A little impromptu entertainment on the subway

Ok, so its been a year. Blah blah blah...lazy blogger...whatever. I'm back.

I really do love living in Toronto and one of the reasons is the impromptu entertainment. Tonight I was fortunate enough to ride the rocket from St. Clair West to Lawrence West stations and overheard a rant that was thoroughly entertaining. A woman was reacting to a poster on the subway that was decidedly anti-meat, anti-cruelty. I'm paraphrasing only slightly, and I hope you enjoy her musings as much as I did:

"I could never be vegan. Vegans can't eat any animal by-products. You know, byproducts like eggs and fish. Vegans are sick all the time. They always have colds and flu. Its not natural to be vegan. Like, you need vitamin D to be healthy. And how does your body get vitamin D? Through taking supplements. And your body can't digest supplements if you don't eat meat. That's why vegans are sick.

And they should also be eating pork in the middle east. It doesn't make sense not to." (Here, the man she's riding with interjects theating meat may be against the religion). "That's not true. The reason they don't eat pork in the middle east is that they don't have good methods of storing it. With beef, you can dry it out - make beef jerky. They can't make pork jerky and that's why they don't eat pork down there. People say that things are religion and they really have nothing to do with religion. Like eating pork and carving pumpkins. Its all propoganda. And when we kill all the dictators, the truth will come out about all of it."

The subway doors opened and I collapsed into a puddle of laughter. Thank you Toronto. You made my night.

Life is not hard

Going through the ordeal I have in the last year has given me lots of perspective. For this I am grateful. I have redefined my priorities. After decades of reading time management and goal setting books, I have found out that all these did was complicate things.

What I know for sure is that there are only 2 things in life that are important.

1. Taking care of your health
2. Appreciating those you love

That's it. Everything else like work, leisure, hobbies, etc...work to either support those things or work against them. We get too wrapped up in superfluous minutiae. Its all superfluous. This blog is superfluous.

i feel awkward.

Its been about 500 days since my last post. Truth be told, I've started this particular post a million times but felt at a loss on how to approach it. Usually, I feel that my blog posts need poignant yet definitive conclusions. This one was difficult to get my head around without feeling vulnerable, naked, rambly. I do want to continue blogging, but this one post has been like the cyber-elephant in the internet cable that has prevented me from continuing. So instead of getting around to the huge issue, I will conclude upfront.

Poignant yet Definitive Conlusion to this post:
When you watch the person you love the most slip away from the world, you begin to live in a new dimension of the universe and everything that once felt familiar doesn't anymore.

Now I'll go back to the beginning:
A few days after my previous blog post, my mother was diagnosed with bladder cancer and was told by Drs that she had less than a year to live. I come from the most beautful little family and my mother was my best friend. The weeks following the diagnosis were bleak. We knew mom would be going through chemotherapy and that there was little hope.

It was then that I had made a choice. That choice was to hope. That choice was to continue being who I am: The Inspiration Junkie. While Drs were going to deliver medical treatment, other family members were going to offer emotional support, I was going to inspire her spirit - to give my mom things to live for. I may discuss these things in future posts, but for now I need to get to the end of this one - and post it before I get cold feet again.

The spring and summer gave us many things to be thankful for. We had spent some magical times together, treatments were going well and things were looking up. When a full year had passed and my mom was still doing really well, we felt like we had climbed the highest mountain and won the most hopeless war. Then 13 months after first diagnosis, the cancer had returned and spread really quickly. Mom was taken to the emergency room in early November. We thought she had the flu but we were wrong. She had passed away in mid-December.

There was no victory.

Now its about picking up the pieces.

About moving on when you don't really know what you're moving on to.

you already know how the conclusion goes.

Carbs, I just can't quit you!

I just stumbled across a killer - keeper recipe. What makes this awesome is that the ingredients are very simple and boring by themselves, but together, they transform into creamy carby comforting yumminess.

Healthy-ish Rice Pudding

1 cup cooked short grain brown rice
1 cup reduced fat plain yogurt
1 cup skim milk
½ cup brown sugar
zest of one lemon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix ingredients together and - here's the magic part, blend. I use my hand blender, but you can throw it in a regular blender too. It makes it really creamy. I like to eat it warm, but it works cold as well.

Edible Flowers

I can't take total credit for this idea, as I came across the recipe for Flower Pot Banana Bread online a few months ago. I've been wanting to try it for a while and E's birthday seemed like a good opportunity. (She's a baker and a crafter too).

I used a traditional banana bread recipe and baked it right into the terra cotta flower pot. (very very well greased). Then when it was cool, I inserted the chocolate tulips that I had bought from Laura Secord. I loved the way it looked and I think I'm definitely going to make this again. It's also a great hostess/housewarming gift idea.

View from the side and top...mmmm...banana bread!

The Ultimate Thirst Quencher

The reason I haven't been posting recipes lately is because I haven't been cooking, or eating. No friends, I have spent this summer addicted to drinking watermelon juice. I would call it the 'watermelon juice diet' and make boatloads of money if it actually made me lose weight.

For a very long time I used to crave the slushy frozen fancy coffee drinks. The ones with obscene amounts of sugar and cream. Those were refreshing too, but left bad aftereffects of heartburn, a sugar crash and extra pounds on the scale the next morning.

This watermelon drink is just so much better than the coffee drinks in every way. I get the coldness, the refreshment, the sugar burst - natural sugar, and it's 100% natural...no preservatives. I first had this combination in the form of a punch with vodka. Personally, I like it better without the booze. Then I started ordering it at my local juice bar until I realized that I was paying $4 for a cup of pureed watermelon, when I could have bought an entire watermelon for $4 and have my own juice for over a week!

Ok, enough of my rambling. Here's the recipe. Again, I like recipes with very few ingredients and steps.

The Ultimate Watermelon Slushie

1 cup ripe watermelon
3 ice cubes - crushed
3-4 leave fresh spearmint - (I grow this in my garden)

Blend all ingredients in a blender and pour into a tall glass.

Seriously life changing.

Blame it on the Whales

It’s been a while since my last post. I realize that. Truth be told, I have been in a funk since my return from my Alaskan Cruise. I blame it on the whales.

While in Juneau, in a chance encounter, I witnessed a pod of humpback whales engaging in the most elaborate of feeding rituals in nature, ‘Bubble Net Feeding.’

What it looked like was 12 whales performing a synchronized swimming routine.

What was really happening was this: (description taken from National Geographic)

It all starts when a pod of whales dive deep under a school of fish, form a circle, and blow their breath out simultaneously, forming a net of bubbles. Within the ring each humpback has a specialized task.

Some blow the bubbles, while others go down and herd the prey towards the surface. Another group screams "incredibly beautiful and haunting sounds" in order to concentrate the prey and force them up towards the surface into the confines of the bubble net, and they all get together in the group and they come charging up through this tunnel of bubbles, almost like missiles coming up through a silo, and then engulf the prey into their huge mouths at the surface.

Not all Humpback whales know how to do this – it is not instinctual. ‘Bubble net feeding’ is a learned behaviour, which is taught by a mother whale to her calf during the one year they spend together before the calf becomes independent. It is thought that only 50-75 whales on earth know how bubble net feed.

And I saw it with my own eyes. The magnificence of the situation brought me to tears. Tears of gratitude, profundity and great sadness at all the beautiful moments in this world that I miss every day. It hit me all at once.

While I am in my beige cubicle, a piece of a million-year-old glacier is crashing into the ocean.
While I am in the grocery store deciding between name-brand and generic store-brand, a 5-year-old Mayan girl pounds cornflour into a small tortilla.
While I’m watching a commercial, between segments of 24, a whale is teaching her calf the intricate art of ‘bubble net feeding.’

It’s like, all this amazing stuff is happening all around me while I’m living my life. Somehow my life seemed like a joke compared to the magnitude of the world and nature. I’ve found it difficult to reconcile my everyday reality with the miracles that occur in our universe. I guess that’s what they mean by ‘feeling connected to the world.’ Except, instead of feeling connected – I had never felt so removed.

Even the notion of connection in my world is a farce. In corporate North America, success depends on stripping every ounce of connectedness from business interactions. If you read any business etiquette book - especially written for women. They have rules:

• Dress modestly. No cleavage at work. (hide any indication that you’re capable of feeding young)
• Don’t cry at work or show emotion. Remain cool and detached. (emotions show your despicable humanity)
• Remain guarded in your speech. (words may connect you on an emotional level; which could become awkward if one of you quits/gets pregnant/gets promoted/gets laid off.)

We spend so much time at work that hiding our human-ness because messy stuff like feelings, tears, elation, love are reserved our real life, the one we live between 6pm-10pm behind closed doors. Poker-face. No wonder we’re tired, depressed and detached.

This is why I haven’t posted in a while – why I haven’t been as active on Facebook. I’ve been wondering if our so called ‘connected’ society is real at all. We are part of this very alienated world wide web.

I’m not suggesting that one can’t really connect online – that meaningful connection can only be face-to-face. We have more opportunities to connect today than ever before, and yet we say less and less. Shorthand kills our connectedness.

Feeling connected – truly connected, like the connection you feel when watching whales takes work. Modern urban society is not conducive to these feelings. And we're all lazy. It takes mental energy to maintain perspective and remember that the world is bigger than the asshole that cut you off in traffic or the misplaced remote control.

Until very recently – the past few decades – scientists believed that humpback whales were solitary creatures. Except for the mother and her calf, they rarely traveled in groups. With recent developments in sonar technology, they’ve found that whales sing to each other over great distances in the ocean. It turns out they do communicate, but in a manner too elaborate for humans to comprehend.

I’m learning that its easy to be a smug human. We don’t know it all.