How To Make The Perfect Sandwich

ingredients:

+ 2 slices of bread

+ cheese (I like to use goat, cheddar, and jarlsberg)

+ tomato

+ onion

+ avocado (optional)

+ balsamic vinegar (optional)

1. Do whatever you do to prepare to fry an egg. For me this means olive oil, a pan, and a stove set to medium-ish heat. On the side somewhere, prepare your sandwich.

2. Fry your egg. Now this is an important part: I like my eggs over-easy with a runny yolk, but in this sandwich you can't have a runny yolk because it'll just be too messy. So I usually let the yolk harden (is that the right term?) so that when I put it in the sandwich and press down it doesn't explode everywhere. I like to put salt, pepper and dried basil leaves on my egg.

(note: I also put chili flakes here because I was feeling dangerous. Also I suck at cracking eggs.)

3. Remove the egg from the pan and place it in your sandwich. I usually put a little bit of balsamic vinegar on the egg now.

4. Grill your sandwich until the cheese melts or you get too hungry.

5. Eat it!

Cherry

[ratatat - cherry]

I am going through an "instrumental"ish phase. This song is amazing. I would highly recommend listening to this album (self-titled) with the volume turned up.

(via)

Greenland is Projected As A Giant Land Mass But In Reality It Is Not

Laurrrrita Wooley Mammoth showed this to me when she was in Montreal.

This is a map of the world. Did you know there are more than one different projections of maps? I did not, which was probably naive of me. Forgive me for thinking that map making might be objective/accurate.

The photo above is a mercator map. You might recognize this type of map as seen in all your classrooms, my bedroom which probably never been in, textbooks, etc. It has its uses. It's good for navigating the seas. It shows the shapes of countries accurately. But it also distorts the size of countries the farther away from the equator they are. For example, in this map, Greenland is almost as big as Africa, when in reality Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. The problem with the mercator projection is that it tends to make the West seem a lot larger than it is. Does this sound like some sort of familiar colonialist rhetoric?

This is the Gall-Peters projection.

If you notice in this map, Greenland is tiny, and Africa is HUGE. China is HUGE. Brazil is HUGEish. And Europe, and Canada, and the United States got a little smaller.

This is apparently what the actual size of countries are. I don't know. (I'm finding it a lot harder to trust map-makers now). It's likely that I'll never know unless I find a way to go into space and position my rocket in a way so I can compare the size of different countries. The problem is that you can't show both shape and size accurately. You have to pick one.

Now this is a site you want to read. I'm serious. It's well worth your time.

Okay so the picture I wanted to show you doesn't work because my background is black. But here it is.

Greenland is 0.8 million square miles. China is 3.7 million square miles.

Go. Go read this right now. Have your world view changed.

absence poems #2&3

absence poem #2 (heavy blanket)

in the morning

in the cracks

between my blinds:

snowflakes.

+

absence poem #3 (surrounded)

snow in the suburbs:

the heavy sound

of silence.

i am all alone.

Things That A Computer Is Without Internet

+ an expensive notepad

+ an expensive stereo

+ an expensive chess board

+ a small DVD player

+ an expensive post-it

+ an expensive calendar

"i hate it when i lose internet and my facebook machines just becomes a typewriter that plays dvds" - kcdanger

(i was just without internet in my apartment for about a week and it was very strange but very refreshing. these were basically the only things i used my laptop for during that time.)

Some Albums You Should Be Listening To From Beginning To End

Some albums are just meant to be listened to from start to finish. I wrote a post once with my top 10 concept albums and this is kind of like that, except they might not have concepts or stories. I mean, even some of the ones I picked back then didn't have full stories so I suppose you could say this is just an update.

There are so many bands and artists in the world now and a lot of the time all we hear are singles and then a few other songs we downloaded from limewire (which died) because we just don't need to buy full length CDs anymore. Also a lot of full length albums suck and the best song is the single you heard on the radio. But there are some records that are just completely worth listening to from beginning to end.

[Basically this is just what I'm listening to at the moment, consider this an extensive music monday. I happen to be listening to a lot of albums and not just random songs].

++

The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

This is a concept album, and it is really, really good. I don't think there's a single weak song on it. I spent a good 3-4 years denying The Arcade Fire's talent but it's safe to say I'm a convert.

Listen to: Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

M. Ward - Post-War, and Hold Time

I couldn't choose between Post-War and Hold Time so I chose both. You should listen to both in a row. I always feel really satisfied with the world after listening to M. Ward.

Listen to (from Post-War): Post-War

Listen to (from Hold Time): Epistemology

The National - High Violet

The National have really outdone themselves this time. Boxer is still an album I love to listen to and High Violet has been on high rotation since I got it in [August?].

Listen to: Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks

Counting Crows - Recovering The Satellites

My uncle moved in October and got rid of some of his old CDs, so I picked this one up. I've never really listened to Counting Crows before but this album is dece and perfect for when you feel like hearing music but not listening to it.

Listen to: Recovering the Satellites

Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War

Will we wake in the morning and know what it was for, up in our bedrooms, after the war?

Listen to: Take Me To The Riot

Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

"Everyone likes Belle and Sebastian" - my cousin. Belle and Sebastian can make your whole day better.

Listen to: Another Sunny Day

++

YOU'RE WELCOME

A Story With Two Morals

I went to bed last night around 11:30 and woke up at 1am with some serious stomach pain. I thought that if I rubbed my stomach it would go away, but it didn't. It stayed. It stayed for hours. It hurt to move. I sweated and moaned and rubbed my stomach and I'm pretty sure my roommate would have thought I was masturbating if he had been awake, but I wasn't masturbating, just dying. I think I died over one hundred times last night.

I tried desperately to think of what was causing the pain. It can't have been the cereal I ate. I ate it all the time and never had such a terrible stomach ache. It must've been the carrots I had at dinner. They were kind of old. They had smelled okay and looked okay and tasted okay, but thinking about it now they were probably rotten and eating me from the inside.

As the pain continued to exist, I began to panic a little bit. I considered calling 911 but I didn't want to wake my roommates. I've been watching Grey's Anatomy a lot and I imagined Dr. Arizona Robbins feeling my stomach and saying "abdomen is hard, order a CT" even though she's a pediatric surgeon and I'm not a child anymore.

She can operate on me anytime. Then maybe after we can do this -

Erm.

Anyways, I was basically delirious last night. Even though I've been working on a few different blog posts about how much I like my room in my apartment ("my space"), I really wished I was at my parent's house. If I had been at my parent's house I would have knocked on their door and made them take care of me. Living by yourself means you have to be responsible and take care of yourself, I understood that, but last night I really understood it. I didn't want to throw up, not because throwing up is gross (it totally is), but because I didn't want to clean it up. If I had been with my parents, they would have cleaned it up. THE JOYS OF PARENTING.

I have no idea what was wrong with me. I thought briefly about googling "how to fix serious stomach pain" but I couldn't do anything but lie in my bed uselessly. I thought about eating some chalk (in the 9th grade I learned that eating some chalk is essentially equivalent to taking some pebto bismol). I'm not sure how much that would have helped. I fell asleep for real around 4:30am after spending most of the past 3 hours clutching my stomach in the fetal position, convinced I was dying of twisted insides.

The moral of the story is: even though being independent, and responsible, and taking care of yourself like a motherfucking adult is a good thing, sometimes it's nice to let other people take control. Sometimes all you want is someone to spoon you and squeeze out all the pain. There are people out there who want to do that for you, so you have to let them. Even though in this case there wasn't really anyone to help me. Also the other moral of the story is: don't eat rotten carrots.

How To Cook Everything

Every day we wake up we promise to be better. We promise ourselves to make changes. We want to love more, love better, try harder. We can do anything we want to.

I will stop worrying about money. I will live better. Maybe not tomorrow, but today at least. That's all I can give. That's all I can promise. For today to be better, at least.

I am not growing in a straight line. I want to learn to love you more.

By now you're probably wondering why this is titled "How To Cook Everything" when there is clearly nothing about cooking here. The answer is that "How To Cook Everything" is a cookbook that is right next to me and I'm avant garde like that. JK.

Wouldn't It Be Nice

[the beach boys - wouldn't it be nice]

wouldn't it be nice to live together

in the kind of world where we belong?