you know what i randomly realized about today?
today is the first day of the rest of your life.
scary, and enheartening, at the same time...
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this is so sweet and sad at the same time...somewhat of a welcome break from the monotony of the cold/impenetrable world of business though. maybe there is an idealist hidden somewhere within this cynic.*btw, cranky mini-rant before we get all smushy and lovey-dovey: if you've seen this before since it's been widely circulating, please don't leave me a lame ecomment like "oh yeah, i've seen this before" cuz seriously, it annoys the heck out of me when people do that. what's the point of leaving that comment anyway? do you want a high-five? a "good for you"? a bit of respect in this world of procrastinators for procrastinating *especially* well? maybe what you really want is a cookie. except i don't have one, and am also positive i wouldn't give it to you if i did. yeah, bah humbug. haha...i should really learn from Nikka (see below)...---
A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds,
"What does love mean?"
The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined. See what you think:
"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her
toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got
arthritis too. That's love."
Rebecca- age 8
"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth."
Billy - age 4
"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other."
Karl - age 5
"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs."
Chrissy - age 6
"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired."
Terri - age 4
"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK."
Danny - age 7
"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss"
Emily - age 8
"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen."
Bobby - age 7
"If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,"
Nikka - age 6
"Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well."
Tommy - age 6
"Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken."
Elaine-age 5
"Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Brad Pitt."
Chris - age 7
"Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day."
Mary Ann - age 4
"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you."
Karen - age 7
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget."
Jessica - age 8
And the final one -- Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a
contest he was asked to judge.
The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child.
The winner was a four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly
gentleman who had recently lost his wife.
Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard,
climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.
When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said,
"Nothing, I just helped him cry." -
and you've been eating WHAT for the last 7 days?
i've found it, guys...the perfect salad. here's how to make.
Wyndaengel's "Perfect" Salad
1 bowl mesclun mix
1/4 cup corn
1/2 avacado
1/2 cup sundried tomatoes
1/2 cup tomatoes
1 egg, diced
1/4 cup grilled asaparagusCombine ingredients into bowl, chop finely, mix
Drizzle with Chipotle sweet and sour vinagerette from Chop'tFor "Healthier Version of Wyndaengel's Perfect Salad":
Add 1/2 cup diced celery
Only 1/4 cup sundried tomatoes
Replace have of mesclun mix with arugula
Only 1/4 cup avacado
For "Meatier Version of Wyndaengel's Perfect Salad":
Add 1/2 cup fried onions
Replaced grilled asparagus with grilled shrimp/chicken/steak -
speaking of over the top...the most amazing meal i've had in ages:
L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon | the philosophy of cuisine
the dream began when i walked past robuchon's franchise in decadent vegas one Christmastime, and my father and i looked into its crazy interior, half opulent crimson and half translucent gold, a melding of culinary temple and contemporary art, a surreal creation of glass vases with vibrantly coloured ingredients sit atop shiny ebony shelves, and wondered.
what kind of cuisine is this? i asked my father, who shook his head and led me away.
expensive food, mei. expensive food.
and expensive it was. the cheapest item on the menu was something like 28 dollars, and that was just on the appetizer panel.
***
there are several rings of gastronomical delights, each ring expanding outwards, each subsequent form of cuisine losing constraints one by one until it leaps, in an unbound and ecstatic little bundle, into a universe limited only by the rarest flavours we can extract from the world around us.
we begin, i think, is the staple foods: your french fries, burgers, lasagne, things that are made from a total of three/four ingredients but hit home, creating nostalgic memories as well as an appeased stomach.
the second ring consists of the more involved tastes that extend beyond the four basic ones of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. food starts to become three dimensional with the fragrance of thyme, the appetizing aroma of basil, a hit of the surprising and the unusual, such as a sprinking of chocolate on a shank of lamb.
the third ring consists of the cultural "delicacies" that are valued sometimes more for their rarity than their good taste. take ostrich meat, alligator tongue, lamb kidney. this is where food begins to lose its way, valued more for either the price or the novelty of it. this is the point that differentiates the naked emperor from one clothed in actual luxurious robes - when you can actually say that the food was divine, absent of Michelin approval.
***
there is the final tier (the promised land of cuisine, if you will) that i hesitate to categorize any particular food/restaurant/chef into, because at this stage things cannot be as definitively described. i have only a vague sense that food of this calibre is simply whole. Joel's fourth course, for example, was quail with truffled mashed potatoes. deconstruction of the sensations into cool or warm, lightly salted or oiled, dusted with rosemary powder or parsley detracts slowly at it, because it can be taken only as a complete entity, a unified experience. my coworker described it as tasting simply like the forest. my l'oursin was similar; the complexity of good uni but paired with a cauliflower cream, set in a gel that suspended the urchin meat on your tongue so that your mind had time to sit back and meditate on it before the morsel was devoured. that one tasted like the ocean. last but not least was something quite ordinary in terms of expense account dinners: a tuna tartar, but done to such meticulous perfection that each cube of tuna was exactly the right temperature to bring out all the taste with none of the fishy tang, coated with a miracuously homogenous mixture of olive oil and unknown spices.
this final tier is hard to describe because there are no characteritics (for characteristics are limiting). it can be as complex as the saffron foam on our elaborate dessert, or as simple as mashed potatoes done to perfection. a true virtuosic chef, i think, can wed the two in flawless creations to which only fine art and music are rivals.
***
anyway, back to my dream. in it, i grew up, donned a blazer and heels, and awoke one day to lead a group of discriminating palates to the culinary palace that is Robuchon's L'Atelier.
i was a little nervous as the youngest of the crowd, since organizing such a thing is never a guarenteed crowd-pleaser. an idiosyncratic revulsion to a particular ingredient, or wayward omnivore in a "vegetarian mood" can ruin an afternoon. at first glance, however, the place was much more impressive than i had bargained for.
service was en pointe. my brother once said in his delightfully un-PC way "you know you're in an expensive restaurants when all the waiters are blond." interestingly enough, L'atelier's wait staff was populated not by displaced wasps, but by indians who, in light british accents paired subdued elegance with meticulous attention.
and the food...well, the food i've already described.
was the restaurant a success? my coworker claimed to feel "unreal," "dreamlike" and "high" after the meal (as evidenced by him randomly picking me up on Park Avenue as i flailed about from 54th to 52nd street, aghast), which proved that they were no match for Joel.
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over.the.top.
reason #280 you don't want to date them golddiggers....
and for those of you hopeful dieters, an interesting finding linked to the recent Superbowl...
Researchers Have Come Up With 1 Way to Avoid Pigging Out When the Pigskin Flies
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD, Friday, February 02, 2007
Feb. 2, 2007 -- Super Bowl food may spike your diet this Sunday unless you have a good game plan.
Enter Cornell University's Brian Wansink, PhD, and Collin Payne, PhD. Their latest study provides a simple strategy to tackle mindless eating during the big game: just look at how much you've eaten.
The researchers found that students invited to a past year's Super Bowl party ate less if the evidence of their gobbling wasn't immediately bused away.
"In general, it is important to have some idea of how much you have eaten," Wansink says in a Cornell news release.
"Serve yourself onto a plate, and then stop when the plate is empty. This is the best strategy for unintended overeating at your Super Bowl party," Wansink says. "Dish it out, eat it slowly, and stop."
Wansink directs the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. He's also author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.
Fowl Ball
For the study, Wansink and Payne invited 50 graduate students (34 women and 16 men) to an all-you-can-eat sports bar for a Super Bowl party.
The students were randomly seated at 21 tables and were able to help themselves to as many chicken wings as they wanted during the game.
Wansink and Payne had instructed the waiters to regularly clear leftover chicken wing bones off half the tables, and to let them pile up on plates on the other tables.
Students at the tables where the bones piled up ate fewer chicken wings (five wings per person, on average) than those at the bused tables (seven wings per person, on average).
Seeing the stack of chicken bones pile up on their plates may have been a visual cue to the students at the tables that weren't bused that they'd had enough.
But the evidence was whisked off the bused tables, possibly spurring those students to eat more chicken wings, the researchers speculate.
It's also possible leftover bones were simply an unappetizing sight, or maybe the students were embarrassed by their bone buildup, note Wansink and colleagues.
Say When
The bottom line from the study: If you have some visual report of how much you've eaten, you may slow down instead of doing an end run around your diet.
The same strategy may also work with drinks, say the researchers.
If your empty drink bottles or cups are left on your table, you might be more aware of how much you've had to drink than if empty drink containers are cleared away.
"This is one ally in the fight against mindless eating or drinking" in a distracting environment such as a Super Bowl party, write Wanskin and Payne.
Their study is due for publication in an upcoming issue of Perceptual and Motor Skills, according to the Cornell news release.
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how fascinating...
Instead of asking why do we sleep, we might as well ask "why do we wake up?"
Why do we sleep?By Greta Lorge, assistant research editor at WIREDIt’s a catchy phrase: You snooze, you lose. But cutting out those 40 winks would be a bad idea. All mammals sleep, fish sleep, birds sleep and even fruit flies sleep. If an animal is deprived of sleep they die - faster than if they’re denied food.
Obviously, sleep rests the body, but in a different way than watching TV does. The body grows and heals during sleep. The body's metabolic system shifts into an anabolic phase of the metabolic cycle. Growth, healing and muscle building all take place when the body is in its anabolic phase - sleeping. The body's immune system functions much better when we sleep. One leading theory says that enzyme balances cause states of wakefulness and sleep. For part of the night, the brain idles in an energy-conserving state called slow-wave sleep. Freed from the duties of consciousness, it can focus on cleanup.
Sleep used to be studied by behaviorists. Their theories of what sleep is focused upon behavior. This prevented sleep from being understood. Recently sleep has begun to be understood at the metabolic level. At its most fundamental level, sleep seems to be a metabolic imperative. One guest below has suggested that sleep may well be the 'default' mode of life, and that being awake is little more than a period of heightened awareness of one's surrounding which is especially suited to doing things like finding food and reproducing. Indeed, the question "Why do we wake up" makes much more sense. It's an easily answerable question, too. For one thing, the body's metabolic system shifts into the catabolic phase. The body's cells are tearing themselves down in support of the body's need for energy to be mobile, to obtain food and to procreate. It's something that the body can only tolerate for a matter of several hours. Then the body must revert to it's 'default' mode of sleep, the anabolic phase when damage is repaired, growth can take place and the body's heightened immuned defenses intensify their battle against the foreign organisms and viruses that have invaded the animal.
Each night, about a quarter, is given to REM sleep, during which the brain is anything but idle. REM stands for rapid eye movement, and it corresponds with vivid dreams, suggesting that it plays a role in consolidating memories. But there’s probably more to it: Though antidepressants suppress REM sleep, patients taking them suffer no memory impairment.
It's possible that sleep, generally, is the way that our mind transfers short term memory (RAM) into long term brain and muscle memory (Disk). This would help explain many phenomena, from the superior performance of students who sleep rather than "cram" prior to a test, to the documented importance of repetition across sleep cycles as a way to train the mind and body for athletic and musical performance.
In any case, it’s clear that pillow time serves a critical purpose. Bad things - like some 100,000 traffic accidents a year, not to mention uncounted instances of calling your spouse by your ex’s name - happen when we don’t get enough z’s.
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My life, a midnight update in spurts
Life came to a grinding halt last week, knocking me full in the stomach with a warning in the form of a swollen belly and incredible pain. It was then that I found out that it's not just UHS nurses that automatically assume every malady is pregnancy - we think you could be pregnant. no, you morons, it's swelling right below my rib cage. unless i'm about to have a child out of my diaphragm. Two miserable hours later, an asian female nurse more belligerent than my cranky pissy self (gotta love those asian females) made me swallow a litre of contrast in preparation for the ever so pleasant CT scan, which in doctorspeak really means they don't know what the heck is wrong with you. Given that my stomach was already swollen, the pain at this point was so intense they decided to just put me on morphine.
Contrary to pop science and WWII movies, intravenous morphine is not "the good stuff." It courses through your veins with the alien coolness of harsh chemicals, ending up in the course of two excruciating seconds at the base of your brain. After that, all you get is a wave of nausea, which I suppose takes your mind off the pain because you are now entirely concentrated on not throwing up. All I could think was, god...this is what it feels like to be on chemotherapy.
Anyway, the official physician prognosis was this: my insomnia was no longer an interesting side-story to be blogged about, but could hold life-threatening complications. First of all, claimed the ridiculously attractive blonde resident named Anja (who looked so much like a soap opera doctor I found it almost difficult to take her seriously) peritonitis usually results from surgical complications. Getting it, having never been cut up, implies that you are either a neonate or ancient, or have the immune system of either.
So this is my quest to cure my insomnia. In recent weeks it's really become pathological; I have no reason to stay up at all other than just to stay up, repeatedly typing www.gmail.com www.xanga.com www.thefacebook.com over and over again, never getting past the front page but just closing and reopening and closing and reopening. Nor am I depressed or anything - I have a magical job where somehow they trust 20-somethings to help make decisions for CEOs and COOs, a miraculous apartment a 10 minute cab ride from just about anywhere you'd want to be, lovely roommates, loving family, sweet and loyal friends. I guess I could always lose a bit more weight or eat at one more nice restaurant, but for the first time in my life there is nothing material or immaterial that I covet or desire (in fact, I long to give some of it away.) I'm not sitting anywhere brooding. I simply have insomnia. It's bizarre, I but I do this strange thing, night after night, opening and reopening and opening and reopening, not really knowing what I am waiting for or when it might appear.
***
It's kind of crazy how things change when you're older. Gone are the snowglobe days when "being sick" meant a mild cough, pleasant fever, nothing chicken soup from your mother couldn't cure. In the recent three times I've "been sick" it's been a rush to the ER and next thing I know it's hurry and put the I.V. in and fix everything can't you see I'm dying here. Gone are the days when "being sick" was actually a little bit fun, a gentle respite and the penultimate excuse note from life. When I was lying in the hospital bed next to some groaning gangster with a broken hip who had just had a catheter placed I thought to myself ok, honestly, never again.
According to my roommate Christine we can't sleep often because there are things in our minds that are bouncing around somewhere in the deep corridors whose doors we shut while taking care of each day's mundane tasks. There has always been things inside my mind bouncing around a mile a minute so I suppose this is the year it finally, like an overflowing ball pit, started spilling multicolored moieties of mental ADD into that previously undisturbed pool of serenity known as the unconscious. I guess the only cure is to pour it out, candid by embarrassingly candid ounce, until I can sleep again.
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absolutely hilarious eavesdropping from recent weekends. drunk people are f'mazingly amusing, but sober people are even more amusing:
anonymous girl 1: stop doing that! she always does that. it's so embarrassing.
anonymous girl 2: yeah i kind of just like playing with my chest area *laughs loudly*
waiter passing by: ...............anonymous guy: My friend is so attractive. It's like there's a party in his pants.
anonymous girl 1: yayyy sleepover! naked pillow fight!
anonymous girl 2: every adolescent guy's dream
anonymous girl 1: seriously though, i don't get why every guy just assumes that if we live together we have naked pillow fights...and this takes the cake...
anonymous girl: Seriously though, you're like my gay best friend
anonymous guy: Well, if I told you I liked men, could we hook up?
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