A nightmare on wheat street

UGH. I'm feeling exasperated.

See, I've been trying to eat healthy for about 5 years now. While I'm at home, it's relatively easy to cook healthy: I know exactly what ingredients to avoid, I know the staple foods that nourish me, and I know how to build meals from the ground up (I use recipes as a guideline). For example, curries have always been easy for me to make and I find they almost always end up very flavourful regardless of how much time is spent toiling over them. I rarely mess them up.

Tonight is Nuit Blanche. And I'm going with a bunch of strangers; really, I only know 1 person, whom I only met for a couple hours at a peer support group this week. For some folk, this could be a stressful experience, and I would be lying if I didn't say I felt a little apprehensive at the thought of hanging out with total strangers. But I have a pretty good sense of what kind of strangers I can trust, and my instincts say to go out and HAVE FUN! And a Chinese astrologer would say: "Well, you're born on the year of the Horse. You have an innate ability to steer clear out of trouble. Trust your instincts, and go with the flow."

Speaking of the Chinese... the plan is to go eat some Chinese food to warm ourselves up during what is sure to be a brisk October night. Sounds great, right? Well, it is! Minus the fact that just about every dish on a Chinese restaurant's menu either has soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients. So, I'm taking a bit of time to look at the online menu of the Chinese place we're slated to go to. On the one hand, everything looks incredibly tasty! On the other, I'm basically trying to get a meal that has a good portion of meat & veggies with a bunch of spices added in (or mixed into a sauce that's not filled with processed junk/gluten).

The difficult part isn't knowing what I can and cannot (or rather, do not want to) eat. It's how to effectively communicate my dietary restrictions to the server or, more importantly, the chef that I find troublesome. And, no, eating gluten will not kill me. But I know from experience that I won't feel all that great after the meal if it's loaded with these things that my body does not react well to. There's MSG, and rancid oils that I definitely want to avoid; and to people who don't eat paleo, I know it seems kinda crazy to be so obsessed with all the ingredients that go into a meal, but it's an important thing and I wish it wasn't so damned difficult to just... eat natural foods. The kind of foods that humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years.

So I wrote down a few dishes that are likely to be safe or at least, much safer than things like... oh, I don't know... General Tso's chicken with super-sugary-gluteny sauce.

How the hell do you tell a Chinese chef NOT to use soy sauce because it contains wheat? It'd be like someone telling me NOT to add curry powder to my curries.

Yeah, I don't eat out much. Good on the wallet, though.

Starless

No stars in the night
Bright light in the sky
Pleiades unseen; blue red green white
                  Flares shine bright 

I sat alone in my fright
In a brisk summer's flight
              of fancy eve's delight

And I listened to to stories of commoners
despite
the green around me; surrounding me, arousing me

Stirred to action I awoke
the wind stirred and stroked
while the laughter around me
faded away to obscurity

Now I leave my seat
And my story is complete

Subtly staying true to nature's queue

"I really should work on my creative projects".
That's the thought that popped into my head while wondering what to do with my day. I don't have any classes at school on Wednesdays, so I have no rush to get up in the morning and scarf down some grok grub before I get going.

I mean, at least I get up now; earlier than 9 am, which is absolutely fantastic for me. I know I could get up even earlier if I found the right time: if I wake up too late, I feel tired. If I wake up too early, I feel exhausted. So it's about slowly pushing the clock backward and pushing against my urge to stay up late at night.

I don't know if I'm a night owl or not. Supposedly, some folk are more adept at getting up in the mornings and going about their day while others are more programmed for late night sessions and waking up later instead. The way I see it, if you live and breathe through electronics (like many of us do now), there's a good chance you'll go to bed later anyway and lose sleep in the process. Who hasn't wanted to keep binge watching one more tv show, or do just play one more round of Hearthstone before - WOOPS! - it's past midnight, and a new day has begun.

The fact that I'm relatively easy to talk to in the mornings, and that I don't need caffeine to get me going makes me think that I'm a morning bird. I definitely wasn't always great in the mornings. I think my Katimafriends can attest to that. But now that I'm older, I realize that mornings are when things get DONE. On the other hand, I have never had any problems staying up late into the early hours and going about, well, projects such as this blog. More often, it's playing video games or, preferably, having conversations with friends online who make me forget how long I've been up. Those friends are the best. Love you gaiz!

I think I'm probably somewhere in between being a night owl and being an early bird, to be honest. And that's an average place to be.

On average, I dislike averages more than twice a year.

Kalyra(scope)

See? Didn't I tell you I was perfecting my pen name?

I can see her again!

There was a time not long ago
where visions of singers in my head rowed
I jog my memory; singing in my ears
through headphones is all I could ever hear

I was doing some power walking back home from Keele and St. Clair. I had just gotten off the Keele bus after an evening spent with survivors of the unjust society in which we live in when suddenly... nothing happened. And that was the best part of my day.

With Iron Maiden starting my walk to my demeure, I knew I was in for a treat. Little did I know that I would be greeted by a still-powerful moon the size of a beach-ball in the heavens; and little did I know that she would be as bright as she was yesterday. Without cloud cover, the only thing that could have made my night even more satisfying was to have one of my favourite female vocalists start singing.

And so this song came on:

And I made it home safe and sound.

Signed by: Kalyrascope

Yeah, I am loving my new nom de plume.It's not quite perfect, but it'll get there.