Triviality
About an hour ago (in a state of total boredom) I went down to the kitchen and investigated a cabinet in which I found canned, marinated octopus, canned, uncooked pumpkin pulp and sweetened condensed milk. I sampled all of these and unfortunately, uncooked pumpkin does not taste anything like pumpkin pie. Also, the sweetened condensed milk gave me a stomach ache. But apparently it is the main ingredient in fudge, so I'm trying to make fudge now.
So I could be doing something productive (three books are sitting next to me, half-read,) but instead I have spent the last hour doing the following:
1. I re-read this Yale Globalist article with GREAT amusement. This may appear to be 1500 words of intellectual analysis to some, but clearly it is just a kpop/k-drama fangirl talking about any k-fan's favorite subject: Korean pretty boys.
2. Began planning a trip to Lake Tear of the Clouds when it gets warm. I've never actually been camping or anything, but how cool would it be to go to the source of the Hudson River!! (I get how this could be not that exciting for someone who hasn't spent her entire life in the Hudson Valley) But Teddy Roosevelt was hiking there right before being sworn in!
3. Re-read some of Richard Feynman's book and wished (again) that I had the inclination/ability to be a physicist. Also, his thoughts on wine are kind of excellent:
"A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"
5. Watched the ending of Utahime again in a fit of teary masochism:
6. Browsed the Wikipedia page for 'List of Eponymous Laws' which contains some surprising gems of randomness and occasional hilarity (may I draw your attention to Littlewood's Law, Reilly's Law of Retail Gravitation and Stigler's law of eponymy?) I feel like writing one about the proportionality between the use of the word "Alderman" in a YDN article and the rate at which my eyes glaze over.
So I could be doing something productive (three books are sitting next to me, half-read,) but instead I have spent the last hour doing the following:
1. I re-read this Yale Globalist article with GREAT amusement. This may appear to be 1500 words of intellectual analysis to some, but clearly it is just a kpop/k-drama fangirl talking about any k-fan's favorite subject: Korean pretty boys.
2. Began planning a trip to Lake Tear of the Clouds when it gets warm. I've never actually been camping or anything, but how cool would it be to go to the source of the Hudson River!! (I get how this could be not that exciting for someone who hasn't spent her entire life in the Hudson Valley) But Teddy Roosevelt was hiking there right before being sworn in!
3. Re-read some of Richard Feynman's book and wished (again) that I had the inclination/ability to be a physicist. Also, his thoughts on wine are kind of excellent:
"A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"
5. Watched the ending of Utahime again in a fit of teary masochism:
Click to view6. Browsed the Wikipedia page for 'List of Eponymous Laws' which contains some surprising gems of randomness and occasional hilarity (may I draw your attention to Littlewood's Law, Reilly's Law of Retail Gravitation and Stigler's law of eponymy?) I feel like writing one about the proportionality between the use of the word "Alderman" in a YDN article and the rate at which my eyes glaze over.