055 tuesday february 8
tree studies / accomplishments poem / pad see ew / the end of a short era
seems like tuesdays are up to being almost a weekly occurrence these days.
it’s a pretty foggy morning out there today which is a pretty good representation of how this year has felt so far. kind of gray and indistinct, with things fading into the background quicker than you would expect. everything’s kind of soft and muted.
for me, personally, at least.
a big part of this has been that i have not been on twitter since january first, and the outsized place that website was taking up in my life has finally started to really sink in. just in time, too, because in theory i’ll be wrapping up my self-imposed exile next week and diving back in to the mud. in theory.
there’s a tension. on the one hand, a constant slow drip of news, information, opinion, and outrage is not really good for your brain, i don’t think. this is not really a novel observation at all but i think it’s pretty true that people are not really supposed to have opinions on, or even knowledge of, thousands of separate-but-ultimately-related mostly-awful daily events. it’s not good to have a take on everything. it’s not good to divide your focus and attention and, especially, empathy into thousands of bite-size chunks that you can morsel out appropriately as the inverted panopticon of twitter brings each new disaster to your attention. it’s not good to be submerged in the culture war for 18 hours a day, no matter how fun it can be. we all know this, intellectually. and logging off for a month and a half every year is one way i remind myself of that fact.
so that’s the bad part. which is a lot of it! but there are good things too, of course, and especially with the recent omicron surge that seems to be more or less undeterred by vaccination status. i live alone right now, and although more and more people are kind of quietly abandoning their formerly-strongly-held opinions about the responsibilities of the individual vis-a-vis public safety, it’s still not a great time to be socializing in public indoor spaces, necessarily. i think it used to sound weird, but it’s less weird now than ever to acknowledge to yourself that you do end up forming some pretty close approximations of “real” friendships with some of the little circle avatars next to funny names that you interact with on a daily basis on twitter. your friends live inside your phone! you can talk to them all day, kind of. and it’s nice to have friends.
and although i’m less convinced than ever that it’s actually valuable to keep abreast of current events at the micro-level that twitter excels at, it is sort of nice to know what’s going on in the world. kind of. then again, i’m less convinced than ever that i have any actual individual agency to affect those events, even at the micro-level, so am i really doing anyone any good by internalizing all those little tiny dooms every day? probably not!
so it’s been a foggy, gray january. drifting along, less stressed than ever because i’m not spending all day making myself mad on purpose about things i can’t control, but at the same time not really knowing exactly what’s going on with, for example, Ukraine, other than in the general sense (that the apparatus of the US state is probably causing trouble on purpose, as always, with the ultimate goal of propping up some kind of business interests, as always.) but also a little lonelier than i was, because of all the friends that live in my phone and not physically nearby. i’ve been reading a lot of books and cooking a lot of food. and i’ve been going to bed earlier. but i’ve been laughing a little less, too.
well. let’s get into it this week.
1. painting study
pretty basic stuff today. just sitting down and actually making myself look at what shapes trees make. and spending a little more time drawings the shapes i see and trying not to make assumptions.
with color, too!
digital pencils have really gotten pretty good!
not much to say here. stay tuned to see if these make an appearance next week.
2. poem
accomplishments poem - feb 2022
i asked st peter when i got up to those pearly gates
pete
i said
did i bake enough loaves of bread?
did i make enough soup?
and did i take enough walks in the park, pete,
did i think about enough birds? as many as i could?
i’m still working on a story that is turning out to be way too long to put here probably so instead you get this little poem this week. sorry / you’re welcome.
3. pad see ew
yes. yes!
here’s a fun one this week. pretty easy. not actually vegan which i will warn you about up front but i think you could make it vegan pretty easily and it’s pretty darn close, actually, anyway. to the point where i don’t think i feel bad about it.
first up, i had to make noodles. i had to make noodles because apparently the really wide rice noodles you usually see in pad see ew are hard to find in stores, even stores like H Mart where you would think, dang, i thought for sure they would have these here, what gives.
the thinner rice noodles you would see in e.g. pad thai are of course very easy to find. and probably would have been fine to use. but it turns out rice noodles are incredibly easy to just make yourself, if you have rice flour, which i do, and a little bit of time and patience, which i also do.
here we have equal parts water and rice flour, some tapioca starch, and a little salt. that’s it!
i also got some thai chilies on a whim. i read that you can make a pretty easy condiment using these and some white vinegar. i also read in several different sources that thai food is perhaps the most condiment-intensive cuisine on the planet. that’s kind of cool, right? i like that vibe.
i actually read a funny story about it. as the legend goes, there was once a king, and for some reason, a woman was due to be executed the next day on his orders. unclear to me what her relationship was to the king. maybe some kind of consort? maybe just a citizen who ran afoul of the law in some other way. anyway she strikes some kind of deal where she promises to give him the recipe to one of her grandmother’s famous condiments if the king will spare her for one day. he agrees for some reason. the next night, as you may have guessed, she offers him the same deal and he accepts again. this pattern continues until the king dies of old age, and she’s also very old, maybe they’re married at this point, i guess they have a pretty strong connection even if it’s predicated upon her impending execution in kind of a fucked up way, but maybe they get a kick out of that dynamic, none of my business, anyway she’s also very old and holding the king’s hand as he’s just about to perish. or maybe she’s about to perish. either way, she tells him that she hadn’t even made it to the coconut-based condiments yet. ha! classic.
i’ve made rice noodles before and did not use this method, so this was a bit of a learning curve. before, i made a big ball of dough and rolled it out with a rolling pin. i think you could also use a pasta machine. people keep telling me to get a pasta machine. but in this case, i brought a big pan of water to a simmer, and floated a glass dish in it, and poured just a thin coating of the noodle batter onto the bottom of it. the floating evens out the liquid into a flat layer, so you get way less variation than if you were rolling by hand. there are some definite issues with this approach, of course. you have to find a dish that will float well enough that water doesn’t bubble up over the sides but which will still fit in a pan and allow you to put a lid over it so the steam cooks the top of the noodle. you can see in the above image, this dish was pretty heavy and therefore rode pretty low and some of those craters are from where boiling water blooped up and dripped into the noodle. but it’s a cool method.
after five minutes you yoink the dish out of there and slide the noodle out, onto a lightly oiled surface so it doesn’t stick. you also lightly oil the dish before you pour the batter in, i forgot to mention that. that’s important.
then you just chop it up into the size you want. voila!
the rest of this is pretty straighforward. hot wok, oil, cook quickly and keep things moving. garlic first, then vegetables — i very lightly parcooked the tougher vegetables for like 1 minute in steam / boiling water before the wok stage. add the vegetables in order of time they’ll need to cook. duh. then protein, tofu in this case, and i added a couple eggs at this stage as well. cook, toss, cook, for maybe 5-7 minutes total.
some people will tell you just to throw the noodles in at this stage and add the sauce (the sauce is mushroom sauce, oyster sauce, black soy sauce, and sugar, by the way. oysters are not vegan but i don’t really feel bad about eating them, make your own call on that, i think you could just use mushroom sauce instead and it would be pretty close.)
some people recommended to dump the vegetables etc. into a bowl when they’re almost done, add a little more oil, and just do the noodles and sauce together for a few minutes. this apparently allows the noodles to caramelize more than they would if you added them to all those water-filled vegetables. and it worked! so that’s my recommendation too. then after you get a nice caramelization on the noodles, add the other stuff back in and toss it around a bit. add the bean sprouts at this point, they cook very fast and you still want some crunch on them.
some toppings including the aforementioned bean sprouts. the peppers have been “pickling” in the vinegar for oh maybe an hour at this point. they are still spicy as hell. allegedly they mellow out the longer you pickle them, but i definitely scorched myself. so you know. be careful.
ta da! yum!
4. the end of a short era
well gang, it finally happened. the day we all knew was coming, but which we nevertheless dreaded. we tried to tell ourselves it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, that there were other paths forward, that things didn’t have to go this way.
but this morning, the Portland Trail Blazers finalized a deal to trade shooting guard CJ McCollum to the New Orleans Pelicans. i know you all heard about it and i trust you are all dealing with the news in your own ways.
i haven’t really been a basketball fan for that long, comparatively. i wasn’t ever really a “sports guy” growing up or in college, and did not follow the NBA or really any other sports league, outside of a vague awareness of the players who were big enough stars that they transcended the sport and became celebrities in their own right. lebron james. shaq. i’m sure there are others but none are coming to mind right now. anyway.
when i moved back to portland in 2017, a few grad school friends and i started to follow the Trail Blazers. i’m not sure if there was one inciting incident, but they’re somewhat of a big deal in this little town, and Dame Lillard was in his prime and lighting things up in a way that was really fun to watch even as a formerly-dedicated non-fan. so, gradually at first, probably a little ironically, and then with increasing fervor and decreasing smirk, we became Blazers fans. they made a playoff run shortly after we all started paying attention, then made the playoffs again, and i was hooked.
Damian Lillard is a genuine generational talent, and even if he never wins a chip (looking less likely by the day, but that’s another story) he’s probably the best player to come through this city in i don’t even know how long. haven’t been paying attention that long, as i previously mentioned. his game is thrilling and watching him play, when he’s playing well, is a real treat. in a lot of ways, he’s the core of our team, the foundation on which everything else was built.
but he was never my favorite. he’s not really that charismatic, he has a sense of humor but is clearly incredibly reserved, he’s a strong leader, no doubt, but he’s not really… fun. and lately, the i-stayed-loyal-through-thick-and-thin mentality of his has started to chafe a little bit. he’s great, don’t get me wrong. but. instead, i quickly grew to love his partner-in-crime, shooting guard CJ McCollum.
CJ is also an amazing basketball player, and has carried the team on his shoulders in some really tough spots, maybe most notably Game 7 of the 2019 finals against Denver. he’s got a quick handle and some seriously slick moves, and can be deadly from the 3-point range. he’s been living in Dame’s shadow his entire time here, but real ones know he’s always been right there, almost as good, sometimes better, but more importantly, totally in sync with Dame in one of the league’s best partnerships. in my opinion.
but also: he’s just a fun guy. he clearly has a real sense of humor, and more than that, often a real sense of mischief. he takes the game seriously, more seriously than many players, constantly working on himself in the on and off season, but you also tell, he sees the humor in it. it’s a job, but it’s also fun! it’s supposed to be fun. it’s maybe one of the only jobs in the country where you can really say that with a straight face. he also loves his wife, who is a dentist, in a completely corny but totally sincere way, which these days i find increasingly refreshing, and they just welcomed a kid into the world. he loves his older brother, who plays in Europe, he loves his teammates, he loves wine, he loves Oregon. he loves the game. and he loves to laugh.
i mean, come on!
for basketball reasons i have been assured that this trade totally makes sense, if we want to maximize Dame’s prime. Dame is getting older, and if we want to make a serious run at the playoffs with him as the centerpiece, time’s-a-wastin. it doesn’t make sense to have two relatively small guards on the same team, who play similar games and have similar skill sets, and Dame is where we’re putting our money. so it just makes sense to move him. we’ve seen it coming for a while, we’ve made some bad moves in the past, we can’t afford to waste any more time, we need to restructure, rebuild, rework things because they aren’t working now. this move gets us under the salary cap line, well under, in fact, and we pick up a handful of draft picks and other assets that are much more moveable, packageable, fungible, and we can make some serious moves in the off season.
it just makes sense! it makes sense.
i guess i get it. when people who have been fans of the organization longer than me tell me it’s been killing them to see the team mismanage Dame’s prime, one of the best shooter’s the game’s ever seen, and they just want to see the Blazers win, or not make a first-round playoff exit, for God’s sake, i guess i get that. i am a Blazers fan and i will be very happy if the team makes a deep playoff run next year thanks to all this dramatic restructuring.
but as it turns out, i think i’m just more of a CJ fan. so this makes sense, i get it. but still. this sucks, man. this sucks ass.
i’ll leave you with some classic CJ moments. i wish him well in New Orleans, and hopefully when he finally retires, he’ll need an award-winning architect to design him a house out in wine country.
well that’s it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.