Neon green coleslaw with bacon

I feel sad.
Not depressed mind you; just plain ol' sad.

I figure I'm going to try and feel the sadness and get through it by writing about it as purely as possible. It's not easy.

For starters, I'm already incredibly worried about paragraph and, to a lesser extent, sentence structure. I think that's what university does to people; it makes them worry about how things should be instead of what you want them to be.

I'm sad because I'm lonely. I'm lonely because I have a difficult time around people sometimes.

It wasn't always this way. I think it has something to do with mary jane. I don't think she harmed me in any significant, permanent way, but I do feel like she's hurt me one too many times. It's been months since I hung out with her. At the moment, there's really no reason for me to hang out with her. And I see no reason that I would be ever alone in a room with her again.

Of course, there's no certainty in this; after all, Lyra knows I've failed to avoid mary jane numerous times when I said-promised I would.

I could so easily go and let her into my life again. Right now. But I won't, because Lyra is stronger. Tears don't lie: they are the non-sanguine flows of the soul.

Sentence.
Structure.

Failure.

I feel sad because I'm lonely, this I've said.
I wonder if I can find some real companionship that isn't in the realm of the spiritual or intoxical.

 I'm just an animal in a strange place with strange thoughts that have the potential to terrify. Not horrify; terrify.

That's one thing I've learned last summer: the difference between terror and horror. Supposedly, a good anthropol- no. no schooltalk no more.

i always thought I'd meet the girl of my dreams sometime during university.
without booze. without mj.
without fear. with love.

I'm getting better. Every day I get better.
I hope that I can hypnotize myself into the passionate Kalyrascope once again; and maybe then I'll find another brightly coloured soul just like me.

Nuit Blanche 2015 and chinese food

Another year, another Nuit Blanche.
Another Nuit Blanche, another set of adventures.
Another set of adventures; a time to remember... and forget about proper sleep schedules.

I still haven't fully recovered from this year's white night. After spending a few weeks readjusting my sleep schedule, I now find that it is scrambled once again.
Sleep, insomnia, dreams; they've always been recurring themes on this blog, have they not? And so I find that, once again, I must make every effort to normalize after the unavoidable sleep disruption that Nuit Blanche inherently causes.

What I've taken to doing is a cold shower. Every. Morning. Okay, so I can't really call it a cold shower because it's not entirely all cold. But I make sure to have at least 10 seconds of icy cold water flow down so that I can zap the slumber (or lack thereof) out of me. It works quite well at changing my mindset. All the anxious and depressive thoughts that stay captive in my bedroom seem to trickle away when the water hits my skin.

My feelings of inadequacy, of a creative mind burned off by the toils of daily life also seem to momentarily disappear. Just thinking about today's cold shower helps me with the writing I'm doing here as well.

So Nuit Blanche was actually fantastic. I went with a rather large group (for once) and I managed to stick to the group all night. The lot of us ate a delicious but incredibly frustrating meal (and not because of the food, because it was awesome) at a Chinese restaurant downtown. My sister, her roommate, three québécois folk, a British psychologist and her local Torontonian friend, and finally, myself. The reason for the frustration was not what I anticipated: the issue was that two people in the group ordered just like everyone else, and one of them did not get what they ordered and the second just... didn't get anything at all. It took 30 min (we had to run the clock eventually; it was getting ridiculous!) after we were all served for the last guy to get his food, by which time we were all done. So it sucked for him. As for me, my hot pot chicken/ginger/onion dish was really amazing. And quite paleo. And although I can't be 100% sure that there was no gluten in the food, being with newfound friends was enough to make me forget all the trouble of eating like a hunter-gatherer in a modern world.

Not many pictures to share (my beautiful camera-phone is now but a broken remnant of its former self), but some highlights include:

• A white bubble not unlike the ROM's/Science Centre's planetarium projecting natural disasters and a scrolling marquee counting the dead. Very powerful, very intense, very unforgiving.
• A trade-in centre where I traded in one of the lanterns hanging around my neck for a handmade candlestick holder. I think the idea was to make a meaningful connection between denizens of the Western world and denizens of more (economically) impoverished countries such as Colombia.
• A voting both where you had to choose between YES for abolishing borders or NO for keeping borders. It was a really ambiguous question... and I voted no. I still wonder why I voted no. So it was a great exhibit, because it stimulated discussion in our group.
• My personal favourite: A rickety-floating-metal-monkey-dome-cage contraption that was shaped like a doughnut and which made ominous sounds as it was buoyed up on the edge of Lake Ontario

I will make a last commentary here. I don't understand why people feel the need to get absolutely trashed during Nuit Blanche. It's such a shame. There's so much to do! But I get it. It's a pretty special night and I admit that I smiled a couple times at some of the shenanigans that the drinkers were up to.
But the fight I witnessed on the Yonge line at 3 am was NOT cool, and it got to me that a crowd was encouraging two young men to fight in the middle of a subway.

Still, I am looking forward to next year. Maybe my phone will magically fix itself and I'll have a couple o' cool pictures to share. For now, my words will have to do.

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