Rhyme or Reason?

Picking Up the Ball

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:03:00 +0000

I have, quite obviously dropped the ball. I haven't updated in nearly a year. A lot of things have happened since then and I'd like to actually recap, but I don't want to actually bore people. Then again, if you're reading my blog, it's possible that you're inured to such things.

Regardless, I'm going to try to pick up things from here and pick up things from where I left off and hit the high notes (and possibly low notes) along the way. Current blog entries, i.e. blog entries that relate to current events in my life, will be labeled as normal. Extra-special recap entries will be labeled as such. So if you already know what's gone on, then feel free to move along with your bad self. Those posts are just to let everyone else catch up.

Oh, and for those who haven't seen it, I bring to you the Secret History of the World, a blog being created by my lovely, talented and beautiful wife and shared with the world at large. I enjoy it.

From a seed a mighty hibiscus blooms . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:58:00 +0000

My lovely wife and I chose to come up with plots for each other for our ScriptFrenzy. Interestingly, each of us are going to use these seeds for a short story (I'd started mine ages ago and never finished it). Here is the plot seed she gave me:

A fat, pink hibiscus flower presses against the window like a prolapse, big and bloated, swollen with colour. The husband is afraid of it and goes on to make a protest speech at the local horticulture club. They are sceptical at first, then they realise that he is right, and there is an intangible evil that can live within flowers. Soon he has a mass of followers. The wife doesn't believe him at all and is eventually alienated from him and his followers. He turns to the dark side and begins exploiting the evil in the flowers. Is he right at all though?

A Frenzy in June

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:58:00 +0000

Every year there is an event called the National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo as it's affectionately known. It occurs during the month of November, and during that month, each participant is to write fifty thousand words. Officially, those words are to constitute a novel, however, the judging is flexible and as long as you write fifty thousand words or more before the midnight deadline, you're considered a winner.

Last year I participated and last year I won (there were a number of words that were metatext--notes about the writing that I was doing, but it I did reach my goal).

As a sort of counterbalance, the organizers have developed ScriptFrenzy. The goal of ScriptFrenzy is to write twenty thousand words or more into the form of a stage or screen play.

My lovely wife, as always, is eating through her word count as though the numbers were jellybeans and she were a small child with a sugar addiction. I, on the other hand, am struggling, much more than I struggled last November.

Prose, I have discovered, is much easier to write than a script. Part of it is the formatting. Part of it is the way the words flow on the page. Where I was able to bullshit my way through the word count in November, I find that I'm having trouble doing it now. Action and description are different. Dialogue is different. I don't find myself having the luxury of rambling.

Regardless, I will soldier on. I've got a thousand words under my belt so far. I've got more in metatext that I've been writing to lay out the story or explore the characters. I've never really been good at metatext (it's always seemed wasteful. That's one of the reasons I've always had some trouble with drafts.) That right there is good experience. I've been reading screenplays hosted online to help me develop a feel for the format.

Some days you're just tired

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Sat, 12 May 2007 08:44:00 +0000

Today would be one of those days. I tried to get to sleep at a reasonable hour last night. That would be why I spent three or so hours not sleeping in bed. On the bright side, I did wake up more or less on time. I didn't do that last week, although despite waking up an hour later than my alarm was set, I still got to work on time.

This is, more or less, what my friend, Rob, calls a placeholder. I want to make sure that I post a new blog entry at least once each day. If I can't do that, I want to make sure that I still write something each day that can be put in the blog.

Eating what I cook

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Fri, 11 May 2007 05:13:00 +0000

For those of you who don't know, I'll elaborate. I've always had a thing about cooking. Okay, 'always' may be a bit too strong. I wasn't a toddler dreaming of broiling and baking, measuring and tasting. I have, over the years, developed a taste for it.

For over a decade, I've imagined having a fabulous kitchen that I can almost visualize. I'm not even sure why that was, as I'd not really spent a lot of time in the kitchen before that, except for at work. Regardless, I picked up my first cookbook in the winter of 1995. I made my first forays into cooking in my ex-fiance's sister's kitchen in Connecticut. Months later, when I was in the Air Force, I spent a lot of time in both fire stations, trying different recipes from that cookbook and other sources. Occasionally I would experiment. I cooked for myself and the guys enough that upon my dismissal from that esteemed organization, my friend Chad Aldridge (shout out to Mr. Aldridge, where ever you may be) pushed for me to try to go to culinary school to learn to be a chef.

I didn't. Instead, I ended up working in the security industry (within the hospitality/casino industry). I don't regret that, but I do wonder where my life would have gone had I figured out some way of going to culinary school. I doubt that that man would have traveled as far as I have. Perhaps, but I doubt it.

For years though, I didn't spend much time worrying about the making of food. I spent more time delving into takeaway and dining at work in the employee dining room (a endeavor not for the faint at heart). I occasionally made meals, but because I wasn't doing it consistently, my skills remained rusty. I did not tend to learn new skills.

Over time, I've taken to spending more time in the kitchen. It started when I traveled to Japan to be with my wife. As she worked and I didn't, I made a point of doing the shopping and preparing the meals. When we moved back to the States, I declared the kitchen as my domain. I didn't cook all of the time. I didn't cook a lot at all, but from time to time I would whip up some meal or another and it would be good. It wouldn't be fabulous -- again, the skills stayed static and I hadn't begun to think about how the food was cooking or how the flavors came together. I was relying mostly on native talent.

Since I've lived in Australia, my enjoyment from cooking has increased. (I think that a large part of that is because I live in a foreign land where the foods that I'm used to getting in prepackaged form are harder to find. American style biscuits for example, sometthing that I've been able to simply buy in a tube. We don't have the tube here. Instead, I've had to learn to make my own.) I can safely say that I have something of a love for the craft. My interests in the matter have increased and I'm actually learning from it. I like that. I like the fact that I'm doing new things, that I'm looking at recipes as guidelines rather than definitive instructions because I know more of what I'm doing. I have a better idea of what the different cuts of meat are and how they should be cooked as well the better ways of cooking them. I know more about heat than I used to know. I know how different heats cook things differently.

As an example, I can now cook beef stroganoff competently.

I would feel safe to say that my mother's beef stroganoff was my favorite dish when I was growing up. About eight years ago, I finally convinced her to give me her recipe. The first few times I made it, it turned out pretty good. It was never right, but it was pretty good. I do remember once, however, when my wife (then girlfriend) and I hosted another couple for dinner, that it nearly inedible. The beef was tough and chewy and the sauce was runny to the point of being almost liquid.

A few weeks ago, I tried it again. I'd learned about the concept of braising, something that had eluded me before. Braising, for those of you who don't know, is a technique in which you slowly cook meat or vegetables in a small amount of liquid over a low heat. One of the key things to this is that the meat be of a tougher cut, one with a bit of fat and gristle in it. The slow cooking process actually renders those more unappealing bits into a thickening gravy that gives a deeper, richer flavor to the food. On top of that, the meat becomes extraordinarily tender. Braising is the technique used when making osso bucco or pot roast.

Part of the problem I'd had in the past was that I tended to buy the more tender cuts like sirloin rather than a tougher cut like skirt. The sirloin was too chewy. This time I bought what they call braising steak at the butchers. It cooked up beautifully and after an hour or so, it was almost flaky.

Another thing that made a difference is that I made my own noodles. I'd learned how to make pasta recently and have been practicing that from time to time. It's really easy once you get the hang of it. Practice does help, though. Since the pasta I was making was essentially noodles made with egg and the recipe that my mother imparted on me required egg noodles, I figured that they would work fine. They did. I'd like to figure out how to make them more curly, but I suppose I will learn.

When I sat down to eat and I took the first bite, I realized that I'd finally figured out how to make a good beef stroganoff.

Read at your own discretion

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:45:00 +0000

I don't care. I'm going to write it. I'm sick and tired of holding things in, of bottling them up, and letting them eat at my soul like a cancerous thing of my own creation. I'm sorry if you're offended by this, but I can't hold it back any longer.

Ed Hoover was my best friend. I loved him more than anyone else in this world save my wife. I've been through some really good times with Ed. I've also experienced some pretty shitty times with Ed. We've had our differences. Still, he was my best friend and I loved him dearly. I still do. He's just not around for me to tell him.

He never deserved what he got in the end. Regardless of how he died (while there are those who believe that he took his life, I won't accept that as fact until I read the coroner's reports. Unfortunately I'm not next of kin, so I won't be reading them for quite some time.) the last two days of his life were the worst two days of his life. His wife of five months had left him two days before his death. He didn't know why she left him at first. She just left. He was confused. He was hurting. He was miserable. He loved her more than anything. She was his world. And she left him. Permanently. (The emphasis was hers in the email she sent out regarding the matter.)

In the past, I've hated his ex-girlfriends for the pain and the suffering that they've put him through. Rather than air any dirty laundry, I will simply write that the hell that he suffered at their hands, their mouths and their hearts was unconscionable and consistent. I hated them for that, but I forgave them as much as I could because he forgave them.

When I discovered that Ed and his widow had become something of a couple, I worried. I worried because I knew that his widow hadn't always been stable in her relationships in the past. I worried that she was going to break his heart. Of all of his girlfriends, though, I felt that she had the best chance of doing right by him. They were together for close to two years before they were married. It began to look like they were going to be okay. I still worried and no matter what I did, I couldn't shake that feeling. Instead of voicing that worry, I put it down as concern over Ed because of his past. While his widow's past had been rocky, it appeared that she had got over it.

He called me two days before he died to talk to me about his widow leaving him. He didn't know why. He sounded confused by all of it. Our conversation got interrupted. After a bit of phone tag, he told me that he had gone to bed and would call me the next day. He never made that call. I didn't call to check on him because I figured that they had begun resolving whatever was going on. The next thing I heard was that he was dead.

She betrayed him. After two and a half years of declaring her love for him, she shoved a blade into his heart and twisted. She made a sham of their marriage. She gave proof to the lie that she ever loved him. She did so maliciously. She gave him no warning. She saw what he went through with his ex-girlfriends and yet she went out of her way to prove herself the the worst of the lot.

Right now I want to take a baseball bat to something. I want to beat the everliving hell out of whatever it is until the baseball bat has become splinters in my bleeding hands. I want to run and run and run and keep on running until my heart and my lungs give out and I fall in a mass of gelatinous goop and I want to keep on running. I want to enact revenges biblical. I want to rain down lightning and smite the guilty. No woman scorned has felt the fury that I feel still, a month and a half after his death.

Instead I have kept my tongue as best I can in order to be civil to the woman that Ed loved. I have kept my tongue as best I can in order to keep from offending my friends. Others have forgiven her. I can not. I feel that she betrayed the love that Ed had for her more than anyone he's ever loved. I find her actions despicable. I have grown to hate this woman whom I once loved as a friend more than I've hated any human being.

Had Ed lived, things might have been different. I seriously doubt it, though. I've seen her work her magic before. Remember, I knew her track record before they got together. Regardless, had he lived they might have worked through the situation that she created. Unfortunately he didn't. That's what makes the situation so tragic.

So that's pretty much how I feel or as best I can put into words at this moment in time. I've been meaning to write something -- needing to write something, really -- for a while now, but my inclination towards civility kept hobbling my words. I saw something tonight that spurred my ire and I couldn't keep my feelings in any longer.

Why food should taste good . . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:13:00 +0000

We just ate food from a place called Souvlaki Hut. The food wasn't atrocious. It wasn't good. It had a slightly chemical taste to it. We may order food from there again. It would have to be a fairly rough day for me to make that choice though, based upon the fare. The service, however, was really good and the kid who took our order seemed nice.

On the subject of food and cooking: I've been making homemade pasta as of late. While my first experiments on the subject were less than perfect, I feel like I really hit my stride on the last batch. I got it really thin (without a pasta machine, something I'm going to have to purchase someday soon if I'm going to keep playing with making pasta) and it turned out nice. The sauce was a cream sauce (basically a white sauce but with sour cream instead of milk) with salmon, mushrooms, garlic and spring onions. I was proud of how it turned out.

The salmon was from the kilo that I got in my Christmas hamper. The package read that it had to be eaten within two days of thawing. We ate salmon for every meal for nearly three days. Unfortunately, there's only so much salmon I can eat. I've hit my quota for a while. My lovely wife, D, is the opposite. It will be a day long in coming for her to say that she's had enough.

Clarification

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 05:22:00 +0000

A couple of points that occur to me.

1.) There is a strong chance that I might write something that you don't want to read. Like I wrote before, this is therapy. For all intents and purposes, this will be my journal. This means that there will be thoughts, feelings and ideas that I may put into it that aren't going to be pleasing to everyone. I can't help that -- it's the way life works. Further, I'm going to try to keep as much of my writing pure with as little editing as possible. So from time to time you'll get later draft stuff, but for the most part it'll be first draft. Those things that I feel that I should keep privately I will. (I just have to figure that out first.) I won't always choose the right things.

In essence, by reading this blog, you take the chance that I will offend or upset you. If you can't accept that, then you should stop reading this blog now.

2.) Why Blogger? I chose Blogger because it felt better. It's very specifically for the purposes of keeping a blog. It will publish the blog to my website, which allows me to put more focus on something that I've let go fallow for some time. I know that I have a Myspace account and that there are those of you who would be more likely to read it there. That's not the point. Myspace has never felt completely comfortable to me. It feels too forced, too chummy, too focused on collecting friends when it should be focused on connecting to friends. I can see the point of it as a tool, but it's not the tool that I want to use. Not for this.

There's also flexibility. Myspace, due to it's nature, isn't always available from every internet connection. Blogger tends to be more available at the moment. That's key.

Recovering from Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Martin) — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:28:00 +0000

It seems to me that I've spent a good part of the last few years silencing my voice. There was a time, far too long ago it seems, when I could express myself coherently. I haven't been able to do that in a while. It's become jumbled and confused and none of it is really what I want to say or how I want to say it. My social skills have deteriorated. I've become an echo of my former self.

Recent events have forced me to reevaluate the directions I've taken in life. I've come to realize that I can't afford to continue entrenching myself in the emotional and physical rut in which I find myself.

This is therapy. Let's hope that it works. I'm tired of the silence. I'm tired of being terrified to speak or write the things that are on my mind. So it's here. I'm sharing myself with . . . well, with you. Just don't forget that I'm doing this for me, to help make me better. To help make me a better person, whether I do it the right way or the wrong way. I hope that it's the right way. I know that it's just as likely going to be the wrong way. Keep that in mind as you read this.

After all, I'm only human.