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Food

So the curry bread turned out surprisingly well.  I guess I was grossly overestimating the antiseptic properties of a few teaspoons of turmeric.  This is why I’m not a science major.  The crumb is much heavier than most breads are because of the oil content of the fried onions, so it’s only really good to eat by itself, though.  It’s got a very filling texture and a savory flavor to it, though, so in my opinion it’s a success.

As I’ve said before, tomatoes are the worst culinary vegetables in the universe.  Yes, I know they’re technically fruits, but their culinary history has been that of a vegetable.  I’m not saying I like it, in fact if I had my choice in the matter, the only culinary uses tomatoes would have would be for ketchup and maybe for some minor use in some curry sauces.

I’m not just being negative on the vegetables, though.  I just happen to be a fan of the underdog of great sauce vegetables.  I am a champion of the onion.  Onions are far better tasting, and they don’t overpower the flavors of the main dish in a meal.  An onion just serves to bring out the flavor in any dish and perhaps make it more interesting.  And onions sell worse than tomatoes.  The beginning of a truly great meal will usually begin with the chopping of an onion.

…In case you’re wondering, that is indeed the most likely reason that I smell foul on occasion.

Categories
Dell is awful Food Restaurants

Why do you feel so entitled to a title?

So Dell called me today to ask if I’d gotten my package again and I explained to them that I didn’t trust them with my property, and that “Claws” is not only not my name, but to my knowledge it isn’t even a proper name at all.  They said they’d call me back because I was obviously not satisfied with their service.  I don’t know what they plan to do but at this point I’d just be happy to never hear from them again.

Again, as I’m typing this, there’s bread rising in the kitchen.  Unfortunately, I may have made a mistake this time.  I made the same bread with fried onions and asiago cheese, but this time I fried the onions with turmeric powder as well as cumin seed to give the dough a kind of curry flavor.  It sounded like a good idea, but I just remembered that turmeric is supposed to have antibacterial properties, so it could kill the yeast and ruin the whole dough.  I’ll have to remember to look up something about that.  If I succeed, I’m dubbing this “Curry Cheese Bread”.  That probably sounds really gross to a lot of people, but I have high hopes for it.

I got this idea when I went to Some Kinda Pasta for dinner today with Sam.  I’m sure most people at UBC know Some Kinda Pasta by now, but if you haven’t, you really ought to.  They’re highly specialized so they mostly just make pasta and sauces, but their specialization means they have really high quality.  My favorite dish there, which I pretty much order every time I go there, is a curry chicken sauce, which is one of the best pasta sauces I’ve ever had.  The flavor is just bold enough to make up for how bland pasta tends to be, and it doesn’t resort to use of the tomato, which in my opinion is the most horrid, barbaric ingredient ever to poison the culinary world.  Tomatoes are so bloody acidic that when you eat anything made with them, you can’t taste a thing but the acidity of the tomato, and the actual tomato flavor masks everything else.  When you put tomatoes in something, you’re just eating tomatoes, and in turn is a destructive force in any kitchen. You can’t enjoy anything that’s salty when you’re eating something made with tomatoes.

The curry chicken sauce at Some Kinda Pasta, however, gives a very nice salty and bitter taste with a sort of zesty spice to it that complements pasta very well.  And for everyone who gasps at my harsh critique of the tomato, I’ve heard from those that enjoy tomatoes that the marinara sauce at Some Kinda Pasta is quite good too.  Not that I’ll ever try it.

Anyway, the idea that a curry sauce interacts so well with unleavened dough led me to wonder if it would work well in bread.  I’m starting small with turmeric and cumin, but if this works there are more possibilities.

I really did miss having a kitchen.

Categories
Food Personal Spirituality Wellness

Not everything has a perfect title

The potato bread rolls turned out great.  Really fluffy, and the combination of whole grain and while flour was just enough to give it a good texture.  I never thought it would make sense to put mashed potatoes in bread, but when you think about it there’s no reason not to.  I mean, mashed potatoes are just potatoes, milk, salt and butter, all of which are excellent ingredients in a good bread.

I’ve decided that sea salt is my favorite ingredient.  Every dish I’ve added it to recently has just become twice as good.

Today was both a very good day and a very bad day.  It was good in that all I did was some light studying before me and Sam made dinner.  It was bad in that I had another existential crisis of sorts.

As I mentioned before, I take philosophy a little too seriously, and it has on occasion caused me some degree of mental anguish.  Trying to think about certain questions about life and existence can make you feel like you’ve gone crazy for a while.  Combining that with life’s inherent limitations can sometimes make me feel a little depressed even when everything is going right with my life.  My entire life lately seems to be ruled by my realization that I can’t achieve anything I want to unless I become a much better person than I am, and I’m not sure how to do that.  I’m pretty bad with directions, either physical or metaphorical.

I’ve been diagnosed with depression by a few doctors and psychotherapists, but I don’t take the meds because they’re pretty expensive (Ontario’s health plan didn’t cover a lot of it) but they also kind of ideologically offend me.  I mean, every time I’m depressed I usually have something to actually be depressed about, and if I just take some pills and feel like everything is alright it doesn’t actually make my life better.  Also, if you suddenly stop taking the meds I was on the chemical imbalance will cause you to freak out.

Lately, though, I’ve been really angry and sad for absolutely no reason, so I’m rethinking my stance on them.  It’s kind of like how I refuse to make disability claims for my learning disability.  I’ve always felt like accepting the extra time would give me an unfair advantage over everyone else, but when I’m having a hard time doing tests on subjects I understand perfectly, I begin to think the psychologists have some legitimacy in their claims.

I don’t think either of these realizations will actually change the way I approach such things, but it’s strange how adamant my stance on them was for most of my life.

Categories
Academic Food

Well, today turned out to be a really relaxed day.  I’ve got another week before I have another exam so I can just take it easy and study at a nice pace.

Since living at Totem Park, I’ve learned to appreciate having an oven.  Back home in Toronto, the oven is probably the nicest thing in my house.  It’s run on gas and really large, great for baking and making things like roasts.  The oven I have here in Fairview isn’t quite so nice, but it’s still nice to have an oven at all.  I’ve taken up making bread lately to get more use out of the oven.  My kneading technique is a little off but things usually turn out fine.  Last week I made a whole wheat loaf with fried onions and asiago cheese, and it was probably the best tasting thing I made so far.  Currently I’m making bread rolls with a combination of whole wheat, white flour and mashed potatoes, the dough for which is rising as I type this.  I’m hoping this will turn out well, as the remaining mashed potatoes were delicious.  For anybody who loves mashed potatoes, I reccomend always using sea salt instead of table salt.  When salt is providing the main source of flavor in a dish, sea salt always works better.

Baking bread always feels satisfying, just because I produce something.  Since I was young, the whole problem with being a student has been I always feel like I accomplish nothing.  Good grades mean a lot for you personally, but at the end of the day it’s just an evaluation, and the act of learning itself never seems like an accomplishment to me as learning has always been easy for me.  But something that requires skill, patience, and good adherence to proper guidelines, and produces something that both I and my friends enjoy always brings me a pleasure that nothing in the actual act of school has ever given me.

I guess most people have skills that bring them satisfaction like that before they’re twenty years old, but at least I’m getting somewhere.

Categories
Academic Dell is awful

First attack!

Okay, so I failed already.  But two hours late isn’t bad at all.

So today was my first exam of 3, and I have a pretty good feeling about my performance.  A lot of people let themselves get really stressed around exam times, and I understand it, because I’m one of the most stressed out people in the world, and I crack under pressure pretty easily.  But exams aren’t that big a deal for me because I’ve made myself less concerned with the consequences.  People are worried in their finals because they’re afraid of the penalty they’ll get to their grade if they do poorly, but I’ve made peace with the idea that if I relax, study as well as I can, and then just go do my best I can be happy with whatever mark I get.  Fortunately, the fact that I’m not always stressed out means I perform better, and thus I have less to worry about.  With regards to exams, anyway.

Dell still continues to incur my wrath.  They called Sam today (or yesterday, I suppose) to tell me to pick up my empty box in Richmond.  Well, first they asked if “Claws got his package delivered to him” which is a strange question to ask since they never actually made any kind of delivery attempt.  My current stance on this is that if they’re going to be this irresponsible with an empty box, I’ll be damned if I’ll entrust them with anything of monetary value to me.  Dell offends me so much.  The very fact that a corporation with such horrible service is allowed economic prosperity is practically a valid critique of the free market on its own.

But I ought not to get upset before I go to sleep.  Tommorrow promises to be a rather relaxing day.

Categories
Academic Dell is awful

Dell is not the #1 choice of students. Or anybody in the known universe.

So one may recall yesterday I was infuriated with Dell and their expensive, low-quality warranty as well as their generally shoddy products that they have no problem selling to you even though they’re aware of known flaws.

Did I mention that?  Apparently my computer’s problem is completely in my AC adapter, and it’s a rather common problem.  So common, in fact, that Dell ordered a recall of their AC adapters almost six months before I even owned this computer due to a problem that, as near as I can tell, is completely identical to mine.  And yet they had no problem selling me a power adapter that had this exact problem, and even with the knowledge that these computers are known for faulty AC adapters, they refuse to replace my adapter unless I send my entire laptop in for inspection.

Oh, about that inspection.  As I mentioned before, I have to mail my computer to Dell.  More accurately, they assured me they would deliver me a box which I would place my computer in, mail to them, and then wait for them to send back.  It’s somehwat inconvenient because that means I would have to surrender my computer to Dell right around exam season which I can assure you is a terrible idea, and odds are they wouldn’t send it back to me until somewhere after December 17th, at which point I would be in Toronto with my family.

Well, the problem got a little worse.  Today I received a phone message from some delivery service I had never heard of in Richmond.  RICHMOND.  He told me he had a package for me from Dell which he would hold for five days before throwing out.  He warned me that I would expect to have to provide photo ID in order to get this package.  Furthermore, the message was for a “Mr. Claws Marks.”  Now, I’m pretty used to people being unable to pronounce my first name, which is why I go by Max.  “Claws” is probably the most  common mispronunciation thanks to a certain overweight bearded flying man in red who breaks into our homes around this time of the year who bears this very name which was repeatedly mispronounced by Americans.  However, it wasn’t just a mispronunciation.  I received an e-mail from Dell addressed to a “Mr CLAWS MARKS.”  Spelled out in text.  So I am to believe that Dell is certain that after hearing me on the phone as “Klaus Marks” (and the phone is the only place I gave them my name) they became certain that my name is “Claws” and not even like the ruddy obese gentleman I mentioned before.  Apparently my parents had the imagination to name me after the natural weaponry of beasts.

In any case, I have no guarantees that my photo I.D. which by no certain means reads “Claws Marks” anywhere on it, will prove sufficient to the impatient man in Richmond who wants to throw out my empty box.

So here’s a recap:  Dell sold me a shoddy product, and when I asked them to replace it while my warranty was still valid, they told me they would send me a box to send them my computer.  I give them my address, but apparently all they wanted to know was what province I lived in because they thought that any random place in Richmond with a strong desire to throw out what they are holding would be good enough no matter where in British Columbia I lived.  Provided I am willing to make a two hour bus ride to Richmond to pick up an empty box, I may not even get this box because of an error on the part of Dell’s Tech support to comprehend that “Claws” does not rhyme with “House”

What makes this more annoying is that even if I do go down to Richmond and get this box, I don’t think I want to use it, because the last thing I want is to be sitting at my mom’s dinner table in Toronto and getting a message from some random delivery service in Burnaby telling me to come by within the next week or they’ll send my newly inspected laptop to the local technological crushery.

So long story short, I’m deciding to just buy a new power cord, because even if Dell didn’t have an entire bureaucracy devoted to ensuring that they never have to provide adequate service to wronged customers, I’m beginning to believe that even if Dell’s customer service division was actually willing to set things right for me, they actually lack the competence required to fix my problem.  I imagine if Dell just apologized and agreed to send me a new power cord, they’d just send me another broken one.  Or one that doesn’t fit in the computer.  Or perhaps they’ll just send me a large sturgeon with a happy face pinned to it and then assure me I got the right product.

Unfortunately, my short route of buying a new power cord is even problematic.  I’m going to have to break my oath to never give money to Dell again, because according to the tecchies at Staples, while they can provide a working AC power adapter for my computer, none of them will actually plug in to my computer because only Dell produces power cords that fit into Dell computers.  This explains why I could never borrow a power cord from a friend when my computer was running out of juice.   If I want a working power cord, I will have to buy it from Dell.  This means there’s a 90% chance it will be broken upon purchase.  However, I will have to purchase two power cords before it will cost less than a one year warranty extension.

In short, I despise Dell.

Also, I have my first exam tomorrow.  I’m pretty confident in this subject, though, so my rage at Dell burns brighter than any pre-exam anxiety I might have.

Categories
Academic Housing Personal

Back just in time for the end of the term

Well, I certainly haven’t been keeping enough attention focused here.  A combination of schoolwork, a computer constantly on the verge of breaking, and some existential crises got in my way.  I learned some valuable lessons this term, but the most valuable is probably to never buy anything from Dell.

I’m sure most of you are thinking that’s a lesson I should have learned years ago.  I can only wholeheartedly agree.

Fun fact about Dell computers:  For the price of four years warranty from Dell, you could just buy another computer.  And for the price of calling Dell’s tech support line without warranty twenty times, you could buy a better computer.

To make a long story short, my computer won’t charge due to a flaw in either the power aqdapter, my motherboard or both, and as a result Windows Vista assures me that it will do everything it can to remind me every second of my writing term papers that Dell sold me a faulty product.  Their tech support company is requiring me to mail my computer somewhere so they can fix it.  The mailing time may go past my warranty and I have no guarantees they’re not going to decide to bill me for anything they do with my computer past the date of December 6th.

Unfortunate.  On the other hand, this has been a very productive term.  My first year in Coordinated Arts PPE was clearly a mistake; I have no talent for economics.  However, now that I’ve switched most of my classes to philosophy I’m enjoying myself a lot more.  I ridicule the future job prospects of being a philosophy major a lot, but the discipline really is my passion, so I have to cut it more slack.  I mean, when I first learned what philosophy was when I was way younger, I remember thinking how perfect a thing that is to do with your time.  Everything else seems kind of worthless in comparison.

Lately, though, I’ve had my frustrations with philosophy.  I think a big part of it is that I take the subject matter a lot more seriously than most students do.  Lately I’ve been stuck in constant indecision over trying to figure out why one action is preferable to another, and the lack of answers with regards to that I’m experiencing have left me a little out of  sorts over the past few weeks.  More on that in a bit.

Since both of us acknowledged we’ve been lacking in this blogging thing, me and Sam have both agreed that for the month of December we will write a post every day.  That will hopefully turn it into a habit.

As most people realize, last Friday was the end of classes and like most people I’m studying for exams as much as I can.  I’m really quite happy with the environment my new place of residence in Fairview provides for this; Totem Park never really gave me the proper  study environment, as much as it attempts to.  I guess I need to have more  of a sense of my own space.

Well, that’s all that comes to mind for now.  Assuming I keep up with my commitments, I’ll have more to say tomorrow.

Categories
Academic Clubs Wellness

So, here I am in Fairview.  Me and Sam spent quite a few weeks moving in, and now everything’s totally set up.

Actually, we were done a few weeks ago, but for some reason my blog kept glitching and I never wrote about it.  But yeah.  First month of school is almost over, and I must say I’m feeling a lot better about this year than I did about last year.  Honestly, I’m not sure I could reccomend the PPE program to any new students.  While I met some interesting people and I liked most of my professors, I horribly failed at all of my economics classes.  I’ve found a lot of students had  similar problems in that the students who enjoyed economics hated the philosophy aspect.  The thing is, philosophy, political science and economics all are connected, because the latter two owe their existence to philosophy, but they don’t go together that well anymore.

However, this year I’m not on a standardized timetable and I find I greatly prefer what I’m doing now.  I don’t have any classes I dread going to or  fail to understand.  Even though I see my future in mostly analytic philosophy, I think my favorite class right now is Existentialism.  I’d actually reccomend it to people who hate philosophy as well as people who like it.  It’s just an all-around enjoyable class no matter what your background is, and the professor has a really good energy to his lectures.

If you’ve been reading Sam’s blog, you know we both joined seven clubs last week.  My favorite of these is the Freethinkers.  It’s a fairly new club at UBC, I think less than a year old, but I’m really glad they’re here now.  They’re affiliated with the Center for Inquiry, which doesn’t have a large presence in Vancouver currently, but hopefully that will change over time.

All in all, the most depressing thing in my life is reading Kierkegaard.  Which, to be fair, is really depressing, but as a whole that says good things about my situation.

Categories
Academic Food Housing Personal Pre UBC Recreation Restaurants

Titles acknowledging that they are titles are postmodern and hip.

I hate imaginary numbers.  They ruined math for me forever.

I mean, honestly.  It’s not that I hate math.  I love math.  The logic of all of it is just so beautiful.  I remember when I was first taught trigonometry, how astounding it was to me that you could calculate the length of a triangles other sides if you knew their angles even if they were composed of line segments longer than the entire planet’s circumference.  When I was first taught that, it put a smile on my face all day.  Sure, I hated all the memorization and formulae, but it was almost worth it when you arrived at a conclusion and knew it couldn’t be any different.  Then imaginary numbers came along, and my entire world collapsed.

It was just like “Hey, you know all that stuff we told you to memorize and take to heart because we insisted that it would be easier than doing all the trial-and-error research that the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians did?  Well now that stuff doesn’t work out for us, so here’s a number that doesn’t really exist.  Use it.”

And the gods of math did weep, for yet another eleventh grader had slipped through the perfectly symmetrical cracks of their divine fingers.

I just wrote all that because I had no idea how to write an appropriate introduction.  Introductions are just always awkward, whether they’re in speech or writing, because you always have to pretend you have both something interesting to say as well as a reason for saying it, when often you have neither, and all you really have is a desire to get a conversation going.

In any case, I’m Max Marks.  Some of you might remember me from last year’s first year blog squad, which is why I now carry the title of second year blog squad.  Isn’t the passage of time an amazing thing?  I guess a lot has happened last year, though I didn’t do a  very good job of documenting it.  I’ll try to correct that a bit more this year.

If you read the admittedly better blogging of my lovely ladyfriend, Samantha, you already know I was originally going to room with her in Marine Drive’s tower 6, which required us to stay in subletted apartments for two weeks before MD6 actually opened, but as a result of UBC housing being really awesome we’re now staying in Fairview starting tomorrow morning.  This is like a dream come true for the both of us.  My only real complaint is one of our landlords doesn’t seem to want to give us our deposit back because we canceled before we moved in.

There weren’t exactly a lot of events leading up to this, but we had more than a bit of time to kill, as flights to Vancouver from Toronto were pretty hard to get (I’ll let you come up with your own joke about Vancouver being better than Toronto if this information provokes one to you) so my dad had to book a flight arriving on the 23rd.

There’s not a whole lot to do in Vancouver when you’re a broke college student with a week before studies, especially since the apartment we’re staying in has limited access to both television and internet, to the point that I’m writing this in a bagel shop.  However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do at all.  For example, yesterday I went to get the rest of my books before the September 1st rush cleared them all out.  It was at this point that I made an amazing discovery:  The UBC bookstore hates philosophy students!

Seriously, for every book I went to get, it wasn’t on the shelf for the philosophy section.  However, the books were in the store.  There were dozens of them, in fact.  They were just all given to the shelves for history and literature.  Come to think of it, this could also just mean that there are a lot more philosophy students at UBC than literature and history students, but since pretending to be victimized is more entertaining, I’ll go with my previous statement.

I was also very surprised when me and Sam went for lunch at what I consider to be UBC’s best Japanese restaurant, Suga Sushi, to find that their owner, Ken Sugahara, was no longer the owner at all.  I was flabbergasted to discover this.  I mean, you can’t spell “Suga” without “Sugahara”  A lot of you who frequent the University Village will remember Suga Sushi always had a banner above it announcing its “Grand Opening” which was apparently perpetually happening for upwards of three of four years.  I always found that funny and charming.  However, now the banner merely informs us that it serves both Japanese and Korean cuisine.  Granted, that’s much more informative, not to mention consistent with reality, but I feel like I lost an old friend.

You leave town for four months and find out things have already changed.  But I guess change is a good thing, so we shouldn’t complain about how fast it works.

Categories
Academic Recreation

IKB… Easy as 123…

So as of today, my PPE classes have been officially moved to the Irving K. Barber learning center.  There’s been a lot of excitement over the place being finally opened, and I’ve got to say, even though it’s not entirely finished, it looks really sleek.  The lecture hall we’re in is way bigger and much more comfortable than the one we had in Buchanan.  I mean, it’s nice to have a big table instead of tiny little desk-like things.  Also, it’s got a pretty neat tech setup.  it’s got these built-in overhead projectors that  project a digital image of what the professor puts under it, so he doesn’t have to get transparent sheets or anything.  On the other hand, both of my professors in that lecture hall seem to have a preference for smaller rooms and chalkboards because both of them like their lectures to be more of a dialogue between students.  I suppose it’s harder to  have a dialogue with students when you’re in a massive lecture hall.

 Back to the fancy equipment…  There was some AV guy in the room all day to instruct the profs on how the equipment was used, and for some reason he got really touchy whenever students went near the panel that controlled it, as if we were going to break something.  Actually, when I got to class a little early I heard a pretty offensive conversation between the AV guy and someone from campus security…  Apparently at Irving K. Barber they have really big problems with food and drink in the lecture halls.  I never thought of it as a big deal, I mean there are vending machines everywhere in the buildings, it seems kind of natural to assume they don’t mind if we bring them into the lectures.  I can understand that it can be annoying when students leave their wrappers or cans or whatever in the rooms (it’s wrong anywhere; lecture halls aren’t special) but the sheer venom I heard this security officer talk about students’ behaviour was just upsetting.

Actually, a lot of the way I’ve seen some of the administration handling IKB is upsetting me a bit.  I mean, a lot of the aspirations I’ve heard about the place say that they intended it to be a hub for students… Like, a place they could gather and talk and meet after class.  But every time I’ve been there it’s been treated just like another library.  If you speak above a whisper you get glares.  I just never feel welcome there as a student.  I understand that the place hasn’t quite been finished yet, but I really hope it won’t always be like this, because the feeling it gives me when I’m there falls far short of how it was intended.

On a happier note, me and Sam are rapidly approaching our bi-anniversary (An anniversary is a celebration of one year.  I stay away from terms like “six-month anniversary”) which will be very nice.  I don’t think anyone expected us to last this long, but I feel quite good about it.  When I think about it, the school year is almost over.  There are only three more days left in February, and then another two months.  I’m surprised at how fast it’s gone.

Oh god…  I just realized I’m turning twenty in April.  There’s a whole mess of stuff to think about now.

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