i can't

i can't take subtle hints. it takes me forever just to figure these things out, and when i think i've got it right i still feel a little hesitant about it.

i rarely ever have dreams, but when i do there is always one thing that they have in common; i can never seem to find what i need. i can't find my shoes. i can't find the key. i can't find my room. i can't find the exit on the gate. something is always missing.

i can't find my way.

sometimes in these dreams i actually have the courage to ask for help. it's to no avail, of course. i still can't seem to get a hold of what's going on around me.

sometimes it's true in real life as well.

i hate having so much time available that i force myself to lay down and think about these things. i look at the ceiling, listen to the ticking clock on the wall, watch the light coming in from the window change positions as cars drive by. i can't seem to think about anything else. the laptop i use makes a whirring noise as i type, and the thoughts in my head seem to make a kind of whirring as well, and no amount of deep breathing will help it slow down.

i can't daydream like i used to.

it took me and hour and a half to drive home today

which actually wasn't the longest it's ever taken me to get home. i made sure to blast the music to keep me awake, a hard feat when i only had a few hours of sleep and hadn't eaten anything today. i found myself daydreaming a lot while i was driving, and for a second when i snapped out of it i thought i missed my exit. i looked around and none of my surroundings seemed familiar, but then i realized i didn't recognize any of it because usually i'd be speeding by all those trees and hills. sigh. another long day.

sometimes it feels like i play a different person every time i go to a new class. today i was the chill, sleepy elaine, just waiting till i could get home. yesterday during the lab i was the busy bee elaine, just trying to finish in time. so many other personalities to keep track of. today someone described me as "old soul." what the hell was that supposed to mean? not to say that it was a bad thing; now that i think about it it sounds pretty cool. but what is it? and which personality is my real one? i thought back to what i was like before all this. all last semester i was the shy quiet elaine; if i didn't have a designated seat i stayed in the corner, i had no friends, but i breezed through everything, albeit alone. this semester i have to work a great deal harder: two kitchen labs, classes that actually require me to think, and actually having to study for quizzes. what i am glad about is that i have some kind of friends this semester, even if a lot of them are just acquaintences, and that i have classes with people who are around my age rather than decades older. then i thought back to what i was like before college; i would joke around with my friends and could laugh as loud as i wanted, knowing i definitely would not be the loudest. i was comfortable with the friends i held on to for years and years. why do different surroundings always bring such an enormous turnaround in my personality? i can feel it rush through my head, and i need a lot more time to think about this.

i can't wait till friday :)

rantalicious: a couple of days ago i scratched my face and now i have a hugeass scar/scab right on top of my nose!!! hopefully it heals soon and goes away... it's kinda painful and it's not really something that i can just cover up with makeup :(

p.s. sorry about the whole identity crisis thing, but it was all i could think of today. hopefully it'll satiate your appetite for a look inside my head...

for a second i wanted to be a vegetarian.

actually, more like 45 minutes, or an hour, or however long the chef's demonstration took last night. he tore away at the huge section of cow carcass laying on the counter as he so gently described how male cows are castrated so that they can grow even bigger than nature would allow them. this section alone weighed about 90 pounds he said, and i thought about my friends that were close to the same weight. no wonder why i didn't see the vegan guy anywhere around that day. an entire semester on the cutting, fabricating, and manipulation of animals, and who could blame him for being absent?
as the chef described different parts of the cow, all i could think of is how i would achieve vegetarianism (is that a word?). at first people would think i was crazy, but i would convince them that i wasn't with the horrifying facts about meat. i can't even describe how i felt as he literally sawed through bones that were at least 2 inches in diameter. i never understood what a bone duster was for until then. i tried to tell myself this was just like anatomy class in high school, but i realized that even being in front of those cadavers did not make me as uneasy as this hunk of cow did. "this is where the cows head would be if he had one... MOOOO!!!" i held a sad expression on my face as the chef pretended there were some imaginary cow head attached to the carcass.

some time during the semester we will be working with veal. i have never eaten veal before, not because of choice, but just because the opportunity never presented itself to me. during the lecture the chef only said two or three sentences about veal, but just the idea of it and i started to get sad. a baby cow kept in captivity just for the sake of a tender steak?

what the hell was wrong with me? this is my job, or at least, it will be. i began to think about the dilemma i had before i decided to go into this industry. did i really want a job based entirely on gluttony? one of the seven deadly sins? when we began to cook though, it all came together. nothing seemed as bad as it did before, and even though this piece of meat was once a living being, it seems as if it does more as food than it would just grazing in the grass lazily. i continued to make my beef stew, enough to serve 5 or 6 people. now that we were rid of the carcass i could easily convince myself of the greatness that is meat.

no, i would not be vegetarian... meat tastes too good. for now, though, i'll probably still stay away from veal...

i need a butcher's scimitar.

class FINALLY started again last week. yep, that's right. i need to go out and get more materials, more books, more knives, more everything, and yet i'm having a hard time just leaving the house right now.

i've decided to start up this blog again, mainly because of grac3anat0my (hehehe) but also because i hate that i keep starting these things just to abandon them a few months later. i need to have more commitment, dammit!! okay okay. so there won't be as many entries about food i've made at home, mainly because i'll be actually going to school 5 days a week this semester (i need the credits!), but for sure there will be a lot of entries on my life. like this one!

ranting time!!!

children. right now there are 3 boys living with us, two of them age 8 and one of them age 12. as i'm typing this, they are screaming and playing around in the bathtub. um, excuse me? yeah. i'm not cleaning that up. they'll only stop fooling around in the tub when their parents come along. that's another thing: they are entirely too dependent on their parents. yes, i understand that they are still children, but every time their parents leave them here, all of a sudden they start running around and screaming because they say they're scared of ghosts. that's right. ghosts. joshua, if there were ghosts here, i'm sure they would have just the same chance of haunting you if you were running around as they would if you were just sitting quietly. is it too much to ask for? now, i can understand how it can be a world of difference if the children were my own, but that's just not the case, and it's beside the point. my point is, i am not cleaning that bathtub.

Get a Job (not you, silly, me)

i realize that it has been over a month since i last updated here, and now that the weather is a lot colder and i'm stuck inside the house, why not update now? school is still trudging along, as usual, same old same old. i find myself going to the library more often to borrow books to read in my spare time, which i seem to have a lot of nowadays.

something different, you ask? well, today i applied for a couple jobs at brea mall. i just feel this is worth mentioning because i've never had a "real" job before (you know, the kind that requires a resume). my first intention for going to the mall today was to go to the supposed "job fair" that the woman at puente hills' See's Candy told me about a week earlier. so i go to the mall, and lo and behold, no job fair. damn you, lying old wench!!! *ahem* anyway, it turns out that this "fair" is just a couple days that See's decided they wanted to take applications, and by the time i got there, they had already hired all the people they needed.

by this time, i figure, screw See's Candy, imma find a job somewhere better. which i did. hahahahaa. Godiva Chocolates. i filled out my application as quickly as humanly possible, stuck in my resume (because i figure that an entire empty page for "previous emplyoyment" looked bad but if i showed off all the stuff i did in school then maybe it'll leverage things out) and introduced myself to the manager, who turns out to be one of the nicest ladies i've ever met (take that, See's!!).

i also applied at Charlotte Russe, which i think is pretty sensible, mainly because i love clothes and i shop there all the time (well, i look around mostly, but you get the point). anywho, both of these places don't start interviewing until november, but i'm still totally looking forward to having a job. extra money for the holidays doesn't hurt either. :)

also, since i like to consider this a "food" blog (teehee) i wanted to talk about this cake. the ginormous cake that Orange Coast College had for their 60th anniversary, which was actually last month. it was 1000 lbs-- i heard someone say 3000, but who knows how they weigh this thing-- and you probably can't grasp the size of it through the crappy cellphone pics, but that was all i had at the time, and i HAD to take a picture of it to show someone.

look at that monster. you should make sure to note the really gigantic bottom layer, which was too big to capture in it's entirety with my cellphone. also, a pic of those random girls to compare for size. haha
a picture of the gigantic slices they were handing out. this was after i took a few bites of course, and then realized i should take a picture of it. you can't really tell the size from this picture, but lemme just tell you-- it was so big that i could only eat half (that's half a slice) and eventually had to get rid of the rest somehow because my stomach was starting to hurt... one of the most shameful moments of my life.

Say Goodbye to Summer...

and a sighing hello to school. again. sigh. i can honestly say this has been one of the laziest summers i've ever had. it didn't even really feel like summer. it just felt like one REALLY long weekend. oh how the days go by...

since it's august, i have to mention the very many birthdays that come with this month- including mine!! yay!! happy 18th birthday, elaine! what's your gift, you ask? college, of course! you get a school you don't know anything about, filled with thousands of students, all of them complete strangers!!! yippeeee!!! you can probably tell by now that i already started class. sigh. it's time again for new classes, new school, new people. i guess i'm just not up to it all. so far my actual classes have been fine. it's the people; everyone already seems to know each other, but i can't even seem to find out where my next class is! or even just the bathrooms for that matter...

i suppose i just need to wait for things to get in their natural order, when everything doesn't seem so new. hopefully that'll be soon :)

now, back to birthdays. in my family, august has 7 birthdays- 5 of my cousins, one aunt, and my birthday.

we celebrated my birthday with korean bbq. mmm... the reason i post this picture is so that you can see the tremendous amount of food there, and also that shirt i recon-ed out of a really old eddie bauer shirt i found at goodwill. it's from an angle that is just far enough so that you can see the jist of the shirt, but can just barely see my horrendous tanlines... because no one wants to see that.

two of my cousins, who were turning 23 and 20, had a party last saturday, and my gift to them were "make your own birthday cake kits" that i made, including a mug, chocolate cake mix, a whisk, a measuring spoon, chocolate fudge icing, and candles. originally i was going to just sew up a bunch of plushies for them, but then i realized how old they were. i wanted to make something that they can actually use rather than just toss aside after saying how cute it was. so what do you give to a couple of people who describe themselves as lazy? 5 minute chocolate cake! i swear, this is one of the LAZIEST ways to make a cake, but it actually came out kinda good. you just gather all the ingredients, mix it in the mug, and bake it by microwaving. the only problem i have with this cake is that you have to eat it almost immediately after you cook it, otherwise the texture changes a lot... and not in a good way :(

sprinkles cupcakes. i've never been to sprinkles, but i intend to taste what all the hype is about. after recently finding a recipe for their strawberry cupcakes, i knew i had to try it, because we all know that strawberries are the best fruit EVAH. and i have to say, they were delicious. drool. obviously i didn't make the ones in this picture, but when i made the cupcakes they didn't seem to last long enough for me to take a picture. that's a good sign, right? i didn't make it with the same strawberry icing, i just used some homemade whipped cream. after a VERY long search for the perfect buttercream icing, i just decided to give up. i soon realized that i never really liked icing... at parties i would always just eat the cake part, pushing the icing to the side. whipped cream always has a subtle sweetness to it, which i like more than the overly sweet buttercream.

mmm. whipped cream... :9

All American Food

this week was a lot more eventful than i thought it would be. thursday the new Chick-fil-a was opening here, so of course i had to check it out. Chick-fil-a has this promotion where the first 100 customers in a new location get a year of free chicken sandwich meals. long long story short, they decided to give it to the first 120 customers instead, and guess what number i was? 124. gay gay gay.

the reason why i woke up so early. mmm.

the crazy asses who tented out all night for free sandwiches. i even saw someone unpack a whole couch. ugh.

the rest of the day was good though. i got to embarrass myself continually, got to rant with laura and reinalyn, and just chill and watch tv with them (Saved By the Bell and Yo Gabba Gabba!). i also got to see chris' house for the first time. i still can't believe he has a house cleaner. we did a lot of spontaneous stuff on a day where i just expected to get breakfast and go home. :)

later that night i left home to spend the weekend with my cousins. on friday stacey and i baked an apple pie. god pies are tedious. but i had fun making it, and at least this time around i had some company for help.

there it is, in all it's gloriousness. i'd say it's pretty good for the first time that either of us has made a pie.

later we ate lunch at (where else?) Chick-fil-a and then stacey took me to Trader Joe's for the first time. so many choices! i ended up buying dried hibiscus flowers, mainly because i was just curious. i mean, it's supposed to be like dried fruit but it really looked like a bag of dried sea creatures. who could resist? anyway, it ended up just tasting like a really big dried cranberry, something i think should be eaten in small proportions. let's just say i only ate one of them.

after one of her friends showed up we started making cranberry oatmeal cookies, but alas, they turned out really weird (hence, no pictures). there wasn't as many cookies as promised in the recipe and they ended up tasting like dried cake and just looking like mounds of stuff. several hours after, i realized that we forgot to add the brown sugar. i was so disappointed in myself!!! augh!

saturday was fun as well. after dropping by my cousin's aunt's birthday party, kelley, aimee, and i ventured to the OC Fair, which was riddled with traffic and bad drivers. when we actually got to the fair we wandered around trying to find some good fair food and this is what we came up with:

sigh. frog legs. what a disappointment. for $13 all we got was 2 sets of frog legs on top of fries and a soda. lame. they don't taste that bad; it tasted like a combination between fish and chicken meat, but i don't think it's worth trying again. blech.

classic kielbasa and sauerkraut. the kraut definitely tasted different from what i've tried before. i just want to know, is it supposed to be soft or crunchy?


the ferris wheel! too bad we didn't ride it this time, but i thought it would be nice just to add a pic of it. haha. isn't it pretty?

the very last ride we rode, Dizzy Dragon. it made my arms and my stomach hurt.

i've decided i probably need to stay in a little more this week, as my sunburn from last week finally started peeling. also, i need to put my internal clock back in place. everything always seems a day off for some reason. :P