natural foods

taiwan strikes again! it's like, as we are all preparing to leave, the island is kicking itself up a notch to give us a proper sendoff. i am now going to relate an actual experience from the life of jessamyn vogel. so, she went on a hike Sunday with Ada, one of our Bible study students, and her family. A government sponsored hike. everyone got tickets. there were like 50,000 people on the trail. at the peak there was an ensemble playing pachelbel's canon. and then, belly dancers came out and belly danced to pachelbels canon. and the mayor of taipei was there. and then they started a raffle. so, pachelbel is still going, with belly dancers, and then some man starts yelling winning raffle numbers on a P.A. system over the din, and Ada gets excited and yells out "I won a blender!!"
i told jessie that if she told me that was a dream, not only would i have believed her, but i would have thought "that was a really strange dream, jessie." but it wasn't a dream. it was just another day in the life of taiwan.

dude, my ipod is rocking an awesome shuffle, i just had both sleater kinney and Me first and the gimme gimmes and cibo matto and sixpence...and then i got one of my chinese lessons. nothing is perfect. anyway, i just got my dishes done.

revelations whilst doing the dishes: natural foods, while healthy and all that whoop-de-shit, grow other natural things--scarily and rapidly. maybe if you do your dishes more often than me--like every two weeks or so...three?-- you don't know this, but i can honestly attest from the colorful molds of various, and frankly fascinating, textures growing on the dishes at the bottom of the pile that natural foods grow more crap than artificially processed foods that are engineered to survive nuclear blasts.
recently andrea and i have gotten a bit healthier--as a result of detox. (when andrea went to school bohemians were cool and she wanted to be one. whereas bohemians were never considered cool at any school attended by the Julie. they were, however, considered smelly patchouli-reeking potheads or damned hippies). i declared yesterday that if the rooftop was a country, the five grain mixture would be our staple food. anyway, we have been eating unprecedented amounts of fruits and vegetables and tofu and grains. the downside of this is that it does not mesh well with the default mode of my life which includes a measure of laziness and depression, rebellion, superceding love of reading, and fits of prayer and journaling when everything seems like it's falling apart. really, when you think about injustice and starvation and war and whatnot, dishes just seem so trivial. then again, doing my dishes made me think: what if my whole drive to help save the world through diplomacy and big ideas and be all liberal artsy fartsy is causing me to overlook one of my natural strengths, which is to create potentially lifesaving, disease-fighting compunds in my kitchen sink? what if i am the next Fleming but will never know because i'm going to grad school and trying to be a writer instead of just letting bits of leftover soy latte mingle with discarded apple cores slathered with peanut butter and waiting for glory to transpire in a few weeks' time? you can't pay for that kind of organic amalgamation. by the way, for the diligent among you. soy is one of the worst offenders. soy and tofu can grow startling, gooey, stubborn, lifelike compunds in a matter of a day or two. and it reeks to high heaven. very impressive, the aggressive rotting of soy products. fyi.

so the family hartle--excluding corinne, my partner in chemical addiction--had a collective heart attack when i proudly announced i had finally weaned myself off of sugar and am now using a sweet and low/sugar mix to sweeten my coffee. you would have thought i just announced that i've decided to take up a weekend meth habit. lauren is on this new health kick, as in natural and unprocessed kick. so she has been purging our house of hydrogenated oils and splenda and the like. i would heed the warnings of my parents more seriously if they didnt drink diet coke unabated. my mom said i could cut down on how much coffee i drink and use only raw sugar, thereby cutting calories by default. um, after 6 diligent weeks of lenten abstention? hellll no! bring on my saccharine demise! and i am sad to say that as my Christian faith grows, my will to rage against the dying of the light and preserve my earthly life, just sort of diminishes. i mean, i sort of know i should cherish my life and treat it well to do the Lord's will. but no one has effectively convinced Julie Inc of the dimished greatness of heaven.

speaking of heaven, have you ever been eating bacon and just spontaneously looked up to heaven and given thanks and said "my God, dear holy Lord, thank you so much for the new covenant!" like, seriously, i think pigs will eat bacon in heaven. i think in heaven pigs will not blame us because they will understand the appeal. they will know that their slaughter was the sad but inevitable side effect of sin, not God's original plan. but i mean, glorious pigs, to have given us ham and bacon?! they will be honored. and just think: if the bacon of earth is merely a shadow of the divine bacon to come?? it's almost worth thinking of taking a razor to your wrists. the power of bacon is especially evident when paired with undelicious things like green beans. green beans, normally a means to a nutritious end, become divine, addictive even, with the addition of bacon.

Brian Regan, by the way: hysterical comedian.

Had a speech contest today at the same school where the girls spoke about online dating. today they were doing impromptu speeches describing a picture in a which a kid is tied up and blindfolded in a room with light shining through a window and a squirrel gnawing through the ropes. some of them very morbidly made up a scenario in which the parents were bad people who had punished the kids by binding them and putting them in a closet because they didnt study hard enough (how taiwanese). but most of them said that the picture showed that you shouldnt flaunt your wealth or your kid might get kidnapped and there won't be a squirrel to come to the rescue. this is a direct result of some recent high-profile kidnappings in taiwan. i thought their morals of not flaunting wealth and not putting your kids in a closet as punishment were spot-on. and i would add: don't leave natural food remnants in your sink.