he vuelto//bagels.

He vuelto {I'm back}.

Yes I'm learning Spanish. But how do I learn during the summer, without formal classes to guide? One way is to regurgitate everything I am thinking in English into Spanish.

solid method.

I haven't posted in a while, and that's because posting hasn't been my priority. Traveling as a Teaching Assistant, you reserve less time for what you're doing and thinking and spend more time doing and thinking things with your colleagues and students.

But ahora, he vuelto. So, I'll indulge. With bagels. Let's begin with this short video:

Food Science understanding adapted from thekitchn.com

Ingredients. 

This recipe is adapted from Margaret Anne's "Best Homemade Bagels".

Yield: 8 bagels [Today's making yielded 7 –– we lost some dough along the way]

Time: at least 3 hours.

Le Dough:

• 1½ CUPS warm water (Margaret's recipe calls for the water to be 110° F – I didn't have a thermometer)
• 1 TABLESPOON active dry yeast (a little more than the yeast in one of those Fleischmann's packets)
• 1 TABLESPOON brown sugar (I didn't have brown sugar either – scroll to the bottom for what I did to cope)
• 4 CUPS flour (I used all-purpose unbleached)
• 2 TEASPOONS salt

Le Water Bath:

• 8 CUPS water
• 2 TABLESPOONS brown sugar (one again, what did I do to cope? scroll down)

Directions.

1.) Pour the water into the bowl, and sprinkle in the yeast and brown sugar. Let sit 5 minutes. Add in the flour & salt and mix (you can mix with a mixer, but I don't like to use mixers. I use spoons & hands). A dough is now formed. Knead the dough gracefully for 10 minutes, like I did below: 

2.) Place the dough in a greased bowl (I greased the bowl using the bare end of a stick of butta), cover with a kitchen towel or cling wrap, and let rest for 1-1.5 hours.

resting just to rise. so poetic.

eyes targeting individual messes. not so poetic.

3.) Transfer the dough to a floured work surface. Divide the dough into 8 equal parts to shape into balls. Punch a hole in the middle of each ball and swirl the thing around your finger with its tip on the top of your work surface. Cover whatcha got with a kitchen towel and let rest for 30 minutes.

it's the bro. 

his hands were too lovely up there to the right so i made them black & white

these are my hands tho.

4.) While the dough is resting (to save time, of course), prepare the water bath by heating the water and brown sugar to a gentle boil. I was going to use a large pot, by Margaret recommended a wok. I didn't have a wok, so I used a large sauté pan.

upstage – what i was going to use

downstage – what i actually used

5.) Preheat the oven to 425° F. Re-poke a hole through the center of each ball, as some holes may have closed over. Swirl the dough on your finger to stretch the hole, like you did before.
Place each newly-swirled bagel on a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking sheet.

6.) Transfer the bagels to the simmering water, four at a time. Simmer the bagels for 2 minutes, flip over, and simmer for another minute.

7.) Use the end of a wooden spoon to remove the bagels from the water and return to the baking sheet.

8.) Ah! Because you preheated your oven, it is now hot. Bake the bagels for about 25 minutes, or until they look like the best NYC bagel you've never had.

9.) Transfer the bagels to a cooling rack 5 minutes before serving. Serve with whatever you'd like. You probably already have something on your mind...

Cream cheese ~ Lox ~ Butta ~ Bacon ~ Eggs ~ Cheese~ Bacon, Egg, & Cheese ~ Peanut Butter.

Y'all know I tend to opt for the PB. I won't add an end photo here because I don't want to perpetuate bagel paragons. You make what you make. 

enjoy.

****brown sugar note:

this was why I did not have brown sugar.

so I made brown sugar instead! 1 tbsp molasses for every cup of white sugar.

All videos made with Splice Video Editor by GoPro. Download it here --> it's free!

fear//make.french.toast

It is finals week here in college world! What an in to a discussion of FEAR.

I've been thinking about FEAR because I feel it, I'd say, 95% of the time, at least a little bit. A sense of FEAR seems to be perpetually looming. Both its presence and its absence come in waves. The FEAR waves just permeate less suddenly, and for longer.

hello i am either FEAR or no FEAR!!!!!!!!!

In the past two days, FEAR has turned from a feeling to an explicit thought. FEAR has ceased soaking the background of my consciousness and is now dripping in a puddle of its own pee downstage. FEAR is wet; like liquid, it pours. And recently, FEAR has been soaking up the spotlight–and is able to be seen through, for now. 

Flows of FEAR are usually followed by an ebb; now they are consciously monitored, analyzed, deliberated. Part of this temporary change, I think, was inspired by Liz Garbus' documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? I had heard about the flick for a while, and decided to see for myself what all the speculation was about. I am not going to make the space here for the discussion that her life and legacy deserve, but I recommend that you watch the doc. 

FEAR is also centerstage, downstage to Garbus' investigation into the musician's life and career. It is often humbling to remember that FEAR affects most people, even those who seem to have no reason to fear anything at all.

Maybe that's the relationship! I thought. Maybe it's as direct as that:

freedom = no FEAR. 

The absence of FEAR leads to freedom; freedom is only experienced in the absence of FEAR.

In appreciation of the human ability to THINK about THOUGHTS, I wrote a little thing:

what I could do if I had no fear!

how would i do it?:

extract the amygdala there are two and they are almonds but especially on the right

side 

rip it out 

with the fear of anaphylaxis from the one allergic

to tree nuts.

FEAR ancestors who were fearful lived by skirting

situations and saying 'that does not seem safe' while hiding

in caves.

but we are safe! we are safe in piles of laundry

still with this fear of having

nothing to put it into nothing

to promise a ripping out of.

it comes to malaise

I BECOME the cave.

think about my strange position!:

I am not the one seeking shelter;

I am not the predator;

I am the cave!

just standing and people

may visit. looking

for something.

i may see threat growing 

from the outside!

but i am standing

and i do not know how big I am.

I'm hoping to turn this stream of consciousness into a poem, but I believe that streams of consciousness are poems, too. 

This blog helps me face fear. By writing, I challenge fear with words. Every time I sit down to write a post, my syntax is shaking; I'm afraid that my points can't be articulated due to some inherent incapacity to communicate. 

But this is communicating.

I would like to think that the feeling will go away, that this will all get easier. Maybe for things to 'get easier', I will need to look straight through FEAR; maybe FEAR will go away when I look straight through it; maybe staring through what I don't want to even THINK about leads to freedom. 

If that 5% of the time that I don't feel FEAR is freedom, I could quantify its existence by assessing if, somehow, the FEAR waves begin to ebb 6%, 10%, 50% of the time.

If I could have that, half of my life, no fear.

If you are soaking in fear, try soaking bread instead. Ready for french toast, love?

VEGAN FRENCH TOAST RECIPE. 

IN CAPITALIZED COURIER TYPEFACE.

LET ME TELL YOU,IT ALL BEGINS WITH A BANANA IN SOYMILK AND FEAR.

this recipe does, anyway.

VEGAN FRENCH TOAST ON A SUNDAY.

INGREDIENTS: 

-2 slices of hard, stale bread that you were about to throw away before you saw this. (I used wimpy bread. I should have used hard, stale bread. There's where the name comes from, after all: pain perdu, or "lost bread".)

-1 nanner (banana yeh)

-1 cup soymilk or whatevermilk.

-cinnamon, vanilla extract, and nutmeg to taste.

PROCEDURE: 

1.) Pour whatever walk of milk you have in a blender or food processor. I used a nutribullet and am lucky to have one.

2.) Tear your nanner in 3 or 4 pieces and drop them in that lovely pool of whatevermilk. I feel like "tear" is not apt for describing what I advise you do to the banana.

3.) Sprinkle cinnamon and nutmeg in there, too.

4.) Blend all that up in your handy machine.

hah! get it? handy?

5.) Pour that mixture into a bowl and dip your (not wimpy) bread into it.

 

+

wimpy bread from Wegmans.

=

6.) Pour oil or butter in a pan. Remember to keep it vegan if you want to keep this recipe vegan. Vegetable oil, canola oil, and butter are good alternatives to animal products.

have no fear! the wimpy bread soaked it up already!

you are on my mind//

For example, a group of neurons in a monkey's visual association area on the temporal lobe respond only when it looks at a specific person (Young & Yamane, 1992). This suggests that activity in those neurons tells the brain/mind that the monkey looks at that specific person. So the next time you see your best friend, remember that you can see him/her because a few thousand neurons in the visual association area of your temporal lobe have become active. Give them a pat on the back for the great job they do for you, without you even asking.

~~~Thank you Indiana University

(Click on photo for link)

sense-making and breathing//from the editor's desk

Art plays with cognition. We can say the art process is strategic, leading to the works of geniuses and production of masterpieces. But the objects of these accolades pool at our brainstems; they wrap around the medulla oblongata (follow my cranial nerve analogy here), a structure essential to vital functions such as blood flow and breathing.

Music, for instance, delivers us our own humanity and we applaud. It introduces us to ourselves, and slowly. Setting the keys of symphonies.

The key of G, the key of C… they calibrate a range of notes, set a spectrum of all frequencies one deems suitable for hearing in the same piece. Following the examples, root notes can be G or C which would tend to set the realms of their pieces, the aura of the notes surrounding them.

Now how do staffs and orchestras introduce us to ourselves? They make us want to realize something without even knowing it, and then help us realize it slowly.  Most of the music-writing and music-playing is done to prep our ears for some eventual eruption, some crescendo, which we would find startling if we hadn’t been implicitly and slowly processing its rumblings. A bridge to a chorus offers a good example: Maybe the notes of the bridge inch a bit closer to the tune, tempo, and/or notes in the chorus. This eases us into it. A swift progression from verse to chorus would, on the other hand, sound a bit jarring, at least in Western cultures. That’s why we call such music “experimental.”

And what about lovers in films, who preface the loving with insinuating interest? It’s tasteless when they embrace each other out of nowhere. Some call it bad on the part of the director. In coffee shops we seem unstable when we immediately confide all our private insecurities in another without first hinting at those peculiar neuroticisms. Hinting is done slowly, in a midnight battery of texts or at the moment you lose your earring, and prepare each end of the possibility, with eyes strategically dodging each other and assembling with the steam of tepid coffees, for the holy glory complexities of what a relationship could bring.

disclaimer: this is not entirely accurate; there is no "left-brained" or "right-brained" personality. each hemisphere is needed in processing, but each does offer a unique orientation to tasks and behavior.

but again, it is not like only one side of your brain knows how to have fun, or be creative.

We process things more quickly and to our satisfaction when they are embraced by both hemispheres of the brain. Take movies, dancing, or, again, symphonies; the sequential is complemented by the spatial. Music’s logic and progression pick up on the scene, movement, or tone, and the latter three pick up on the logic and progression. Everything feeds off each other. Moments like these successfully deliver what would otherwise take time to understand (e.g. emotions, love, tension) The immediacy of them make enough sense to halt breathing, the process which makes the most sense of all. 

To survival, anyway. Maybe that’s why sometimes it feels okay to die. Things can suddenly make enough sense that the essential mechanism to living must be suspended, for a little while.

Do we only keep on breathing because things don’t quite make sense yet   ?

Take-home message:

 love your medulla oblongata

                                             and art is anything that leads you to abuse it

ps imma try to post a recipe soon i swear this is still a food blog

shaking negativity//sequence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmDAk4j3RDA

Document art?

Document groove

Document shaking

negativity

~in sequence~

my hippocratic oath//presidential valentines

Notes from the notebook of yours truly:

Neuropsych, 1/31/2016

Clinical and Lesion Studies: Relating Brain Damage to Abnormal Behavior:

Clinical and lesion studies focus on identifying brain effects (specifically, brain lesion effects) on behavior. 

Clinical studies look at cases in humans, do not inflict harm; lesion studies look at cases in animals after manipulating brain tissue.

            
Notable Clinical studies: Medical Observations

                        (e.g., Hippocrates, Galen, Broca, Wernicke)

Hippocrates (460-380 BC) believed the “brain hypothesis” – that the organ that influences all senses and movement is in fact the brain.

-He was one of the first to deny epilepsy as proof of demonic possession.

-Hippocrates was also the first to note that the brain processes information and controls the body contralaterally.

Learning about "key" historical figures is like testing your faith in iconography. When individuals are wrapped in accolades, deemed the harbingers of some great and no-longer-to-be-questioned discovery, I wonder: was Hippocrates, a Greek physician, “father of medicine,” really the FIRST, or the ONLY ONE, to think these things?

Probably none of which was written by him??!?!

I tend to need some insight beyond this computer's Apple dictionary to define my own understanding. PBS is a good, corroborating source:

While Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, lived in the early 5th century B.C., the famous oath that bears his name emerged a century later. No one knows who first penned it.

Often I'm afraid that what I learn is lying to me. Sometimes the syllabus seems to gloss over, simplify things indefinitely. I hear and see that these people did these things and are these things and webbed some sophisticated finding into society's modern network of knowledge. 

But I find it difficult to think that someone was the sole "discoverer" of anything. And when every textbook tells you so, it's like doubting your own birth certificate as proof of your existence.

We really just need a face, someone to look to; a body to wear the cape of some concept. Because if we said this was just "Medicine's Oath," what possible version of ourselves would be available to believe in?

Valentine's day is bordered by Presidential birthdays.

Coincidence??!?!?!

(this person loves iconography)

pore over this//donald trump

While reading an article today, a phrase caught this computer's Apple dictionary:

you may think this blog post is politically relevant so far. i agree.

The article can be found on OZY.com. Wikipedia simplifies what this media service is and how it started:

We'll talked more about OZY later. but what gets me this article's phrase, gradually and strategically magnified through screenshots: pore over. Sounds poetic. But what does it mean?

Okay, I know what pores are; I can blame episodes of inflamed insecurity on inflammation-decrying skin commercials. But openness does not seem to be what the phrase "pore over" is referring to:

Hmmm. Being totally focused on something seems the negation of an opening through which microscopic particles can pass.

this pic is suggesting I pore over pores.

I'm thinking more. Maybe my poetic suspicion of the phrase–although used in discussion of Donald Trump–is on to something. This Apple Dictionary isn't even sure "pore" is related to "peer," which, as a verb, seems relevant:

perhaps?

So if English uses the word "pore" to describe perforations in your human exterior, but also uses it to describe a human genuinely dedicating effort to something, then can "poring over" describe the process of making one's entire being a hole, and allowing that something to pour over and through?

don't even get me started on standard English.

If you're interested in the rest of that OZY article, click the pic below: