Brrr.

Fatigued.
I'm tired.

So, a lot of people on the vegan blogsphere are making posts about their 'go to' foods, or their comfort foods. I thought i'd go ahead and share mine with you all, since i've been eating it rather often of late.

Now, let me preface this by stating that I am an 80 year old woman, and you cannot judge little old ladies on the things they eat. Not many of you know it, but deep down inside i'm that little old lady who cringes at roller coasters and microwaves, the one who rinses out ziplock bags to use again. I'm rather proud of this, and I think it's rather sexy (just cause theres snow on the roof doesn't mean theres no fire in the oven, eh? eh?).In this same vein, my Oma (another small, old lady) has two sets of things she cooks- one set for other people, and one set for her. She constantly claims that the things she likes to eat no one else likes- they represent the strange and unmarketable culinary misfits that she deems good enough for her but not good enough for anyone else. I can sympathize with her, because i feel this way about a number of the foods i like to eat. This is why i do not offer them to people. I, like my Oma, know that i can cook 'better', but 'better' is not necessarily what i prefer. Case in point, my comfort food.

Boiled Sweet Potatoe.

Unseasoned, rather mushy, still in tuber form, boiled sweet potatoe.
Lately the one's i buy from market fit perfectly, cut in half, in the rice cooker pot i throw on the table top burner in the kitchen. I boil these suckers, shucking peanuts while watching the pot in my below the knee cashmere coat (the kitchen is inhumane amounts of cold), and then retire to my room with two plain halves of a boiled sweet potatoe in a bowl.
It's sweet potatoe heaven.

Then i take out my dentures for the night and crawl into bed.
But seriously, what can match the pure unadulterated delight that is warm, mushy, boiled sweet potatoe? Skin all soft though still adding that toothsome edge to counteract the soft and yielding sunset hued flesh? Okay, maybe i do enjoy them too much. Fuck it.

What else has been up lately? More job searching, bearing little though some fruit for my labors. The roomies and i have hauled a concrete block onto the rooftop patio above my room for a makeshift fireplace. We fill it with logs and huddle around it under the darkening, pollution tinged winter sky. We roast things in it. We are hunting for a cast iron so we can make baked goods. We shall be triumphant beijing gods of winter.

On a side note, while i wait for scottie to boil us some tea, i'll tell you what happened between the last paragraph and this line.

Scottie came home, hollered ahoy across the courtyard and shambled off to his room. Shrugging on my coat I went after and stole some of his ever so potent (it's got the taste and consistency of congealed jager) chinese herbal throat medicine stuff. Then we shambled over to the kitchen and did what two sick room mates suffering the Beijinger pre-winter weather do: downed raw cloves of garlic. Ohad, le Israeli roomie, insists this will make us better. I took mine, like a little 80 year old lady, unadulterated and pure. Scottie had to do his in glasses of water. Pansy.
Now what we refer to as "the garlic shivers" are descending, so i'm going to go to sleep. For those of you who have never munched your way through a handful of raw garlic cloves, the stuff makes you feel really, really weird.
l
ove&luz

jess

Excelllent

This post comes to you from my insulated and well heated room, in the middle of a dark hutong in Beijing.

I'm sorry i haven't been posting too much of late, but ive been running around town trying to get work and trying not to freeze and trying not to be sick.

So far only one of those has been accomplished, and it's only been kind of sort of accomplished halfway. I've got a little work but not a whole lot- thats something that will hopefully change soon enough. I've definately frozen many times over, and only truly manage to defrost moments before i am forced to re-submerge myself in the icy outdoors that currently compromise all of northern china. as for the sicksies part, well, i'm not as sick as i could be! hurrah! i'm going to keep saying that until the day i get another kidney stone. to me that will hold as the epitome of horrid, horrid illness.

on the upside i'm having a swanky coat tailor made for me in a lovely dark, dark blue. it's going to come down past my knees and once i have it HOHO! look out world. Jessie just might be warm. All i need now are gloves, socks, and boots. Yahtzee!

So as much as i love you all and miss you, im going to lay down now and go to sleep so that i can work on eradicting the last of my jetlag and attempt to overcome my illness before it gets too nasty.

love&luz
jessie

The jing.

Oh goodness.

Lets start off by giving a huge round of applause to Korean Air, which provided me with the most enjoyable 10 hour flight i've ever had. Not only did i have a row of 5 seats all to myself (ALL TO MYSELF), but i had two correctly vegan meals, a warm and large blanket, headphones provided, a travel kit including thick woolen socks, a toothbrush, and a mentholated (MENTHOLATED) eyemask graciously given me, free alcohol (only some wine to help me sleep, nothing like what went down that first flight to china...) but the bathroom was huge and included a full length mirror. Yay for Korean Air.

The layover in Seoul was grey and uneventful. I was accosted by some Christians in the Seoul airport, which was a little alarming. Besides that, the airport was much like both Beijing and Narita. More like Narita, cause the new portion of the Beijing airport is so large and cold feeling, but both Seoul and Narita feel cozier and have more bustling shops.

Getting to Beijing I took the new subway train from the airport into the city (so convenient) and then with a few transfers was being met by Scottie at the trainstation. We navigated through some seriously serious hutongs, and then found ourselves at his little home away from home. It's so beautiful. You walk into a courtyard through red double doors (which are standard in Beijing hutongs) in the middle of which grows and immense oak tree. The rooms all radiate off the courtyard, including a kitchen and two bathrooms. Theres Wifi. Theres heating. Theres lovely peace and quiet in the middle of Beijing. It's beautiful. I'm so pleased- theres even a rooftop patio!

Sigh. When i'm feeling more up to it i'll describe how the walls in the courtyard are covered in Indian-esque murals of various Goddesses and the rooms are filled with antique wood furniture (the owner, apparently, used to run an antique shop). I can't imagine a more lovely place to be staying.

Well, maybe if i could ship a few certain someones over from Hawaii, and set up a similar flat for my folks across the way, then i could. But then i wouldnt be making new lifelong friends and i'd be mired in the comfort of familiarity, so i suppose this is better anyway :)

miss you guys and love you
jess

Jessie Goes to Beijing

Not a take off of Debbie Does Dallas, I assure you.
So the news is in, I'm returning to the motherland, and that means that this blog is going to get more play than it has been lately.

Unlike me, who will be getting less play than i have been lately (sorry dad, oma still can't read the blog...)

Yes, I'm aware that the blog's most avid fans will likely be my parents, but as they are two of the most important people in my life I'm okay with that (hi mom, hi dad *geeky wave*), and as theyre the two that like to hear from me the most it's only apropos.

Now on to what i've been contemplating today while packing (by packing i mean, sitting at my laptop with a cup of tea stealing glances at my pile of things, spread across the floor of the apartment). In saying my goodbyes I've come to value silence over words. When i begin the whole "like, im leaving and want to tell you how much you mean to me" thing, I flounder about and never really get at what i'm trying to say. I try to build up to the big thing that i want to say with other 'clarifying' explanations of my feelings, and then end up stuck in the 'clarifications' without ever reaching what it is i'm attempting to clarify (pointless much?). So I've come to feel, why muck about trying to move ever so tactfully through the mire of emotions when focusing on the moment and companionship will likely bear better fruit? Can we ever really impart to another individual an exact meaning anyway? Words that hold specific emotions for me may hold a completely different set of emotions for someone else, regardless of the broader meaning. If i verbalize an emotion it's not guaranteed that what my listener hears will hold my intended meaning, will make them feel whatever way i want them to feel anyway. In that regard I've also come to feel as though my attempts at telling my loved ones that i love them is a little selfish- not all the time mind you, but at least currently. I feel better, more secure, more validated even if i feel i've made it clear to those i love how much i love them. It's almost as if i'm trying to elbow some room for myself inside of the people i love. Lame.

Which is why i've opted for some silence, which i like a lot. When it comes down to it after all of the mitigating emotions that make me feel as though this relationship or that relationship differs in this way or that way (blahblahblibbityblah) all that i'm really trying to say to anyone is "i appreciate you, and i know when i see you again i'll be happy".

jess.

Stereo

killed the live performance artist?

anyway, this little quickie is coming at you directly from the inner sanctum of an overly air conditioned (life is better refrigerated, goddamn it!) coffee shop in honolulu. It comes to you as i wait for someone to return with a car and then take me to a different food selling type place. As such, this post may end abruptly. Oh the spontaneity!

What is going on lately, you ask? Not much, I answer. On the short walk from the bus stop to my current location, I began to think about my frame of mind when iʻm working my ass off for my money (which is different and better than working my ass for my money) and when iʻm lolly gagging (which sounds like a dirty dirty past time) about. Its much easier to think that the world is made of rainbows and...oh god. the ride is here.

this will be continued and expanded at a later date.

Books

Are better than looks.
They are also what i read a lot of, lately.

Somewhere i fell out of the habit of reading for pleasure (save the rare piece of erotica...heh, get it? its a pun.). From elementary school through middle school and onto the middle segment of high school I was a voracious reader. Couldn't leave the house without a book on me, always looking for something new, constantly in middle of at least three different novels. And then it ground to a halt.

It ground to a halt around the time, if i recall correctly, that the writing stopped. By 'the' writing, I mean my writing. And now i find all of these things coming back to me.

and thusly i rejoice.

I think it had something to do with China. Trapped in a world with which i could communicate in only the most basic ways (food and sex being the two things i could easily procure) my conciousness turned in towards itself and began once again to produce. To reproduce, perhaps, in vain attempts to re-surround myself with the familiar. After all, writing and painting created an oasis of familiarity in foreign world. And now that I'm back home, I find these urges not only live on but flourish. Yay.

It feels as though something that had been pinned in place has now been let loose, and can circulate itself through out my system. Honey being stirred into hot water, warming and expanding, separating into translucent golden strands suspended in clear liquid. Thats it is, and i like it. It's good to be back in a place where i seek to create and experience with equal intensity. Having taken a step back and allowed time to drift past, drinking in emotional, physical, temporal and ethereal experiences my will is at last ready to drop back into the hustle and bustle of artistic energy. I am once again an active participant in the collective unconcious, up from a brief break by the sidelines.

Aren't you so happy to hear it?
blaow.

Guns and Cigarettes

Are what I'm cooler than.
It's been awhile, hasnt it? I doubt that anyone checks this dry shell of a blog, but oh well, blogging is nothing but masturbatory anyway right?

Let's get some updates going on hurr. The last blog as about...well, i think it was about being back from China was it not? I don't believe it was overly informative. I think i promised you stories that I'm not at this time prepared to deliver. Let's sidestep from those musings on the past and make this blog about what is really going down now that it so happens i'm back from China.

The first thing i'm doing is getting involved with things that i can be proud of, and living my life according to all of those beliefs that i have. What that means is, I work for Greenpeace and for a friend's landscaping company. You know, saving the world and preparing for the revolution. Don't tell the government i just said that (but the boats will stop coming someday...and at that point, well, i'd like to have a breadfruit tree or two). I'm outisde all day long no matter which job i'm at, working with either people or plants. Between me and you, I prefer the plants, but i guess that wasn't such a big secret anyway. Life is good on the island, and yet i still contemplate returning to china. Why? Persuing a personal journey, I suppose. I can either stay here and get over my inability to stay in one place for longer than 6 month at any given time (I haven't done that since i graduated high school) and continue to delve further and further into a sustainable and outdoorsy kind of life, or I can go back to China, make loads of money teaching while (and learning to become one with myself), and then travel down through Southeast Asia interacting with curiously foreign and intoxicating energies. It is a dilemma, if you will, of the physical over the spiritual.

Oh, conundrums. How skilled you are at pushing the dueling energies within me to points of unrest.

On the other hand, I'm taking up my art in ways i havent in quite a while. Writing, creating, growing and starting to silkscreen. Which is sexy. Yay for that. Yay for the place that i'm at for the time that i'm at it.
I love you guys, I'm going to go pee. Then get my things together and walk over to the intersection that I get to canvas today. Yay for accosting people about enviornmental issues (that 'yay' drips half-feigned half-real enthusiasm tinged with sarcasm, if you couldn't hear it through your computer screen).

Love&luz
jessie