Take bread out of microwave, switch on microwave and heat up meat product, take butter out of fridge, put butter in microwave, pick up butter knife from drying rack thing, take butter out of microwave, butter bread, put butter back in fridge, wash and put butter knife back on drying rack thing, take out meat product, add sauce, eat.

—

Today’s quote

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

In this vein, I have convinced myself that I will throw myself face first at making something that will in turn create change. From the same book, “Those who don’t build must burn”. Currently two paths exist. “Work” work, as in the regular job, and whatever the hell my friends or I come up with.

I was at the supermarket again the other day, eyeing the processed meat section. I’ll have to switch to using some kind of chicken or fish soon. But not right now. I found a pack of Sam’s sausages(remember that midget mascot running around with a bunch of kids?), weighing like a ton, for a few hundred bucks. I may be exaggerating about the weight. But it had way more than an equivalently priced cargills pack.

Oh good God, I’m talking about food and cooking on ASOB, NQIM. Where are the axe wielding barbarians and kick-ass ninjas? Verily, the twenty twelve prophesy is coming true.

So yes, I decided to get a little imaginative and threw in a bunch of chopped up onions, chili and ginger. It was pleasing to the palate.

Looks like I might not meet with a grisly death at the hands of a sentient food processor sent on the rampage by my refusal to use it, after all.

—

In other news, there’s this quote I just can’t get over.

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know”, Alice answered. “Then”, said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Went snooping around this “super market” thing. Lots of peculiar objects on the shelves. Bought things like bread(doesn’t grow on trees! lolwut?), sausages, cereal and cow juice to go with the cereal. I’m set-up for at least a few weeks. Days. A couple of days, at least.

Googled “super simple roti recipe” and found a blogpost by a kindred spirit, explaining how to make basic chapattis. Took at least fifteen minutes, I think. The ROI on this cooking thing is too small for my taste(see what I did there? Ba-dam-tssss).

Not dead yet, so I’m guessing the chapattis were alright. Should find a few test subjects to test future meals. Next week, perhaps chicken. At least, chicken that’s been cut up by the supermarket attendants. I have no desire to handle intestines and things.

Note: Must find way to breed chicken without intestines and other non-appealing parts. Some form of tree-grown chicken maybe?

Note 2: Any of you want free samples of (more or less) cooked chicken? Running trials to ascertain the minimum amount of cooking needed to avoid de-… to avoid addiction to delicious chicken.

Over the new year, I got a bunch of texts wishing me(Captain [censored]), a happy new year, from (all kinds of people). There were even a message from some Major who was in the UK at the moment.

This still happens, occasionally. Someone calls, asks if I am not the esteemed captain, confirms my number, and hangs up after apologizing.

The story doesn’t quite end there, though. I also get calls for a “Mr. Jayasekera”. Or something. I once got three calls from the same number, a secretary, convinced that she had dialed the wrong number, kept calling and finding me on the other end. I politely told her “No, this isn’t he. Alright.”, “No, you just called me five seconds ago.” and “No. Yes. Me again. Sorry”. I could practically hear her blushing her way through it.

Then there are the calls from what sounds like a carpenter’s workshop. A voice asks for Mr. J, straining to be heard over the occasional burst of a power saw, timing sentences to make the hammer in the background fall into place where the silences would be.

I’d be interested in knowing how this number had such an illustrious journey through two owners. Maybe it’s some elaborate prank that someone’e pulling on me, the punchline of which is still being worked up to. Hmm.

You know what’s ridiculous? Batteries. Why batteries, you ask? Batteries never did anything ridiculous, you maintain.

I maintain that the release dates of major gaming titles should be religious holidays but that doesn’t make it happen, does it? Batteries are evil. Each and every one of them.

When I was a kid, I used to go through a lot of Eveready batteries. Now these are just like any other battery, except their hearts are full of hatred. Most toys needed at least two of the suckers. One day I got  a new toy monster truck(BADASS, yes), and hurriedly popped over to the shop across the road to get six batteries with some money I managed to whine out of my mother. Six shiny new Eveready batteries with the jumping cat thing on them. Boundless energy, it whispered to my young mind.

About four minutes later I was urging it, complete with angered scowl on my face, to start moving again. On flat ground. It moved if I gave it a little nudge from behind, but then that stopped too.

Remember folks, Eveready feeds on the tears of children. They’re good for TV remotes. I tried it much later on a digital camera, and the thing took three pictures, then died without even pulling the lens back in.

Energizer, whenever it was available due to it being more expensive, got about an hour or so of driving around the back yard. An hour is a terribly short time for a kid when he’s having fun. Especially when it involves running over your sister’s dolls with a monster truck.  This was madness. This was devastating.

So started my blood feud with battery technology.

Briefly, there was hope when my father took a set of rechargeable batteries from an ancient cellphone and stuck them on the back of the truck, but that only worked for the monster truck. The other cars eyed it enviously.

Today, a good thirty or so years after batteries got really popular, we’re still checking battery life on phones. Wireless technologies consume a lot of power. With current battery tech, Wifi might as well have us flinging 1.5v cells at the router. What is up with this? I recently read an article on improving battery endurance by ten times or something like that. I’m assuming a usable product might show up in a hundred years or so.

This, as you know, is unacceptable. I want my devices to last forever dammit. I don’t care if it lets me videocall people on the other side of the planet, or if it tells me near instantly when someone sends me a tweet. Networks, bitches. They’ve existed for decades, get over it. They could hook you up to someone on the Moon if they wanted to.

Why can’t someone invent boxer shorts that generate electricity, or heat pads that convert body heat to usable energy? Hell, I don’t care if I have to get a USB port on my neck if it means not having to charge a blasted battery again.

Just got back from Retractive, a concert of retro music(allegedly) at the Warehouse Project in Maradana. The warehouse project seems pretty interesting - http://www.warehouseproject.lk/. Copy sounds very hipster-ish but they seem to be doing some good work with the local kids. LEARN, a project to teach the local kids english and things is also run out of the warehouse, you can contact Ruwan from Beyondborders for more info or to volunteer. Or Mel from the warehouse project. I think.

But anyway,

The music was meh-ish. The artists were just… alright. I can’t complain since my musical abilities only extend as far as awkwardly tapping my feet in tune(hopefully) to the beat. It wasn’t particularly retro either, but again, I’m not complaining since it was the likes of the Goo Goo Dolls and Sting. If that’s retro, then I’m far older than I consider myself to be.

We left the premises around 9:30, meandered for a while and ended up playing foosball. An hour later I was in Pettah waiting for a bus again. Time was about 11pm, on a Saturday. Prime time for drunk dudes to do the four-legged walk home. After getting off the bus that brought me there, I passed behind a pair of old men sitting on the curb, wearing their sarongs in what I shall just call a “screw decency, and anyone who happens to walk in front of us” fashion. They were debating the pros and cons of walking home to where they live in Maharagama. I did not inquire about public transport and availability.

Past the CTB stand, and into the whatchamacallit road to see if there were any buses in there. The one leading to the Gunasinghepura stand and the gas works. I’ve never actually seen anything like a gas works in that area, though. Granted, in my mind a gas-works would be a giant steam-punk-esque structure billowing steam from various tubes and crevices.

Near the public toilets, off in the shadows I saw a bunch of young gentlemen who I can describe only as brown skin-heads. Nose rings, large tattoos, bugger-off face, sleeveless tshirts, shiny denims and more cigarettes than you can shake an excise duty officer at. A little past the brain trust, a young lady sidles up to me and asks “ayye, kohomada?” (or “how you doin’?”). I say “uh, hondai” (or, “eiiiiieeeeeiiiiii”), freeze for a bit and walk faster towards the buses, staring straight ahead.

Finally I spot a bus just pulling out of the gas-works area, a 1. Bus route no. 1 is the Colombo-Kandy bus, a matter of great pride to anyone living along the Kandy road. We have the number one bus! Probably the first bus route to exist! Take that, Highlevel road. We had buses when you were still whipping cows along the cobbled mess you called a highway. Probably.

So I get in and sit down. Eventually all the seats are taken, and the bus sets off. A dude starts singing some sinhalese song. I don’t know what. Sue me. Something about fair skin and “meeting you, my dear, where the flowers bloom”. Definite Retroactive material.  I get off the bus a few stops before my house, to grab dinner. Afterwards I look around for a three wheeler, see one parked nearby and head towards it. I ask the dude if he’s up for a fare. A voice from the back says, sleepily, “and who the hell are you?”. This is when I notice that there is someone sitting, or lying, in the back seat. The driver tells him to bugger off, shoos him away and tells me he’s sorry for the degenerates.

The starter handle hasn’t even dropped yet and the driver starts telling me about how drug addicts, like the one who was occupying his back seat earlier, are a terrible drain on society. He says they consume narcotics all day and wander around at night, demanding free transport. Apparently the few police officers he’s mentioned it to don’t do anything. “What families, children for those fellows”, says he, “all they do is steal anything they can get and buy more drugs. Am I supposed to do a 200 rupee fare for free? They are trying to dress us(or, ung apiwa andanda hadanawa)”. I go “huh” at the appropriate breaks in the speech. I hazarded a “yeah, totally” at one point but then he went “ah? ahhhh?” and I just went “uh, yeah”, and he continued with the local crime report.

Four minutes later I was unlocking the front door.

It’s just. Interesting living here.

—

I’ve gotten very self-conscious of what I put up here, all of a sudden. I feel like I’m being compared with all the bloggers who write well, and can’t help but feel a slight tinge of guilt, since I’m likely to feel like a slap to the face with a gym sock after reading some of the content out there, locally.

Salad by SliceOfChic

You might be wondering why there is a picture of a salad up there. Then again you might also be wondering why your life is such an empty husk, never to see fulfillment, forever to be lost in between the pleats of the skirt of life. Just like that blasted vanilla milkshake from the Deli France in Odel. Thing tasted like sawdust in water.

Last night I had a very strange dream. Yes, I know what that sounds like, and no, this has not turned into one of those blogs.

Just hear me out. It was fun. It involved a bunch of talking vegetables, me, and an evil mole. They say the faces you see in dreams are ones you’ve seen when you were awake, consciously or otherwise. I was relieved to find that all my companions in the dream had no faces, in that dreamy censorship kind of way, meaning I probably hadn’t seen any anthropomorphic vegetables anywhere.

Anyway,

I was standing outside a house. I was small. Apparently I was about vegetable-sized too. I turn around and there was a carrot, a… leek(?) and a cabbage behind me, all looking very agitated(don’t ask me how I knew this without seeing faces).

It turned out that we were a band of vegetables running away from a mole who was hunting us down to return us to his human master, who was apparently a cook. We were thrown into a wild adventure through the rain gutters and roofing tiles, jumping off ceiling fan blades and ducking into cabinets with the mole hot on our heels. The technicalities of a mole being able to even see where it was going, let alone being physically able to dangle off the edge of the roof didn’t occur to the escaped ingredients.

Eventually, we were joined by a pineapple, who had escaped some time later. He also brought about our demise, when just as we were running towards a little boat docked in a stream nearby, which was to take us to freedom, safety and the joy of slowly rotting away in a few days, the mole ambushed us, ordered his henchman the cat to burn the boat, and threw a net over the lot of us.

Turned out the pineapple had snitched on us to save himself. What followed was a slow montage of cooking scenes full of salads. Sauces never looked so terrifying. There was even a corny-teen-movie like sequence at the end, with credits and “the cabbage went on to be eaten by the Duke of Wellington” etc.

Breakfast was uncomfortable.

Click on it. Learn. That link is all about violence against women. What we don’t really hear about is violence against men. I didn’t think it was much of an issue till about last year either. Violence against men takes many forms, such as plain old domestic violence, molestation by employers(usually of under-aged boys) and refusing to make sandwiches.

BeyondBorders is doing a great job over at http://beyondborders.wordpress.com/tag/16-days/ by compiling a collection of images and brief descriptions for people to use freely to produce material for promoting campaigns like the 16 Days of GBV. Or GBV awareness, rather. You should contribute. There’s only about four days left and any contributions in the form of photographs or even just your take on GBV would be immensely appreciated.

With all you people wandering around with shiny new SLR’s, I’m surprised we haven’t been overrun by contributions, actually. It’s sickening. You get a chance to do something for the betterment of mankind and all you do is take pictures of your cat? Disgusting. I fart in your general direction. At the very least, submit one picture to keep the guilt-inducing voice of your conscience away, like I did. Looking for a good deed to do before Christmas brings you a lump of coal? Well, here’s your golden opportunity. I’m Gerald Pereira, and I demand that you contribute.

TL;DR?

Good/Bad guy reversed. His voice seemed the most appropriate.

So, The WMC is having a 16 days of activism thing -> http://srilanka16days.wordpress.com/ which hopes to inform people about gender based violence and things. I had no idea what gender based violence in Sri Lanka is like, so I googled it. There is some violence against men, but I couldn’t uncover much about that and the whole 16 days thing seems hell-bent on women. Apparently it’s mostly violence against women, usually takes place in domestic settings and is almost evenly distributed among all areas and societies.

This is not surprising. Women get enough shit as it is, what with passive aggressive blogposts that reek of discontent with the female populace by snarky post-adolescents and the whole internet thinking they belong in kitchens. It doesn’t help that the legal system doesn’t offer much solace for many victims, and only a small percentage of cases are actually reported at all. What this means is that well, it’s up to you to do something. *cue motivational speech*

Violence, be it domestic violence, sexual harassment or mental trauma do not go unnoticed, most of the time. Just like an excessive amount of commas in a sentence.

*ba dum chingggg*

Stop treating women like they’re some other species. I keep seeing people who are all “Oh yeah I respect women, totally man.” and then start spewing stereotypes like a confederate soldier. It’s not about respecting women, for Christ’s sake, it’s about respecting your fellow human beings. They are not from Venus, and no matter what you tell yourself, you’re not from Mars. All of us crawled out of the sea together. The female of the species did not accidentally crawl out of the sea and into a prehistoric kitchen, in which they’ve been stuck ever since.

Women, don’t let anyone tell you you’re anything less than the other gender. Even the little “You know no machang, women are like that”. Women are like what? Enlighten me, dear caveman. We’re not living in some 1940′s Disney movie. There’s an infinite amount of things to get over, like parents raising their children to believe women are the fairer sex, people’s primitive instincts to assault anyone weaker than them and inane cultural influences designed to keep men in power. You have to start somewhere, I guess.

After that(a Samsung X100), it was a string of regular phones till early this year when my Sony G705 was replaced by a Nokia E71, a real live smartphone. Although by then it was well past its prime and got paper balls thrown at it with accompaniments of “stop drooling on your lunch you senile old man!” by the other, more powerful smartphones.

It had an OS that could actually run full applications. I felt like I was creating world peace every time it synced with my Google account in the background. Symbian was old and creaking, but it was still an actual smartphone OS. It was a mini computer, complete with an accessible filesystem, applications and all the little things that made it feel like one. A mini computer from 2004, but still, a computer.

A few months ago I was thinking of getting a smartphone. I was hell-bent on Windows Phone, because it looked pretty and, I thought, wasn’t as restrictive as iOS. I got my hands on an iPod touch for work stuff. A few weeks later I was wondering what the definition of a smartphone was.

After learning that Windows Phone was just as restrictive, if not more so, than iOS, my dreams of mobile computing lay shattered, in ruins, in a pile next to my dreams of becoming a professional foot-model. The most important thing about these phones that I missed was file system access. How can you call a device smart if it can’t download and store a random file off the internet? Even my router gives me basic access to its folder structure. I mean, my old Sony Ericsson dumbphone let me see what was on my memory card. Windows and iOS, while very pretty, felt so very wrong. They do their thing very well, but that thing isn’t exactly full-featured computing. That thing could better be described as a thing that-

Anyway, a few weeks ago I got myself a Galaxy S. Running Android. Only a few months ago I would have balked at it as a badly hacked together linux window manager, but honestly, I’ve been enjoying it far more than I should be. It just feels right. It lets me do things like unmounting the cache partition and re-mounting it somewhere else with more space, and installing different kernels(after making a backup to a PC on the network, of course), just for the heck of it. Most of all, it feels like a computer.

I can see why a lot people would prefer other OS’s. They’re more phone/internet-device-thingy than full fledged computers, and they set the bar on what things should be designed like. But for myself, I prefer Android, with its frustrating UI issues and downright retarded battery life*. It’s not a phone’s fault batteries are evolving at the same pace as women’s collective ability to drive. It’s just a matter of time till they figure out a way to run phones off people’s fat. But then again, I don’t see a sudden upturn in the graph for female F1 drivers either(Though this might be a good thing). One can hope.

True story.

* Managing about a day’s use now but it’s hard to track with my current sleep cycles which fluctuate like a dog’s opinion of you when you step on his tail(whinewhine it hurts! I hate you whine grin lick lick wag tail, anyone?).

** Christmas is coming up!

*** Watched Mulan. For the first time. Totally crushing on a cartoon character.