opusculus

Lately I've been trying to get the hang of salads. I grew up having salad as the designated side with dinner every night, and there's something about that that makes it come off as really, deeply and sincerely, boring to me. All I ever had, and all I ever did when I took over the family cooking was lettuce + random dressing. BORING. And making the lettuce the main course never quite…worked for me? I always felt weirdly dissatisfied.

But I bring my lunch to work most days, and while I have no problems filling it on days that I cook myself something the night before, I really needed something besides frozen tamales/burritos/chicken pot pies etc. to fill it on the days I don't. So! Salads are something I can do in 10 minutes even if they're a bit on the complicated side, and I have these adorable little sauce thingies that I can use to put my dressing in so it doesn't get all soggy, and therefore they seem like a good solution to that. I like sandwiches more, but I hate pre made sandwiches because they get all soggy and the flavors mix and sometimes it's still fine if I really, really loved the sandwich in the first place but I just don't like them as much. And my usual objection to salads - that they're not filling - is kind of negated by the fact that I pack that lunchbox FULL, dudes. I have breakfast (yogurt with fruit or fruit and cheese, normally), miscellaneous fruits to serve as snacks, miscellaneous chocolate to serve as desserts (Green and Black's Maya Gold is the most delicious thing ever, for the record), miscellaneous cheeses to serve as snacks in case the fruits aren't enough, and maybe a cookie or two just for bonus, and usually in the morning it's kind of bulging out at the sides. I usually don't finish all this, but I like having snacks available and if I don't have fruit available I feel grumpy all day. And there's basically no restaurants nearby that actually serve fruit, which is really great incentive to have it available.

But since I've never actually really made salad, I'm sort of in the process of teaching myself how to make a good salad. So here's a summary of what I've been learning about how to make a satisfying salad from what I have available.

( mmm tasty food. )

...I don't know if this is the worst icon for food or the best icon for food.

Man, I haven't posted in forever. Partially because of catching a cold, and partially because of general meh at life. So! Have two book reactions, about two books about as polar opposite as things get.

Intrigues by Mercedes Lackey

I think my overwhelming reaction to this book can be summed up as lolololol. ( cut for spoilers for the entire book )

In summary: Mercedes Lackey writes great books for those days you're spending in bed snuffling miserably into boxes of tissues. No thought required, and everyone involved looks so silly at being miserable that it's hard to feel very miserable for yourself.

And the other book I wanted to babble happily about is The Other Brain by R Douglas Fields. This book is utterly beyond awesome, and is basically what I've been looking for for years, except infinitely more awesome. It's about glia! Glia, for those of you who don't remember what they are, are basically the cells in your brain that aren't neurons. For ages, they've pretty much been dismissed as insulation for the nerves to keep the electrical signals from getting lost, but as it turns out, there's increasing evidence that approximately 90% of your brain isn't dead weight after all! (Well. Some people's brains. I am perfectly willing to believe that for some people 90% of their brain is dead weight.)

Basically, if I wanted to sum up the book, it's just about how glia have a huge role in the brain that people have overlooked because, well, it's easier to study the parts of the brain that emit electricity than it is to study the parts that don't emit anything noticeable. It's not the best-written pop science book I've ever read by any means, and some parts dragged on for me terribly.It's not the best-written pop science book I've ever read by any means, and some parts dragged on for me terribly.It's not the best-written pop science book I've ever read by any means, and some parts dragged on for me terribly.

But! Glia! New information on the brain! With new information on how the brain works that makes the working of the brain make so much more sense to me! ♥♥♥

...Okay I want to explain that part a little more. Most explanations of the brain pretty much go "Electric signals fire and that's how we think." This is true and all but...what happens when they aren't currently firing? I can't imagine that when your memory of a flower is stored in the brain by a constantly ongoing tiny circuit of neurons firing - it just seems like it wouldn't work for all the background information that the brain has to store. (Not to mention - god, can you imagine how much energy it would take to have to constantly fire signals so even the background information could survive?) I mean, there's weirder things in nature so I pretty much went "...okay?" at the books without actually getting it. But if those electrical signals are changing other things in the brain, and that's where the bulk of everything is happening and the neurons are just the electrical wiring, this makes so much more sense to me. Like seriously. SO MUCH MORE SENSE.

I just wish I knew a neurologist so I could ask if I'm completely off base here or if my reading's right :( Or at least had an affordable brain textbook. Why do textbooks have to charge so much. ...So basically in conclusion I am a giant dork for information about the brain. This is not news. Also if I bother finish reading this book on Christianity I am so ranting about it here. You know that any book about Christianity that starts with them turning a skeptics' group into a bible study class with the power of their totally new and insightful arguments about the nature of God is going to be awesome, right? (Hint: Scientists did not doubt the Big Bang because it was too religious. Scientists doubted the Big Bang because if you don't doubt theories and test them and instead take them on faith because they match a possible reading of the Bible, you are a bad scientist.)

So, I tend to be vastly indifferent to most protagonists. Most authors seem to play their protagonists relatively conservatively, with most genres having one or two protagonist types that just have taken over. Much like weeds! Urban fantasy has its tough badasses, epic fantasy has its naive young heroes, romance has its virginal pure heroines, science fiction has its badass professors/engineers/practical people, etc. And mostly they all meld into one undistinguishable mass of boring in my head.

And this goes twice as much for first person protagonists. And yet, why did I like the first-person tough-badass heroine in Feed so much? Because I got a better sense of her voice from the blog posts she wrote in the text, because I'm so used to getting to know people through blogs that I felt comfortable with it. If I was ever wondering whether I was truly a child of my generation, I'm not now XD

In no particular order:

• Wearing purple makes me happy. Considering it's not even particularly my favorite color, this bemuses me. I mean, I like it. But it's tied with blue and green for my favorite colors, and neither of those make me particularly happy to wear them.


• I thought I found out that a sequel to Phantoms in the Brain was coming out around November, but now I can't find any information about it ever. Considering that's my favorite nonfiction book ever, this makes me sad. :(


• For some reason I feel really comfortable over at Dreamwidth in a way I haven't been feeling with LJ. It's the difference between a startup company that's actively engaged in its users and innovating and all that crap and an established company that's been stagnant for years and never really quite understood the segment of its customers that I'm a part of. I mean, I would guess that SUP actually understands its Russian userbase relatively well, if only because that seems to be the market it bought LJ for. Just... not fandom. At all. I mean, I still plan on crossposting over to LJ and reading my flist, but I do think I'll be using my DW as my primary.


• I need to get back to exercising. I quit while I was sick, for obvious reasons, but now that I'm mostly better, I'm still having a hard time kicking myself into doing it again. Surprisingly though, despite the fact that my posture's been absolutely horrible lately, my back hasn't been more than twinging. Usually the easiest way to make myself exercise is I know that if I don't strengthen my back, I'm going to either have to get a breast reduction or just deal with a lot of back pain, and without any back pain I'm lazier about it. PAIN IS A WONDERFUL MOTIVATOR. Or. Well. Effective motivator?