of clotted cream is that fat is filling and keeps your otherwise completely silly tea sandwich from making you hangry in half an hour after all the sugars burn off.
It’s also delicious! I ate two!
In which I was just sick a couple weeks ago! Unfair!
Friday there was some sneezing. Apparently that’s the tell now: if I sneeze more than once in a day I’ve probably been exposed to germs.
Saturday afternoon at work I started to feel pretty rotty, and by the time I got home I was definitely Coming Down With Something.
Now it’s Monday and I still feel gross and I’m mad at whoever it was that decided to come into my workplace and FUCKING BREATHE AROUND ME. I don’t want to be sick! This is my weekend, I want to get chores out of the way and feel good and read library books and drink adult beverages! I do not want to sit on the couch like a zombie staring at the television! I do not want to spend sixty percent of my weekend asleep! God damn it!
Just the usual crud: congestion, cough, aches. I haven’t even taken a Covid test, because at this point I don’t really want to know that the people who make up the society I live in don’t “believe in” vaccines and are basically out there spreading disease more or less on purpose.
Going to work when you’re sick is stupid. Being sick is uncomfortable at best, and can kill you at worst. To stop from spreading most disease, just stay the fuck home when you’re sick, or if you must go out, wear a goddamned mask!
Some bastard got me sick and I hope they have a permanent itch somewhere for the rest of their life.
In which there’s hours of cooking.
First you have to soak the chickpeas and make the bread, so best be starting the day before. Because we’ve got executive function, oh yes we do, so it only took, what, three weeks of thinking about it before we did it.
Anyway, I made some super high hydration dough and prepared it as if it were ciabatta, but it basically just came out like all my bread does. Which is fine, it’s still good. (I thought about making actual pita bread but by the time I did I no longer cared enough to get the flour back out.)
homemade bread
So the problem is that, aside from a food truck I once heard about five years ago and which may or may not still exist, there’s no falafel around here. None. Zero. So I have to make my own.
falafel balls!
Well, I mean, there’s a Greek place in Walla Walla, but they make a style I really don’t like, called revithokeftedes, which is basically falafel only with terrible texture.
I don’t have a food processor—well, I have a little tiny one, but I only use it for olive salad—so I have to make my falafel in the blender, which is a pain in the ass, but I pretty much have it dialed in now.
I used the old oil that’s been sitting in my fryer for God knows how long; it’s probably a little rancid but not bad enough to stink or anything. Just made the falafels taste more professional, honestly.
Here’s some tabbouleh, my favorite salad of all time:
tabbouleh
I don’t like the fine bulgur so I always use the more rustic stuff. It feels unbelievably wholesome, somehow.
The hummus is from a can and it’s fucking wonderful.
ziyad hot spicy hummus
It took me years, but I finally figured out that the best way to make tahini sauce is to use hot water. It really comes together much more easily that way, with, I think, possibly better texture somehow.
Anyway, after baking bread and getting the blender dirty and chopping all that parsley and opening a can and making tahini and deep frying all those little balls, after all that, the food was fucking wonderful!
YUM
Tahini always reminds me now of eating in a falafel place in Brooklyn (which apparently still exists); there were squeeze bottles of tahini on every table (the same style as those old mustard and ketchup ones, only bigger, and white rather than yellow or red) and how much I loved just having that much fucking tahini to pour all over my falafel and rice.
In unrelated news, I bought a necklace and emailed with my aunt. Pretty sure it’s been over a dozen days since I last showered. Later this month two other aunts will be in town visiting, and the whole family will be going out to Sunday dinner. Also I learned how to remove and replace the back wheel on my bike the month before last, which was actually pretty cool and of course much easier than I’d expected.
In which I’m blogging, goddamn it, I don’t even care if I don’t even care!
Recently my brother gave me a speaker he found in the road because I’d complained all my speakers were crap. I guess he actually saw a vehicle drive over it before he stopped and picked it up. Well, it’s fine, it kicks ass, and it’s tiny.
a li’l speaker guy
It’s a Clip 5. You can clip it to shit! It’s waterproof. IT WAS TOTALLY FREE. It sounds astonishingly good for its size. Right now I have it playing bhajans.
Friday night I went to the Milton-Freewater Downtown Alliance Chamber awards dinner. My boss gives me a free ticket, and this is my third year attending.
The food was great, the wine was great, and the awards themselves are really nice because they remind you that a lot of people are actually quite humble and wonderful, and operate under the assumption that their duty is to care and help and give back, so they just go around fixing shit and funding things and quietly making life better. Which is something we need to see from time to time, lest we get all jaded and bitchy reading about politics and living and working with men, as we do.
One of the fun parts of the dinner is that there’s a table decorating contest, so not only does the place look nice for the event but no matter where you’re seated you get local business-provided swag because you get to keep whatever’s on your table. (The people who sat at the cheese factory-sponsored table this year got cheese, cream, butter, and tiny Jersey cows!)
awards dinner
My table this year had a giant tagine for a centerpiece and abundant chocolates; I didn’t want the tagine but I did get the little rug it was sitting on, which turned out to be probably a bath rug:
new li’l rug guy, on the living room floor next to a cushion and another li’l rug; this is where i sit to meditate
I wanted it as a meditation asana, and it’s perfect for that! It’s extremely soft, even if I’m not a fan of the fake-distressed rug designs, and fine to sit on.
I also got a half dozen rocks glasses, and nearly all the candy on the table, because nobody else wanted it. Whoo!
Work’s the same, I mostly enjoy it because it’s not fucking Comcast or Home Depot, but I’ll have been there seven years in July and the new has definitely worn off. I still love what we’re doing there, and I love the humanity of the place (you don’t get fired for being nineteen seconds back from a break, for example), but I’ve never been promoted and haven’t gotten a raise in years. Doing dishes and cleaning grills isn’t exactly stimulating, and I sorta thought that by now I’d be in charge of a department or would be doing fun admin shit, maybe in design & editing, or HACCP or documentation & training or whatever, but the place is still run exactly as it was when I started: more or less like a hobby.
Which is fine, but there’s no path for advancement and without a promotion into an admin job that doesn’t exist I’ll never get to sit down! And I’m pushing 60 and would very much like to sit down, if I’m honest, please.
I sometimes think about getting a ‘real’ job, but I have no idea if I’m qualified for anything grown-up anymore. (I’ve been out of IT forever and it’d probably take me a week to set up Active Directory services properly! Heh.) And while it’s true the idea of a commute sucks, it’s also true that my IRA only has four grand in it. I figure something will fall into my lap eventually, because it’s usually who you know more than what. Or not! We’ll see.
I want my backyard to not look like shit, but I also want to not have to go out there in gloves and boots and pull a bunch of milkweed out of the gravel myself. I’m going to ask if the lawn guys will do it this month, before mowing gears up in full and they get too busy to help lazy people with stupid projects.
I also want to go back to Amritapuri again this year, but maybe not during peak monsoon season. I’m sure work would let me off again but I’ll have to see if I can afford it.
Trap, the feral ditch cat, recovered perfectly from her spay surgery, stayed five days in the guest room and was a perfect guest, and now hangs out with me all the time. I get the impression she thinks I’m an extremely stupid and lazy cat, but I keep ‘finding’ food so she’s willing to tolerate my lack of running around the neighborhood at night eating birds or whatever.
Sometimes she tries to boss us around by marching up to one of us or into a room and yelling, but since we don’t know what the hell she’s saying it never works. Most of the time she naps inside or on the patio couch. Yesterday evening I caught her playing, actually playing, with some dry leaves. I’d never seen her play before, not even when she had kittens.
So, yeah, I’ve been adopted by a fucking cat. I did not want a cat. I don’t even like cats. They’re an invasive species, they walk in litter boxes and then on your kitchen counters, they’re assholes. Fuck cats. I’ve seen this particular cat torture half-dead rodents, and I once listened to her eat an entire bird, skull and beak and feathers and feet and all! Disgusting! The cat is a terrible species, awful, just nasty. Buuuut I just feel responsible for her now and she purrs and is soft, and she’s happy to see me when I get home from work, so yeah, I love her.
What I should do is get a fucking goat, to eat all the weeds in the back yard!
to get back into the habit of
BLOGGING ON THIS WEBSITE
In which there’s more, but not much more… because I didn’t write it.
Most nights, I slept with my windows wide open and could hear the surf. It was glorious.
the sea at sunset
If I left the hall early at night, I could hear the bhajans slightly while lying in bed, and sometimes in the early mornings I could hear the archana. There was always traffic during the day, and some at night, and everybody honks while driving in India. Sometimes the horns sound like elephants.
The last week or so I’d figured out that if I kept the windows closed, the ceiling fan on, and the bathroom door closed (it had permanent openings and was always humid), my clothes would get slightly drier. I only bathed once a week because even though it’s the tropics and there are two taps, there’s no hot water. And no towels; I used a sheet or a dupatta. It’s cold to shower and it’s impossible to get dry.
The power goes out frequently, but rarely for more than ten seconds at a time. This is why not bringing a laptop was a good decision, apparently unshielded they get fried all the time.
(I started this the day I wrote the previous post, then saved it to come back to later.)
~+~+~+~
It turns out that after coming back to this post to finish it, I don’t want to finish it! Overall, the trip was utterly transformative: I thought thoughts, I had experiences, my spirituality deepened in ways that would sound ridiculous if put into language, so I won’t try.
Everything that exists is a metaphor for finding your real self, which is closer than close, and all the effort you do to ‘become’ whatever it is that your intellect thinks is enlightenment is more or less running around in circles, and only true Love can get any of us anywhere near understanding that, and that’s what my Sadguru gave me when I went to visit Her.
Plus I drank a cocktail with ice in it at the Delhi airport, which of course gave me Delhi Belly, which I suffered after I got all the way home, and it sucked REAL bad. So bad I even tried to go to the doctor about it after about five days, but gave up when the nearest clinic wouldn’t take my insurance. Nevertheless, I survived!
In which I use my passport! And spend eighty hours in airports and airplanes!
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for most of a month now, because I wasn’t sure how, since it wasn’t really a touristy trip. I went to see my Sadguru, an enlightened person, an avatar, for spiritual purposes, and most of what I have to observe was the ways my mind does what it does and how I reacted to that. It’s not like I went to any restaurants or shows or on any hikes or cruises.
view from the footbridge facing toward the Amritapuri ashram
The trip was Walla Walla to Seattle to Vancouver to Delhi to Trivandrum. I never left the airports, and it took a couple days each way. Absolutely exhausting. The shape of the trip was dictated primarily by politics; from what I’ve been told (by a Keralan living in Canada I met on a return flight) you’d typically rather go through Dubai.
The way over I was exhausted in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. My relationship has its struggles, I’ve been in the same entry-level job for six years with no promotions or recent raises, I’m older and fatter than I’ve ever been, and I live a life of, essentially, laziness and dissipation. I read a lot, I sleep a lot, I drink too much, I don’t bother to have a social life, and while I know the shape of my life would be perfect for sadhana I just don’t do as much as I wish. I was unhappy in every quarter. Which is why I wanted to go see Amma so bad. Get my priorities straight. You spend a lot of your evolution believing in doing things, but then comes the realization you’re not doing anything, you’re not the doer, and yet you have to do things to achieve states, and it’s all some bullshit Buddhist koan, and you need your guru.
After determining that I wanted to go and why, with literally no effort on my part, everything just fell into place. Suddenly there was money to go, and tickets, and a month off work with zero push back, and literally everything I needed was just… provided to me. (Thanks, dad!)
~+~+~
So one morning around three AM we got in the car and went to ALW, which is my favorite airport because you can go from the door all the way through security in literally four minutes. (I hate airport security for its waste, irritation, and ineffectiveness. It’s theatre and its tedious.)
Anyway, flight to Seattle. Few hours layover, I got a coffee but I don’t think I ate. Then flight to Vancouver, which is a really well-done airport. Nice to look at, immigration was a breeze, wifi, all the kiosks worked, nice art.
Flight to Delhi was either fourteen or sixteen hours, I can’t remember which, and by then my extremities were bloated and I was miserable because the seats are for takeoff and landing, not a dozen-plus hours of actual flight, and I’m too old and fat now to get my feet underneath me or curl up. I did sleep but it was terrible quality, weird and jittery.
Airplane food
The food was pretty good, though. They fed and watered us probably four times. I had a window seat and so had to bother my row mates twice to get out, walk, stretch, and pee. The bathrooms were still familiar plane-style weird little closets with toilet paper.
Weirdest part of the whole journey was that it never got dark. You’re just flying over the lid of the world with the sun. So, so many hours of bright daylight.
Then another few hours in Delhi, to get out through immigration and back in through security. The Delhi airport is a fucking people-moving disaster, the signage is either not there or useless, and both times I went through it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going in spite of being in possession of a reasonably high intelligence and a general concept of how to get through an airport. The airport employees I asked were contemptuous (which I do understand, I work customer service too, and being asked the same fucking question over and over does get annoying) and unforthcoming and rude.
The immigration guys were bored, grumpy, gruff, and slow. Yes, I had all my documents ready: passport, boarding pass, visa. Your job sucks, whatever, at least you’re sitting down for it, you huge baby.
Security in India is segregated by sex, so you give your bags to the machine for scanning and then have to hike way over to where the women are being screened, leaving all your belongings utterly unsupervised, to be wanded in private in a cubicle by a female soldier-slash-cop. (These were friendly and pleasant, and one even complimented me on my hair.) Then at peak disorientation, tired in a strange airport where you don’t understand the majority of the languages, you have to remember which carousel has your bags and figure out how to get back sans signage. It’s a trip.
Continue reading »
In which I’m on vacation, as of Saturday at 6:10pm when I clocked off work.
I’m pretty much packed! Had to buy new luggage, because ours were a few inches too big for the new carry-on sizes and I don’t want to check anything. New suitcase is green, within parameters for cabin luggage on Air India, and came with a cute matching extra bag I’m using in place of the shitty old backpack I was gonna bring.
I have culture-appropriate clothing, shawls and wraps, new undies, compression socks for the planes, and a sweater. I have toiletries, jewelry, bug wipes, an eye mask, ear plugs, headphones, a rain poncho, and snack bars. I’ve decided not to take my contact lenses. I probably won’t take any makeup, or if I do it’ll just be the tiniest bit to wear in the airports. Can’t find my safety pins, but won’t really need them unless I buy a petticoat and choli at the ashram and wear a sari.
I have movies and music on my phone, and an external battery (or two, if I take his with me). Will finish loading up the Kindle with ebooks tomorrow. Have a keyboard to use with my phone if I want to type, and a journal to write in.
I have all my tickets and visas printed and neatly organized in a binder. I have all the travel apps anybody could ever want installed on my phone. I bought a roaming pass for my cell phone, so will hopefully have coverage outside the airport while finding my already-booked-and-confirmed ashram taxi.
Checked Kerala weather, and I don’t think it’ll be so awful—the highs are lower than here, and the lows are in the mid-70’s, which is actually cool enough to wear a sweater if you’re sitting. The things I’ve read made it sound like monsoon is sizzling, but 75-85 isn’t that bad; more like it’s the humidity travelers must be reacting to. And I love rain.
They assign you your housing when you visit Amritapuri; I can’t decide if I want a room alone or to be stuck into a dorm. As it’s monsoon and Amma’s been in residence for months, I can’t imagine the ashram will be full to the rafters, so I might get my own room. Do I want a room alone? I am pretty old and set in my ways; if I get stuck in with other devotees they’re gonna hear more farting than they probably want. I leave it to God, I guess, to stick me where I’ll be most challenged—and this is exactly why I expect to be put on kitchen duty and to spend my entire vacation doing dishes every day.
All that’s left on my to-do list is ‘get travel cash’ and a last load of laundry so I can take a clean nightgown. Then I’m out of the country for the rest of the month.
It’s an awfully long way to go to not do any sight-seeing, but really I just want to spend more than 2 days near Amma for once in my life. Three weeks will probably trigger a breakdown but hey, it’s what I’ve always wanted!
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
![The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna [microform] - Ramakrishna](https://pics.cdn.librarything.com/picsizes/41/30/4130982-c-h200-w100-pv25_593659495077426b414d6741_v5.jpg)
