My Freshness Scarcity

I’ve done a fair bit of grocery shopping in the last couple days and I’ve come to notice something: my fridge is always empty.

This isn’t to say I don’t buy food, but it’s that the kind of food I tend to buy doesn’t need to be refrigerated. My freezer is always fully stocked. My cupboards are exploding. But the fridge is sort of sad looking, with nothing but a cartoon of orange juice, some sauces in the door, a bottle of wine, a tub of margarine, some cheese and yogurt, and maybe some milk if the weekend is close.

I tend not to buy perishable fresh food because I am too flighty to stick to a weekly meal plan. Plus, even regular portion sizes are too much for me to consume before the expiry date. Why buy a 12-pack of eggs when I only need 2 per week? Why buy a whole celery bunch when I just need a single stalk? Why buy a litre of milk when I only drink 250 mL on the weekend? In the end, the extras wouldn’t be consumed and would go to waste, so I just don’t bother. But dry goods like pasta and rice last forever in my cupboards! My freezer is stocked to the brim with fruits, meat, and vegetables, as well as favourites like pizza and lasagne.

Now that I think about it, I don’t really buy bread either. It’s something that I don’t consistently eat, I only want it once in a blue moon, but I’m not going to buy 20 slices of the stuff when all I want is toast with jam maybe once every two months, it’d be a waste.

Honestly, I wish the sizes of my fridge and freezer were switched! It would be way more useful to me.

The Conscientious Shopper

This past Friday evening, I was out shopping for a Father’s Day present after work. I didn’t find what I was looking for, and I could have just gone straight home after that but it was payday, so I thought there’d be no harm in looking for some new clothes. I ended up wandering into Dynamite and heading to their sales rack. I found a very cute black belted dress with tiny white polka dots there, and it was marked down big time! So I took it to the dressing room, hung the dress up, and started undoing all the buttons so that I’d be able to try it on. But as I undid the buttons, I glanced up to the tag and froze at what I saw.

“Made In Bangladesh”

After a moment of paralysis, I slowly backed away from the dress and contemplated it. After the collapse of that factory building, I’ve developed a distaste for clothing from Bangladesh. But it was pretty and affordable; did I still want it? I decided the answer was no. I didn’t want to support cheap third-world clothes, and besides I didn’t need a new dress. So I touched up my makeup in the mirror and walked back out of the dressing room.

In an ideal world, I’d only buy products that were made in Canada. But Canada isn’t really a manufacturer of clothes, and when they do it’s usually out of my price range. But I still buy clothes that are made in China even though the same situation as Bangladesh is probably playing itself out there too. It’s hard to figure out what the right thing to do is.

The Best Thing A Writer Can Do Is Read

Before I realized that getting more sleep would be a good way to kick-start my writerly inspiration, I decided that doing more reading might be the ticket. You see, I’ve given up a lot of things since I became a home-owner... that mortgage ain’t gonna pay itself! Sometimes it’s the little things that matter, so I gave up (amongst other things) buying new books. Because let’s be honest, books are expensive, especially in Canada.

Thankfully, I got a ton of Chapters gift cards over the holidays and finally decided to use one up. My purchase was the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; I’d heard great things about Murakami’s writing and the novel’s plot seemed right up my alley. Indeed, this gargantuan book has everything: sex, espionage, an exploration of the nature of writing, parallel universes, vengeful feminists, cults, and paranormal activities.

This past week I was feeling like I'd made significant progress in the book, but then I came to a plot point where I realized the author had just set up the crux of the novel... 344 pages in. I am LESS THAN ONE THIRD through this book. D: It's like the literary equivalent of a progressive house song; it's 9 minutes long and the bass doesn't drop until 4 minutes in.

In any case, this is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Can't wait to see where else it takes me!

It's All Coming Back To Me Now

Slowly but surely, a change is coming into my life... I’m starting to dream at night again.

Let me explain. For starters, I always dream, that’s never changed since I was a wee one. And my dreams have never really been average, but quite vivid, fantastical, lucid, and extremely easy for me to remember in great detail upon waking. Seriously, my subconscious has come up with epic House MD episodes that would have put David Shore to shame. ;)

But I noticed that around the time I turned 30, my dreams changed. They became a lot more boring for one; dreaming about working in the office or watching TV with the family really doesn’t compare to dreaming that you’ve runaway with fairies to an alternate dimension and chilled in Father Time’s garden along the way. Not only did they become more mundane, but I couldn’t even remember them once I woke up, only vague feelings of mediocrity lingered behind.

I assumed it was just a complication of getting older, my brain just wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. Then, about a month ago, I changed my sleeping patterns. Basically, I got more of it haha. As opposed to going to bed around 11:30pm-12am every weeknight, I committed to going to bed at 10:30pm instead. Not only did I noticed I’d be far less tired in the morning, but gradually my dreams have gone back to being grand and vivid and epic. It’s not completely the same as it used to be (I’m still having issues remembering details when I wake up) but it’s definite progress towards a place I want to be in.

I never realized how important my epic dreams were to me until they started to fade away. Last night I dreamed that it was like 200 years in the future and I was canoeing down some Vietnamese river with a group of grumpy rebels working to repel our evil robot space-lords. And then there was a final showdown between our group’s hero and the head bad guy, and our hero killed the head bad guy... and then was somehow crowned the prophesized king of the robot space-lords and turned to evil. Which is when I woke up. How unreal, my brain is awesome. :D