Sort of a recipe, but not really.

Too bad food doesn't photograph well, because this after-school snack I prepared myself was delicious and beautiful: ginger noodles with sesame seeds and seaweed flakes. If you would like to make it, here's how:

thin rice noodles
soy sauce
orange juice
maple syrup
sesame oil or olive oil
extra-firm tofu
cashews
finely chopped fresh ginger
white pepper
dried ginger
seaweed gomasio (you can find it at Wild Oats)

First, put water into a big pot and bring it to a boil. If you use dried rice noodles in a box, then they are coiled up like brains into two coils. Remove them and separate the coils. Cook half of them noodles for about five minutes, until they are soft. You can use some of the cooked noodles and save the rest for later. Meanwhile, mix soy sauce with orange juice and maple syrup. Add a little bit of juice and syrup at a time and taste it to make sure it doesn't get too sweet. Put a little sesame or olive oil into a big frying pan and chop the tofu into thick slices, maybe two inches long. You can use as much or as little as you like. The stove should be on medium heat. Cook them until they are golden, then flip them over. When the tofu is pretty well-cooked, turn the stove down to low-medium heat and add the noodles, sauce, cashews, fresh and dried ginger, pepper, and a lot of gomasio. You can really use as much of any of these ingredients as you like. I haven't tried it, but it would be really good to add some tahini to the soy sauce mixture, to make it more sesame-y.

The holidays have ended...

I had a splendid Christmas! We had lots of visitors, which I adore: David, Ellen, Jeannette, Adam, Miles, Kid Robot, Pink, Ribby, Mana, and Pop, plus our usual household of Mum, Dad, Ezra, April, Minnow, and me. I had a really nice Christmas eve (my favourite day of the year) which included shopping for everybody with money from my great-uncle. My dad and I returned with 17 gifts! Dinner was especially nice, as we finally had enough Tofurkey; also, another great-uncle sent us his lovely homemade applesauce.
As for gifts, I got several lovely things, including a banjo, a gunne sax dress, a few books, another dress, socks, bloomers, tea, one of these posters, etc. Ezra's main present was a PlayStation 2, which I have been using a lot, I must admit. My favourite game is Guitar Hero -- quite entertaining!

Ezra, Pink, and Kid Robot shoot off a rocket

Christmas excitment

A lovely gift from Miss Gliss! They are delightful limited edition Andy Warhol soup cans from Barney's!
In other events, everybody is here, and tomorrow is Christmas eve, my favourite day of the year. I've finished all my presents, but I still have a lot of wrapping to do.

A Mighty Wind

I LOVED this movie. I certainly didn't like it as much as Waiting For Guffman or This Is Spinal Tap, but I really thought it was delightful. The music was hilarious.

A special surprise

I am posting on my blog from school, because now I have special permission! That is a good thing! So... so far I've had an okay day. I did pretty well on the French test, I think, thanks to my flash cards, a splendid invention. Anything else? I'm only on page 27 of Beowulf, and I'm enjoying it. The poetry is interesting, but he is an extremely boastful character.

Code Monkey

I really like this song; the lyrics are simple, but funny. It's called "Code Monkey," and it's by Jonathan Coulton.

Grendel 2

"Then the harp began to play. The crowd grew still.
The harp sighed, the old man sang, as sweet-voiced as a child...
The harp turned solemn. He told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world into darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect. The terrible race God cursed.
I believed him. Such was the power of the Shaper's harp! Stood wriggling my face, letting tears down my nose, grinding my fists into my streaming eyes, even though to do it I had to sqeeze with my elbow the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them. "Waaa!" I bawled.
Oh what a conversion!
I staggered out into the open and up towards the hall with my burden, groaning out, "Mercy! Peace!" The harper broke off, the people screamed. (They have their own versions, but this is the truth.) Drunken men rushed at me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, "Friend! Friend!" They hacked at me, yipping like dogs. I held up the body for protection..."

I love this bit for many reasons. First of all, I think this illustrates what a tragic combination of human and animal Grendel is. He looks like a really horrible animal (I picture him like a bear, only with claws and fangs and horns,) but his emotions are very real, and his thoughts, perhaps more than human. He isn't simple at all, and so befriending animals or plants or the sky is out of the question. This is (I believe) the only time he attempts to talk to the humans, but I really think that deep down he is lonely and needs a friend. He is 15 years old in the book, and I think he acts a lot like a lonely, abandoned child. At this point in the story, he hadn't killed anybody, but the humans had already labeled him a fiend, one of "Cain's clan," or, as he says, "the terrible race God cursed."

"...the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them..."

Lovely!

This line was a really powerful moment in the book for me. Think about this logically: Someone tells Grendel that because he eats dead people off the war-sites, he will burn in Hell. Grendel carries the corpse with him, the same way a human might carry a ham sandwich they were about to eat, but who is the killer of this person? The people that claim Grendel is the cursed one! So if Grendel is doomed because he cleans up the already-dead, shouldn't the killers have the same, if not a worse, fate? So, Grendel considers this, and decides that this unfairness isn't right, that it couldn't have been planned by the gods watching over the people, because where does that leave Grendel? The only logical conclusion is that God must not exist. It makes perfect sense to him. But the humans' willingness to believe anything makes Grendel furious, and that's really what started his quest for the truth, and, ultimately, his murders. So I think it can all be traced back to the humans.

I started Beowulf today and I really like it. It's very strange...
One more thing! Does anybody know what John Gardner's views on religion were? I don't know much about him, but in this book he seems to be trying to make a point about religion; I just can't figure out what it is.

The best guinea pig of them all

If you haven't already heard the news, we took lil' Sasha and Ziggy to the Animal Refuge League. My mother was especially tired of being a guinea pig zookeeper, and I cannot blame her! Luckily, we got to keep lovely April, the best one. She is really lovely -- very sweet, and she doesn't seem to mind being picked up. At one time, my room was referred to as the "guinea pig insane asylum," since Sasha is crazy. If you picked him up, he'd bite you, and if you opened his cage, he'd started racing around it in a terrified, frenzied manner.

Grendel

I loved this book. I thought it was very moving and the poetry was fasinating. I loved how Grendel was incredibly flawed, self-contained, and angry, yet I immediately identified with him, and I don't think I'll ever look at Beowulf (which I am reading right now) in the same way as someone who read it before Grendel. It was very thought-provoking. I'm too lazy to type out my favourite bit right now, but maybe later...