It turns out, all you need to make an apartment feel a bit more like home is a nice bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. Of course getting the kitchen table in the first place helped a bit too.

The next plan of action is either to deal with the empty walls in the living room or get some living greenery around. I was going to plant a potato, seeing as how they’re already sprouting under my sink anyway, but I read on the internet that there’s a high chance of introducing a pest like a nematode or flatworm from planting regular grocery store potatos. I have enough trouble with fruit flies.

What I really need is a spurtle. Why shouldn’t I have a kitchen utensil whose sole purpose is to stir cheese sauce? And possibly other sauces. Assuming I ever learn how to make other sauces. The trick, I think, will be finding a store that still sells them.

It’s times like these — after I trudged through pouring rain only to find I forgot my McGill ID in my gym bag and thus can’t get into the Burnside building — when I wish everybody had ID chips implanted in their wrists. Add one entry in the database for McGill and I’d be all set.

Well, things were made a bit better by the news that Richard Dawkins will be coming to speak at McGill in October. Considering that Robert J Sawyer is doing a few public readings in Montreal that same week, I think my head might explode.

Earlier today I took part in an economics experiment. These things often involve a team setting where how much money you earn depends on the decisions you and your partners make. Usually your decisions are private, and while I find there is usually one way to optimize payment for everybody, people will always try to work things to get more for themselves.

Today, however, we had the option to disclose all sorts of information and discuss strategy. With everything out in the open, everybody was much more willing to cooperate and I ended up making a lot more than I would have had we all been working in secret.

Between that and the ID chip, I am once again convinced that we’d all be better off with a little less privacy. Less privacy regarding the solutions to my electromagnetism assignment would be a good start.

I invented my own pad thai recipe today and even though it looks kinda gross, it was really really good. It even sort of tasted like pad thai.

You’ll be disappointed if you came here looking for the recipe, though, because I don’t even know what it was. I just knew I had a craving for something spicy with peanuts, so I just started putting things in a pot until it started tasting like what I was craving.

Most had nothing whatsoever to do with pad thai sauce, but it worked out. I guess with a craving like that all I really needed was peanut butter and tabasco sauce. I think there were at least four other random sauces thrown in there too in an attempt to give it the right texture and flavour that I wanted. That’s how most of my cooking works.

It even started to get kinda gross at the last few bites, just like the pad thai you get in TikiMing (for the Montrealers) or Thai Hut (for the Saint Johners).

There is no destiny and there is no fate, but I believe in both.

It is impossible to change your destiny. If you believe you have, it only means that you didn’t really know what your destiny was. By definition you cannot avoid your destiny and you cannot change your fate, because whatever you do or become means that that was what you were destined to do or to become. Your fate is what happens to you.

Does this mean that everything is fixed in the world and you can’t do anything to change it? If you believe that, and so you give up on life, then it was your destiny to do that, but if you don’t and choose to continue living life then that was your destiny.

It is a paradox but one that contains no information and holds no problem to resolve. To me questions of fate and destiny don’t matter at all since they are concepts defined only by what happens, not what is meant to happen.

Though it may imply a fixed universe, it just as easily implies the other. Nothing is meant to happen, it just happens. It is Douglas Adams’ tautology that is “the prime cause of everything in the Universe“, “anything that happens happens.”

The world is ours.

My brain is capable of understanding a maximum of two languages: English and Other.

I took French lessons for an hour a day everyday for ten years as part of the New Brunswick public education system. That sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t really get you that far since, like most classes, most of the details are forgotten ten minutes out the door. Nonetheless, by the end of high school I could listen to two people (even two French teachers) having a conversation in the hall and understand most of it.

Then, I moved to Japan, and promptly forgot everything francais and replaced it with nihongo. By the end of one year there, I could understand and speak Japanese much better than I ever could French.

Living in Montreal has certaintly been bringing some of the French back, while the Japanese has been slipping away. The problem is, I sometimes forget which is which.

Comment sa va? Genki yo.
Bibliothèque wa doko desu ka?
Où est la ginko?
Métro de ikou.
Au revoir. Ja ne.

Those all sound perfectly natural to me. It’s all “other”.

Though I can’t speak, at least I’ve noticed that I can read French about as well as I can Japanese. While on the metro yesterday, I looked up at one of the ads and realised I knew exactly what it meant, despite being in French. I remember three or four years ago riding the densha through Nagasaki and having the same realisation in Japanese.

It was a good day.

As it turns out, since magnetic force is related to the cross product of a charged particle’s velocity and the magnetic field vector, Newton’s third law, that ever action has an equal and opposite reaction, is not true in general. This can be seen in the situation shown where two positively charge particles move towards each other with an angle between them of 90 degrees, such as along the x and y axis towards the origin.

I hate it when I realise that I’ve been dupped by a sly marketing scheme.

Starbucks started the sweet trend to lure people who don’t necessarily like plain coffee, said coffee lover and freelance writer Gilbert Bouchard of Edmonton.

CBC News - Coffee drinks loaded with fat and calories: report

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s no surprise that the things aren’t healthy, but it’s a bit creepy thinking that drinks like Tim Horton’s French Vanilla cappucino might have been inventented just to warp my non-coffee drinking sensibilities.

I’ll just have to reinstate my policy of only drinking such things during Roll Up the Rim season, and social events. (Yes, I know Roll Up the Rim is just another marketing thing, but at least there are prizes other than 560 calories involved.)

On the flip side, it is very satisfying when I can see through these marketing things. Example: Aquafina’s commecial about having a low “TDS” score is not necessarily a good thing! Pure water, with no solids or whatnot, will kill you.

The moral of the story is that the way out of any argument/debate/conversation is to say, “That’s all well and good, but remember, even pure water is poisonous.”

I love these days where I get tons of stuff done but really I don’t do anything at all.

I rearranged my apartment after being spurred on by the offer of a free kitchen table. Now, even with more furniture, my apartment feels twice as big. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing yet, though, since I do like a nice cozy feeling. Does anybody have a wall they want to donate, so that I might make myself a separate bedroom one again?

The rest of the afternoon was spent waiting for my parents to arrive in town, i.e. watching TV. Once they finished getting lost, I showed off my place to them (it was their first visit) and we went out to supper at the best Japanese restaurant in Montreal. Sending them on their way again, it was back to my place for some casual snacking and watching Terry on CTV.

Good movie, but the way. But I think it would be very difficult to tell the Terry Fox story in a way that was not touching.

As for the rest of the night… well, there’s no way I’m going to start studying now. My thesis will have to wait until tomorrow.

Not because I don’t have any friends, but just because I think there’s a nice quite of peace in being alone sometimes.

Let me clarify.

Yesterday, as a result of the shootings at Dawson College (about which this blog post is not), some of the other buildings in the area were evacuated and closed down, including the nearby Atwater metro station. My route to the pool where I usually swim laps takes me through that station, and yesterday I passed through only a couple hours after it was reopened. In what is a relatively busy station, there were only three or four people on the platform. Coming from Guy-Concordia metro, at which about thirty people had gotten onto my car alone, it was a nice contrast.

I’ve had this feeling before.

I always liked the bus, in part because no matter where I was going, how late I was, or how much of a rush I was in, all that stress would just evaporate once I took my seat. When you take the bus all you do is take the bus. Another lovely tautology.

But of course this only happens when there’s lots going on in my life otherwise — there’s no appreciating an oasis in a rainforest. I love spending time with people, but every once in a while, for just enough time to take the bus from one place to another, it’s nice to just relax. Alone or not.

Maybe I’m just depressed. Depressed people say things like that.

Don’t worry, I’m not, but I do realise that that’s how I sound.