A virus appears

Since my last post, a lot has changed.
Well, not that much for me personally: I'm still cooped up at home, but fears of catching and spreading a virus that has shut down large parts of society is now persistent.

I don't feel like writing much these days, but I figure I'd write at least one thing for the month of March. Yep, just living day by day, and all you hear on the news are things about the virus.

It kind of sucks. I have to be careful when I go for walks outside, trying to stay my distance from other people stretching their legs.

I wonder how long this will last.

I'm enjoying Breath of the Wild. I decided to finally get it because I knew I would be cooped up inside a lot. Meanwhile, Animal Crossing released a while back and a lot of people, Twitch streamers and folks whose stories I read online, are raving about it. I might end up getting it eventually.

It's a lonely time, but it won't last forever.

Mid-February wear

It's pretty late to be up and writing, but I have never forgotten something I read long ago that stated that the most creative writing can happen at the oddest hours.

I don't write much these days. I probably should spend more time on it. And I don't take very many pictures, but there I feel like there isn't much to take pictures of as I don't venture out and about as much. I guess I can blame the cold of the winter.

Still, I ought to publish something, and so here I am, but I don't have any photography for you because I'm too tired to go through the process of uploading and transferring my pictures from one cloud service to another. I might have to get a new Android phone (or keep desperately searching for my old one) because it makes it really easy to access my pictures directly, as Blogger is owned by Google, too.
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I have an improv event tomorrow morning. It's part of a workshop series called Reclaiming our Power, and it's a once-a-month thing where I interact with folks at a downtown social centre. I don't know what else to call it, but I'm happy that I'm going out for something I planned over a month ago. I know it's helpful to not stay at home all day.
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Maybe I'll write some poetry sometime on here, sometime. It's something to do. And it's nice to not feel judged for what I write. I just wish that sometimes, I did write and something would write back. I almost wrote to Lyra on here again. It's kind of weird seeing His Dark Materials posters in bus stops and seeing an actress incarnate a being that I refer to in a spiritual manner. Portals to other worlds, well, I haven't experienced them in a long while, but somehow, I'm convinced they're still around.

I'm surrounded by maybes. Maybe I'll try something to help get out of my funk. Maybe I'll cook something. Maybe I'll try sports - I did actually sign up for a YMCA membership again, but for now, it's mostly used for pickleball. Oh, pickleball... Stories abound about pickleball, and I play badminton once in a while, too, but not at the YMCA yet, just at a community centre.

Sports are a good thing, but when I don't do them often, I can't say I miss them terribly. I really love video games too much, I swear, it's so much easier to spend hours immersed in a virtual world, but thankfully, I have sports to do, as well.

A glimpse of my current life.

On The Road to Smash

It's great to freely be able to write about pretty much anything, and I've always thought that writing about something is better than not writing at all. I like writing about writing a lot, because it's so easy and it kind of feels like a cheat code to get out of writer's block.

I'm almost done "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac: I have a half-dozen pages left and it's not a bore. I think the fact that I mentioned not having read the book whilst citing it as an influence on my writing was making me feel inauthentic, and I have to say it's a fun book to read because there's always something happening. I tend to read pretty fast, which makes it possible to get through books in less than a month (which is about how much time it took to read it), but the downside is I'm not going to win any awards for what I interpret from it. That is to say, I'm not quite sure what to take out of the book other than getting a sense of what the beat generation was like.
Supposedly, some of the characters are modelled after real people from the era, like Kerouac himself and Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and I'm not huge into that scene so suffice to say that I enjoyed the book for the excitement of seeing what it might have been like to live in the late 40s/early 50s on an American road trip. There's lots of introspection on behalf of the narrator, and it's kind of cool how easily Kerouac describes the transitions from one side of the country, the atmosphere of the west coast in California and the bustle of the city in New York, and of course the feel of what it's like in Colorado.

Other than reading "On The Road", I've been obsessively playing through Super Smash Bros Ultimate on my Nintendo Switch for entertainment and the addictive nature of beating mini-stages and collecting spirits to level up is starting to wear off. I'm playing through the adventure mode, too, and you collect spirits in there that can help you beat other spirits, and you can send some spirits on missions to find items to defeat other spirits but I don't really see the point so the fun is in playing the various stages with varying conditions and I let the computer decide what spirits match up best to defeat the CPU opponent.

And of course, I play Super Smash online. I played a lot of Palutena last week, but I like to switch characters around a lot so I play some Zelda and of course some Roy, too. Once in a while I'll try a character I'm not great with, like Robin, and get completely destroyed but the "Global Smash Ranking" doesn't mean much to me so I don't really care if it goes way down from the 4 million points or whatever. Really, it's always fun to play against real opponents more rather than stacked-up CPU bots, so I play online and although I know that video games suck up way too much of my time (so does Reddit... again!), maybe it's okay because it feels like I'm at least doing some thinking about how best to win.

I'm finding it tedious to upload pictures from my Windows Phone, but the pictures I take are uploaded automatically to the cloud, it's a matter of transferring them from one service to the other and I said I wanted more pictures on each blog so here are some pictures I have lying around from a couple months ago when I was playing Smash and kind of annoyed by Nintendo for having a "Melee" tournament with Smash balls from Brawl and I was going to upload them to Nintendo or something to get something changed but I can see in hindsight that that would have been a complete waste of time so I'll put them here instead.

Now the Raptors are playing and since we've gotten rid of the TV the iMac and we're watching them on the iMac I have to sign off so my housemates can watch the game (and I will probably watch it with them) and I'm surprised that I'm actually watching a lot of Raptors game this year. I guess I'm on the bandwagon since they won last summer.

Till next time!

Omelettes faite

Although this is not a food blog strict, food is an integral part of my life. If I don't eat well, I don't do well, and this I learned 10 years ago when all I cared about was the next sugar high. I see now that sugar is creeping back into my life - in the form of easy carbs - and so I thought I would write about some food that I took pictures of earlier last month in the spirit of remembering to be sane and healthy.

It's February! Maybe vitamin D is low for you too. Cooking makes me feel proud and grounded, connected to the earth & creative and, in my case, helps me stay focused on the good things to keep me going.

Omelettes are awesome for so many reasons: eggs are cheap, incredibly good for you, versatile, and it's simple to be creative when you can stuff them with whatever vegetables and fat & oils and meat and mushrooms helluva spices and whatever herbs that you have on hand. And even if you don't nail the perfect omelette, it's hard to go wrong when you know how to make them, so I thought I would share three pictures of these omelettes that I made last month that filled my mouth with nutritious goodness.

I add the spices in the egg batter first (except salt) and I cook the filling in a separate pan - in this case, celery, mushrooms and probably some bacon

I use as much fat as I can to make me feel full and add the filling when the omelette is mostly done and I fold it over

There's some goat cheese hidden in the omelettes (I try to avoid too much processed cow dairy) and I made an extra effort to add a garnish of parsley

A new decade

If you had asked me when I was seventeen what I thought my blog would look like 13 years later, I would have answered: "probably kind of the same, maybe some cool new web 3.0 gadgets but altogether, a bitchin' log of my life still".

What I did not know was how important this place would become for my sanity. It's partly my lifeline. My bridge between the offline and the online world. My ethnographical account of teenage into young adult into less-young adult life, and also a place to rant and let go of some of the hardships I've experienced in modern, mostly urban society.

The way I write hasn't changed much. I seldom prepare anything in advance. After all, this blog was originally created after an english assignment in high school prompted me to create an art project with words, and my influences at the time ranged from XKCD to Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness novel, On the Road (which I still haven't read but have lying around). The point is, I will continue to blog liberally.