For Your Intellectual Fix

In my rant below, I mentioned that I would put effort into the serious issues I care about and develop them fully, if not quite to academic standards. Well, I have a research paper to write for poli sci this month, so I'll be devoting my academic brain to that until it's done, and then in April I have exams, so I won't be writing anything serious until I get to Berlin. I'm currently planning to write a reasonably comprehensive description of Western government.

However, I'll only be starting in a month and a half, so if you desire intelligent commentary on current events I suggest you check out Crooked Timber. It's a blog run by a variety of academics, and I've really been enjoying it. I learn a lot from their insight, especially on subjects I knew very little about, and their posts are often funny, or sarcastic. Go check it out.

The problem is that there are too many problems

I've decided that since I'm no longer going to be writing out my serious thoughts on this blog, I could use this blog to rant. And I do feel like ranting. Hopefully when I read this tomorrow, I won't cringe too much.

As you know, I've decided that my career will lie in chemistry. I think that I will enjoy my work and that it will be of benefit to the world, and that's all I really want from my job. Having a salary that I can live on will be a bonus. But it seems that every week I read or hear about something that makes me want to switch. AIDS and malaria are terrifying problems for the developing world, especially Africa, so maybe I should study medicine- do I really want to study medicine? Developing economies are in a mess, so I should be an economist. Politics is messed up, so I should study political science, or maybe law. Corporations are psychopathic, so I should become a businessman and reform it from within (this will never happen. Fuck business.)

In all honesty, I only want to be a chemist. I've always loved science, and I think chemistry is awesome, so I've never seriously contemplated switching out of chemistry. Instead, I've decided that I will also devote myself to a noble cause. I don't know which noble cause yet, but I think I'll figure it out one day, once I've actually lived in the real world. So I'm fine with where I'm going in life.

Reading about these global issues does make me temporarily pessimistic, and I think that maybe humanity is doomed. But really, I'll always be an optimist, which I rationalize because there's no point to being pessimistic- bad shit will happen, and all you can do is hope for the best. That being said, my optimism isn't so much rational as it is an ingrained behavior, as I never chose to be an optimist, and becoming a pessimist seems as likely as becoming a born-again Christian. In fact, I tend to agree that our personalities are determined by our genes and our environment, so not being an atheist or an optimist seems impossible.

The frightening array of problems that the world isn't really a problem for me, because I'm an eternal optimist with a relatively fixed direction in life, but they do bother me because they make good people indecisive. Based on zero first-hand experience, I've concluded each of the many problems requires many people focused on solving it, so if people are confused by the state of the world, then less people will want to volunteer. And if people don't work to solve all of these problems, then my optimism is just silly, isn't it?

Fuck blogging

I've figured out why I rarely write in my blog. This epiphany came to me when instead of writing on the topic of socialism and capitalism, I was swearing and typing garbage in frustration. I don't enjoy writing in my blog. I usually enjoy what I've written even though it could use a lot of improvement, but the process is generally difficult and time-consuming. Sometimes, late at night I will find it easy to write, only to have to revise it the next day when I realize how terrible it is. No matter what everyone else thinks of it, I find it terrible, and I have to rewrite it before other people read it and don't bother to reread the good version. During this revision, I usually wish that I hadn't published it in the first place.

In the end, I've usually published a post that I can be proud of. I value my writing because it forces me to clarify and organize my thoughts, which is the painful part of the actual writing process. Generally, at least Isabel and Vlad will read and enjoy it. But the more I write, the more frustrating not being able to write well gets, and the less interested my friends become.

So in future, I'll be rewriting my old posts until I am proud of each, and until each one is an accurate and excellent representation of my beliefs. At that point, I'll publish it online for anyone who cares. I won't be blogging for blogging's sake, I'll be writing for my own benefit.

Beverages!

Water is even more of a necessity than food, but we don't give a lot of thought to the various ways we take in water. Obviously the best way is to drink plain water, but most of us drink many other beverages besides water. My favorites are, in descending order, coffee, beer, wine, tea, fruit juice, milk, and soda. And I will discuss each of these in term, in such detail as to bewilder and amaze you. Umm, I mean, it'll be interesting.

Obviously the main factor is taste, but the effect of the drink is also important. Coffee wins on both taste and effect, as I simply love the taste of coffee, but I also find caffeine great when I'm tired. My favorite coffee is Italian coffee, in its various forms depending on my mood and the time of day (espresso is a little strong for waking up in the morning.) Good drip (American) coffee is great too, but it's also far more likely to be terrible, and I only really drink it black. I'd argue that if you add milk and sugar to coffee, it's because you don't want to taste the coffee.

Beer runs a close second when compared to coffee. Drinking a beer in the evening is a great way to relax, and drinking a few with friends is also great fun. Beer is a lot more varied than coffee: there are even some beers that taste like coffee, and beers called "espresso stouts." So while I wouldn't get bored of drinking coffee, I can't try new kinds when I want something new. My problem with beer is that it makes me more tired, and I'm tired often enough that I find coffee much more useful. Besides, I've never puked from drinking too much coffee.

Next on my list is wine, which I also really like, but that I don't drink often. I drink a fair bit of wine at home, where my parents often drink a good wine with dinner. In fact, I think wine is the best accompaniment to most meals, although German cuisine often goes great with a good beer. The fact that it's stronger, in terms of taste and alcohol, and comes in larger bottles than beer makes it good to share with dinner, while beer isn't often shared. (40s are an exception, as drinking a 40 on your own is a cheap and disgusting way to get drunk.) Drinking a bottle of wine on your own is generally a bad idea, as it's a lot to drink and causes bad hangovers.

Tea is the world's favorite drink, consumed around the world be every culture I can think of. The taste of teas varies considerably, with smokey, dark teas like lapsang souchong, lighter, slightly spicy teas like rooibos, herbal teas like chamomile, and fruity teas of all kinds. I find that even given this variety, no tea comes close to replacing coffee as my favorite morning drink, although it's tempting to replace my water consumption with tea. You can drink tea at any time, and unlike coffee where only small quantities are healthy, most teas can be drunk in large quantitites while still being healthy. And if I don't feel like coffee, tea is a great substitute. It's also great just to be able to try all the different kinds of tea that there are, although unfortunately my favorite black tea, Assam, isn't easy to find outside of tea shops. Tea's also great when you're sick, which is why I've had three cups of it today.

Last on the list are fruit juice, milk, and soda, which I rarely drink. Fruit juice is great, since it's healthy and tasty, but I tend to get tired of one kind quite quickly. Milk is also healthy, and fairly tasty, but I disagree with how it's produced, and I get tired of drinking it really quickly. Soda is an interesting case. I very rarely drink soda, although I have friends who drink it all the time. It's not healthy, and I find it has too much sugar and too little caffeine to enjoy its other effects. It's only selling point is taste, and since tastes are established in childhood, I have to wonder why parents don't restrict soda consumption like mine did.

You know, I'm not entirely sure why I write posts like these, categorizing aspects of my life. Obviously, I analyze all kinds of daily phenomena, but I surprise myself with how systematically I describe things that many people don't give a second thought too. Most people think "I hate math" or "I love big dogs, little dogs not so much." They might go on and think "Math is boring and useless" or "coffee is bitter and gross, Pepsi is delicious", but ranking and explaining my beverage choice is something only a scientist would do.

Crazy Cooking

Last time I was in Berlin, I cooked and baked bread about once a week. While I was staying at the Forth's house, I cooked a few times, but cooking stopped once I moved into res. I joked to Isabel that I needed to cook something soon because I was going through withdrawal. So, once I got back to Berlin, I not only cooked dinner but I also baked a loaf of bread. Considering that my other achievements for the day were getting up, playing four hours of Wii, and taking an hour-long bath, you'd think I was making up for the months spent in Vancouver.

I've noticed that the more I cook, the more I enjoy cooking, which isn't true for baking. I've helped my mom bake since I was about eight, and with a good recipe I can bake everything except complicated cakes and pastry. If I bake a batch of muffins, if I bake them again it'll probably take me slightly less time. If I cook a dish, when I go to make it again I can add new ingredients, change the way things were cooked, and the result is much improved. With bread it's a similar story- I can make a more complicated type of bread, or improve one I've made before. The fact that cooking is a lot more variable than baking is why I think I much prefer to cook than bake.

My cooking has also come a long way in the past ten years. When I was nine, I watched a TV show where they made crepe, and I decided I wanted to give it a try. I didn't ask someone older to help me, but luckily my brother happened to be around, and when he came into the kitchen he did not find me lightly frying a thin crepe like they had on TV, but rather I was deep-frying a solid mass of batter. He added milk to the batter and showed me how to spread the batter around, and crepe became my dish. Until I was 17, my repertoire consisted mainly of crepe and scrambled eggs, and I'm still considered the expert on cooking crepe, even though my dad and brother can probably cook them just as well. When my dad moved away for a year, my mom started asking me to cook occasionally, and by now I can cook quite a bit.

Although I can cook, my attempts at improvisation have consistently failed. My first attempt, at age 11, was to liven up a tomato soup I'd prepared, and so I added a bit of every spice on the spice rack- about 20 in total- stirred it all together, and took a sip. I still think it would have tasted fine until I added a heaping teaspoon of steak seasoning, but the final product was disgusting. I had to throw the whole pot of soup away, and I ended up eating a peanut butter sandwich, which was a much safer meal. For me, spicing up my food is equivalent to ruining it. But I still occasionally decide I want to try something new, which is why I ate fried bread for lunch.

I actually had fried potatoes and onions for lunch, and since I'd eaten something edible I decided to risk something inedible. Fried potatoes are great- they're the best thing you can do with old boiled potatoes, and with some scrambled eggs with fried potatoes and onions is a great meal. So I thought that maybe fried bread would be okay. My thinking was along the lines of "This might be crazy enough to work." And, in fact, bread fried in bacon fat served with eggs is delicious, and my dad makes it when he decides we need more saturated fat in our diets. I was going to try frying bread in oil to see if it tasted good. Served with the potatoes and onions, it tasted pretty good, considering that all the meal had was starch and oil.

I wasn't done experimenting yet, though. First I tried a piece fried in olive oil instead of rapeseed oil, but I added way too much oil and it was barely edible. Then, since the bread had so far seemed a little dry, I added some water before frying it. The hissing and snapping from the water was pretty cool, but I ended up with bread that was chewy, oily, and doughy, none of which are desirable properties in my mind. I was also pretty tired of fried bread by now. I tried toasting a piece and then lightly frying it, which was very disappointing. First of all, toasted bread tastes way better than fried bread, and secondly it didn't fry very evenly after toasting. Finally, I added beer while it was frying, and I had high hopes for this piece, because beer is tasty, and beer in bread is often quite tasty too. Although frying beer is really cool to watch, the beer-fried bread was, unsurprisingly, not very good.

In the end, frying bread is a waste of time, especially considering that toast is quite tasty. I had fun messing around with bread, though, and I think that the next time I make bruschetta, I'll probably lightly fry the bread in olive oil, because on its own the olive oil piece was actually pretty good, if way too oily. I also got my annual dose of experimentation, so I won't be trying anything crazy until I come back to Berlin next summer.