pantsfarm

A long time ago (well, 2008) I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to start my own sourdough culture. I had easy access to an oven (counter-top) in my own apartment, and I figured if the need arose I’d make use of my parents’ oven (a real one).

So I did what any reasonable food-interested nerd would do and started searching for how to get a sourdough culture started.

After reading a few different guides, most of which seemed intimidating and complicated, I decided “to hell with all that!” and got started loosely following the instructions on this very approachable guide.

I had an empty jar that previously contained bottled spaghetti sauce, a large bag of Chinese all-purpose flour sitting in a larger box that used to hold frosted mini wheats, and as much Beijing tap water as I needed.

I mixed together equal parts by weight of water and flour, and let it sit out for a couple days uncovered. After that, I started regularly “feeding” the culture, which involved stirring it up, pouring some out, and then replacing with new flour and water.

After a few days, you can imagine my surprise when I noticed that it was bubbling up and had a not unpleasant smell. I’d expected some kind of foul spoilage with colorful mold and putrid odor. (All of these I have been treated to since in other failed attempts to start a culture.)

It was only then, culture alive and bubbling, that I decided to give it a name: Melvin. I think my sister Cara and I were hanging around on the roof and possibly drunk when we came up with that one, but either way the name stuck.

I started trying to use Melvin to make bread, and the first few loaves turned out a little… flat, but with repeated effort I was eventually turning out tasty little loaves.

Eventually though I moved to a new apartment with no oven, and I gave Melvin to my mother, where he continues to thrive and provide delicious local Beijing sourdough flavor to those fortunate to be a guest to dinner when my mother entertains.

My old college computer has been re-purposed and so my mother asked me to go through and save anything I wanted to save before she wiped the disks.

This of course prompted me to sift through all the old photos and music and homework from college and it’s been… entertaining. I need to finish going through these photos and put some of them on facebook or something.

Also lots of fun has been listening to some old playlists. It’s interesting to think back and consider how arrogant I was. Well, I still am I guess, but I mean the arrogance of being so young and convinced that I had some things figured out. I thought I knew, but I had no idea. At least now I am pretty convinced I don’t know a thing.

Also, was I just really sleep deprived all of the time in college? Look under my eyes, yikes!

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Me and Mia

I’m currently back in the USA for a week staying with my family up in Maine. It’s a refreshing change of pace to be in a place where the color of the water is a beautiful sea green, and there are trees growing but not in rows, and so on and so forth, and basically a lot of the natural beauty which is almost entirely absent from my life in Beijing.

That all said, there’s a winter storm raging outside, and it is cold. Seems like nearly a foot of snow dropped overnight and the wind is still blowing something fierce.

It wasn’t a surprise though, the forecast has been there for a while and on top of that, there was a nice automated message from the local Fire Department, yesterday, warning of the coming storm and that people should do all their driving and such then before it got really dangerous on the roads.

Part of the preparations for my family’s house was to restock the woodpile. There’s a few pallets stacked with wood a bit away from the house, and then there are the racks in the house. The racks in the house were low, while the stack far away was high. It was a fairly simple task for me — fill the inside stacks before the outside stacks got snowed under.

Going off on a bit of a tangent, one of my bosses is very fond of using “woodpile” as something of a metaphor when talking with our clients. It’s pretty good on our end, as it seems most people can pretty intuitively understand the idea (enough clients from places where one would have a woodpile, evidently) of having a large pile of discrete objects [logs / art production tasks] to process [burn / do].

Of course in that context we, the production company, never has to deal with the creation, so to speak, of the woodpile, which is a different thing altogether, and there the metaphor starts to lose some of its strength.

Returning to the actual, physical, woodpile though, moving the logs around reminded me of some of the small joys of having a clearly defined task to execute, and the satisfaction of going out and doing it.

The connection between effort and progress is one that I suspect is rarely stronger than in manual labor tasks. Having just written that I am sure there are plenty of examples where this is not true at all and I am romanticizing manual labor as somebody who doesn’t have to do very much of it, and to this I have no real retort. It’s probably true, there are no doubt many thankless tasks in which there is no satisfaction to be had by doing something to completion, perhaps because if one must do so every day for years, the joy is very hastily forced out.

But still, for me, this lazy sack who spends most of his days sitting in front of a computer (much as I do now writing this) hammering away at the keys to produce no physical product to show the result, it was… well not fun, that seems disingenuous if not wholly ridiculous, but satisfying.

I guess this is as much in praise of the satisfaction that comes with finishing things as it is an appreciation that I don’t do that kind of work so often as to have rendered it merely monotonous and unrewarding.

And with that, it’s time for me to throw another log on the fire.

Lately on Quora I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter on the topic of something called the “Paleo Diet“.

The gist of it appears to me that gluten is (very) bad, and most carbohydrates fall on a scale from not-good to akin-to-poison. That this seems a little dramatic may be a consequence of the… colorful language some proponents use in describing their dietary choices. There are a few accounts that are more balanced out there (I encourage you to spend some time with Google as I did) but much of what I see is characterized by language and attitudes which strike me as more proselytizing than persuading. It seems interesting, though I have a lot of questions, but that is a topic for another post.

I did read a bunch though and something that struck me was how little consensus there seemed to be on many topics regarding human diet and nutrition. We’ve got a lot of experts saying a lot of different things, and moreover, what the experts have been (loosely) agreeing on seems to shift over time. The whole situation reminded me of an excellent blog post I’d read a while back on Idle Words.

The post, titled “Scott and Scurvy“, is about how scurvy was all but eliminated as a problem, and then it came back. The post goes into a lot of fascinating detail on the history of scurvy and its treatment and how our flawed models for understanding it led to that period where scurvy resurfaced as something to worry about.

I tried to find a high profile advocate of the Paleo Diet to title this post with but couldn’t think of any and so I went with Owsley Stanley instead who adheres to a slightly stricter doctrine of food, summarized thus: “Stanley believes that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic.”

All that said, it strikes me as interesting to think that at some point we’re going to get this whole nutrition thing down and at that point, in retrospect, all these diets and theories of nutrition and so forth are going to look kind of cook-y just as ptomaines look to me now. I hope that it happens soon enough that I personally can see how it all turns out.

I’m just collecting some quotes I’ve read recently on the differences between the two.

from portrait of an LBX

Speaking of laowai, that’s the other word that gets our goat. Laowai — along with dialectical equivalents: lowei, waigolo, gueilo, etc. — means “foreigner,” but it is the slang way of saying it compared with the proper term waiguoren (compare the word “Paki” for “Pakistani” or the French slang “ricain”, semi-derogatory shortening of the formal demonym “américain”). Just about every Chinese in the country will shout this out from either pure stupefaction at seeing us or just to let everybody know what’s coming through town (imagine the scene from Blazing Saddles when the town drunk is screaming, “the new sheriff’s a ni**er!”). I’ve tried explaining to countless Chinese why we don’t like it when people shout laowai out in front of our faces. We know we’re different, that we come from somewhere else, that our eyes and noses and hair and whatever other parts don’t look like theirs — we know all of that very, very well, and when we’re trying to initiate contact with a new person, the last thing we want is for them to turn to their buddies laughing and say “laowai” as though a stray dog had just started talking. Every time I explain why this irks us, they just give me blank faces and say, “but that’s just the word we use for you… we don’t mean anything by it.” I suppose they, coming from one of the world’s most insular societies, have absolutely no idea what this must feel like, and rationally this shouldn’t be a problem for smart people like Andy and me. But hearing it thirty times a day, in addition to all the other stupid jeers, just really wears us thin, especially when we’re tired or in a bad mood (see above). I do suppose that if you went back a hundred years, before there was any idea of political correctness or courtesy for people who look *different*, and asked even an educated, open-minded man in the American South why he used the word, “ni**er” to refer to black people, he probably would have responded, “well, that’s just the word we use for ‘em… we don’t mean nothin’ by it.” Maybe when my grandkids come to China, things will be different. Until then, we grind our teeth and bear it.

from a thread on the something awful forums

uick question, how does everyone feel about this word? I personally got no issue with it in the slightest and use it to refer to myself or other foreigners all the time. However, in recent months I’ve met more and more people (usually Chinese-literate-just-outta-college kids) who feel all offended by it.

One girl I work with (Actually the same one I mentioned earlier about the IN AMERICA WE DO IT THIS WAY thing) was all pissed when she heard our place’s boss boasting(?) to some dude about how she had about 30 “laowais” working for her. She was all, “Why doesn’t she just use “外国人!” I personally see laowai as a more colloquial but more or less un-pejorative term for 外国人.

I’m not personally offended by it, my friends refer to me as a laowai. My boss, who lived in Beijing for a number of years seems to think it’s offensive though. He prefers wàiguó rén. I think maybe in bigger cities it has generated a negative connotation but here in a relatively remote southern boom town, where foreigners have rarely been seen before, laowai seems like the defacto term and I don’t take offense. Maybe it’s like a black/African American thing?

That’s pretty much my feeling on it. Laowai has pejorative connotations but when most people use it I don’t think they mean to include those.

Of course, China isn’t that far along with the whole “racism is bad” thing and you do probably run into more people using it in a nasty or superior way, and there’s a little bit of difference (probably superiority) built into the way Chinese people talk about race anyway (white people, black people, red people, yellow TYPE people…) so maybe it’s a little worse than “black / African American” but this is all pretty nebulous anyway and really if I had to choose I’d say go ahead and keep calling me a chalkie just stop doing the farmer blow on the sidewalk in front of my apartment and I’ll call it even.

as for the laowai thing… yea, i went through a phase where i didn’t like it, but meh, bitch all you want its never going to change… might as well embrace it.

From a chat where I asked about differences:

老外 is more 口语
外国人 is more formal
Also
老外 is probably used to refer to white people
外国人 is more neutural
neutral

Also, I just asked on quora.