food is the staff of life

I have been researching how to make jelly from bottled grape juice. I like grape juice. But unfortunately I am the only one who drinks it here and I cannot drink 2 quarts of it before it goes off. Grape juice makes mediocre popsicles (not tart enough) and although it does well as a gelatin mold, it's not exactly different enough from the straight juice. Jelly can be made and poured into freezer-safe plastic dishes. I would not need to go through the hassle of canning.

We've had changeable weather the past few weeks and my head really hurts. I haven't been having the drippy sinuses so I stopped taking the 24-hour fake-Claritins. Today I woke up and the goo was back, so I took something and all the goo cemented to the inside spaces of my face. Someone needs to invent a decongestant that's not used by nefarious people so I can get it in sufficient quantities to take it for several weeks. I want that goo gone.

Grocery shopping today. Bought lots of unrelated stuff. Curry, Mexican food, turkey sandwiches, bagels, bacon... I think I bought so much stuff because it is a holiday weekend.

I still hate holidays. There's not much point. Everything is either crowded or closed. Maybe if the majority of people could go back to their oppressive religious practices where holidays were reserved for holy rituals... then they'd not be at the beaches or parks or on the highways. Restaurants would all be closed, but a lot of them are anyway. And as long as no one (well, the ambient majority certainly not) is actually observing sabbath Sunday, I want stores and restaurants to be open standard hours on Sunday. Either people should observe their ritual times and stay out of my way when I'm enjoying the open spaces near my home or they should do their jobs and stay out of my way. I'd so much rather time shift holidays and weekends. I'll take my weekends on Tuesday-Wednesday and I want my holiday at plus 8 days from the standard. Of course that means the way public transit is skeleton service on Sunday would really suck.

Whenever people tell me they don't like organized religion, I wonder about them. Do they find these pre-set days meaningless and kind of irritating like I do? I'd like to belong to an organized religion personally. I just haven't found any that don't suck. There were some off-shoots of Paganism that were okay-ish but they're hardly organized and the more organized versions are extremely oppressive toward non-traditional life-role women--- every single time they say women are like the Goddess who is loved for her fertility... well, fuck, I guess I'm not really welcome then eh? And as for the more mainstream things, well, they've all got written canon from thousands of years ago. The canon was written so stuff didn't get lost or distorted, but it also confines the beliefs so the religion isn't truly a living-growing entity. I'm not going to do something I think is immoral and evil so someone else's god will love me. But it doesn't change the fact that I feel absent a sense of belonging anywhere.

I wonder why there are so many people who dismiss organized religion. Most of the close families I've seen are much more likely to be religious. Most of the people who denigrate organized religion seem to share beliefs with the mainstream ones, so why swim against that current? Why is it such a bad thing to be a "joiner"? We're expected to toe the line in all sorts of other ways. It's not like it's possible to make friends if you're not willing to [white] lie to people. The world is full of compromises you must make in order to survive amongst other people. Why would joining a group of people with similar beliefs be that much worse than making small talk at a party you're only at because your boss expects everyone there. Maybe finding people with similar beliefs is hard because other people share my belief that our mainstream religions are actually as oppressive as I think they are. That makes me want to found my own religion.

Of course, I'm lazy enough that I only make freezer jam instead of boiling the jars and all that nonsense.

"I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

I woke up this morning because the neighbors were screaming and pounding on the walls. It was awful. And right at that moment between being asleep and being awake, I couldn't tell whether I was having a nightmare. I tried to force myself to wake up so I wouldn't be scared by a dream and it just kept getting worse and worse, so I thought I was trapped inside my dreaming body where people were being violent and screaming all around me.

Then when I was completely awake, I heard the neighbors screaming in the hallway while dragging their kid along with them. It was the kid pounding on the wall, not bodies being thrown at me.

I'm still disconcerted and kind of jittery.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. -- Zhuangzi

It's not the box, it's the contents.

You know what we need? Better individual packaging.

In this era of [a certain subset of] people thinking we need less packaging it's not going to be a popular opinion, of course, but the current method of packaging stuff sucks.

The miniature boxes of cereal are idiotic because they're not a whole portion of cereal and they tend to only come in variety packs including stuff no self-respecting adult would eat, while including things no children consider food.

But the family-size boxes of things always go stale before I can finish them.

Then I was thinking about those air-pocket things that Amazon uses for padding in their boxes. They're perforated between the pockets. It's obviously air-tight. And there's printing on them, so they could be labeled with anything.

If that was how cereal was sold, one could buy a wheel of packets. Pantries could have a cereal bar like paper towel holders that come mounted to the under-cabinet. It wouldn't take up more room than the regular boxes at the store (perhaps the shelves would need to have a different configuration, but the volume wouldn't be that different.)

We don't need individual cardboard boxes per half-serving, but if the big outer box could have several sealed packets of the contents, there would be less food wasted. And isn't that the point of packaging?