My blog has come to haunt me

When I created this blog I had all the best intentions in the world to post often and to post things of quality, but over the last few months it's become somewhat annoying.  Annoying because it's become a bit of an obligation.  The resulting entries are, watered-down, rushed and uninspired.   I just read a couple of my recent entries and can't believe the amount of clipped sentences and sentiments.  I mean why go through the motions of posting something if it comes from nowhere intended for nowhere.

What's the point of emitting or broadcasting something if it doesn't stick, and if it doesn't provoke feeling, thought or discussion?  I don't mean to launch complex debates or forums about what I write about, but I consider an entry a "success" if I can make someone think or feel something that's outside of their immediate experience.  Maybe in particular about food, maybe an entry about chocolate made you think about first time you tasted REAL chocolate - did your world change? From that point on would you continue to classify "smarties" as chocolate?  Or that first time you tasted something that was so perfect that it made you think all the way back to where it came from, how it was tended and what creativity and mastery was required to render it to the state of perfection in the form of a bite in your mouth.  

What I love about food, aside from the obvious sensory satisfaction, is that there's a sense of place, history, love and ceremony to making and eating food.  Maybe it's the food geek in me that wants to force a lot more meaning into food than what is sitting there in front of me on a plate.  And it's the same writing geek in me that wants words to be more than just what's on the screen/page.  There's a potential in making the experience of reading or eating as immediate or as transcendent as you want it, but the most interesting part of it all is where it meets - you.  The person, forming the relationship between the immediate sensory experience and everything else that matters or doesn't matter floating in time and space.

Maybe it's presumptuous of me, but I'd like to write for that end.  

Has anyone seen "the Watchmen"?  I'm starting to make myself out to be a real Dr. Manhattan.  I mean well though.

Just when we were getting into it...

It's mid-march and I'll be leaving Toulouse in a month.  A month!!  We finally got some of that southern france weather (the weather we came for) this weekend.  It was 19 and sunny.  yeah, I know.  Our landlord's mother, told us that this has been an unusually cold winter and that this 19 degrees business usually starts in February, but instead we were slogging through an extra rainy/cold winter.  But no complaints, we're going to make up for it this next month.  P and I went to lunch at Place St. Georges...or where the rich, beautiful and sunglasses clad french families go to dine.  *sigh, here in France, small children wear nicer clothes than I do - and by nicer I mean WAAY nicer,  like burberry trenchcoats and such.  

P got steak tartare (our first time here), and the thing came out as a raw hamburger mound with chopped up cornichons, onions and capers in it...AND a raw egg right on top.  I mean, we knew what we were getting, but it was still a sight for us non-raw-hamburger/egg-eating types.  It was a lot of raw beef and raw egg in one sitting, but we liked it and ate it all.  It comes with worsteshire sauce, mustard and tobasco sauce on the side - a nice lady sitting at the table next to us gave us instructions on how to eat and manage the thing.  Put the sauce on it, mix it through with the egg (much like one would prepare fresh hamburgers, only you don't throw it on the grill), then mound it onto bread and eat. 

When we're not pigging out on raw meat amidst beautiful french families, we're eating this:

Choucroute garni - it's an Alsatian specialty of saurkraut (warmed through) garnished with sausages, smoked meats and potatoes.  We walk by this stuff at the pig butcher stalls, but never tried it until last week.  We asked the lady to explain to us what to do and how to eat it and she packed up enough for a meal for the 2 of us.  In the picture we have: 2 types of sausages, a slice of smoked pork shoulder, some boiled potatoes and the choucroute.  Who knew a steaming mound of hot sour cabbage would be so good.  There's a butcher that specializes in choucroute garni and we're going to get stuff from there next time and see how the two meals compare.

love - a belated valentine's day post

If P and I celebrated anniversaries together, we would have just rounded our 7th year.

22 year-olds P&P having lunch at the Maggie Benston Centre at SFU.  I really dug P's "Andrew-Jackson" coif back then.  He wears it differently these days.

After 7 years together I didn't really think that there would be much more to learn about each other...I kind of felt that we were now in "new-experiences-together" mode, and less the "getting-to-know-each-other" mode.  We're at the point where we anticipate each other's sentences and jokes don't need to be finished before we mind-meld into "pault" and crack up at punchlines that never drop.  We even got each other the exact same valentine's day surprise, each having secretly dropped by the same chocolate shop minutes apart from each other.  We have always spent a lot of time together...we like to.  Since coming to Europe we've taken it all to a whole new level, like we're in one of those machines that make diamonds from carbon (what do you even call those things?), it's as if we get super intense, highly-pressurized, focalized laser beams of each other.  All pault all the time.  And yet, I'm happy to report that we still manage to learn new things about each other.  Love and romance thrive on mystery, non?  Check out these new mystery nuggets that I recently discovered in my lover:

1) P CANNOT STAND middle-aged women with short, severe bobs (straight cut bangs, straight cut everything).  He can handle the two separately, he might even like either of those components in their own right, but just NEVER together.  I found this out when we sat across from a tall norwegian woman with that kryptonitic combination, paul was made irritable and uneasy that whole train ride.  

2) P HATES wind, or even breezes.  He gets fussy and unnerved by the slightest movement of air out of doors.  A perfectly beautifully, sunshiney day is, in Paul's opinion, ruined by the slightest traces of a breeze.  He gets so worked up about it.

   

Here we are on the windy west-coast of norway.  I am lovingly drawing P's hood, to minimize his exposure to wind.

3)P tolerates human cloning (this is a gross simplification of an hour-long debate) - like, really?  On a more positive note, we've come to the conclusion that we very much look forward to having traditional "mixies", rather than clones.

photos of the two of us together are rare.  This was at Ruby Lake on the Sunshine Coast.  Our friends V and S took us to a secret spot where we picnic-ed, swam and went to town on the rope-swing.

It's been 7 years, and P just doesn't want to hear it sometimes.