Some Hummus (The "I Made It Myself" Kind)

I wrote of a recent Whole Foods excursion recently, when I found myself buying only snacks. Really expensive snacks. Delicious but exorbitant snacks.

I love snacking. It's the best part about the "don't eat big meals, just graze all day" kind of diet. But I don't love spending ridiculous amounts of money on snacks.

When I went back to Whole Foods two days ago, I thought to myself, "What's a good snack that I can make myself?" I had already done homemade salsa and homemade tortilla chips earlier in October (with fresh, self-picked tomatoes). What else could I... hummus!

Hummus. What could be easier? Chickpeas, tahini, blend, serve. I bought the ingredients plus garlic and prepared for greatness.

Some Hummus

1 15-ounce can of chickpeas/garbanzo beans
some raw tahini
some apple cider vinegar
some lemon juice
some garlic (8 cloves)
some ground cumin
some olive oil

(I used a blender. You people with food processors, I hope you know how lucky you are.)

1. Drain can of liquid, saving the liquid in a cup.
2. Put about half the can of chickpeas into the blender.
3. Pour a little of that bean juice from the can into the blender.
   
4. Glug some apple cider vinegar into the blender.
5. Put 2-3 spoonfuls of well-stirred tahini in blender.
6. Cover top of stuff in blender with a dusting of cumin.
7. Mash garlic cloves, or dice up into little pieces. Add half to blender.
8. Blend.
9. Add the olive oil that you forgot. Blend more.
10. It's probably too thick to blend properly. Dump it into a bowl.
11. Do the same thing over again, but this time add lemon juice instead of the vinegar, since you just found it in the back of the fridge. Add a little more bean juice, too, to make it blendable.
12. Aww yeah, it's blending now.
13. Spoon the thick first batch into the second batch and blend on high.
14. Add more cumin because you don't know if it's too bland or not.
15. (That was a little too much cumin, but you'll find that out later.)
16. Blend again. Aww, fudge, it's not blending any more.
    
17. Oh well, it's done anyway.
    
18. Spatula it out into a bowl.
    
19. Make a little hole in the center of the hummus and pour a little olive oil in. Serve.

Some parts were wayyyy too cumin-y. But on the whole, this turned out really well. And I now have a ton of hummus. Well, actually, about the amount of 4 Trader Joe's hummus containers. I will make again.

What Kind Of A Blog Post Comes Out When You Have About 15 Minutes...

Just went for a run on the Custis Trail. I don't like the feeling when you're running and it's cold out and the back of your throat burns from inhaling such frigidity.

I have yet to get into any sort of meditative state while running. I also don't have any experience with the "runner's high." Aak's Dad is a marathoner and I think once said that if you've run over six miles many times and haven't gotten it, then something's weird. Well, six is about my upper limit. I think I'm a natural runner, and I think I could do pretty well if I were to train myself to go higher mileages, but I just don't enjoy it enough. I like it a lot more that I have a running partner these days, marathoner girlfriend, but that's pretty much the only reason. I used to row in college, and that was a lot of running. I hated it every time.

We're going hiking this weekend in the Shenandoahs, at Matthew's Arm. (Btw, Aak should totally bike that trail I'm linking to here).

I caught David Letterman last night for the first time in ages. It's good to know that the show hasn't really changed over time. He seemed more bored with it than I remember, but I only saw the early part of the show. He was always bored with the monologue, like something he needed to get through. Last night he had a sketch where they had a camera set up across the street from a Lens Crafters and they wanted to see how many people dressed like Sarah Palin they could fit into it. So, one would walk in and stand behind the glass door and...well, it was funny. Gotta go.

Sometimes at the end of posts I fight the urge to sign off like it's an e-mail.

Phone Screening

I was just screened over the phone.

A girl from Match.com emailed me, I emailed her back, and in her next email she asked for my "#." I thought that was pretty fast, but I gave her my digits anyway.

She called me just now, from a "Private" number, and said she wanted to make sure that I wasn't crazy. I guess that she's had experiences with crazy people before?

She started asking me about stuff, and when she found out that I had an OKCupid account, too, she looked it up on the phone with me. Which led to her asking me how many girls I'd slept with... and she was shocked at the answer...

After I hung up the phone, I looked up her OKCupid profile. She was a lot more racy on OKCupid than she was on Match. And her answer for "What I'm Really Good At"... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Hypersocial

I'm going to have to wean myself off caffeine now. I'm perfectly happy drinking a ton of coffee throughout the day. I drink 2 in the morning, and extra couple while at work, and a whole pot while at home studying. It's great and I think it has minimal effect on me except maybe in waking up in the morning. I may now need the boost to feel normal. But I now feel like I'm so in the habit that it's just so natural.

I held off from coffee drinkerdom for a long while because I figured it was an inevitable thing to become hooked eventually. Yes, I know this is wrong, but it seemed that every adult alive is completely hooked. My Mom gets headaches when she doesn't have hers. So, I figured I was merely delaying and waited for the time to come. That time came with the introduction of coffeemate.

I too feel sometimes like a High-kick-a-you-kick after a day of studying solo. The other day I spent a whole day reading out of a damn textbook in my apartment. By the end I felt physically restless and cabin-fevery. It's those times when I most realize the value of social contact. I think that this habit of a solitary pursuit is making me more social. I go for broke more around people after being away from them for a while. I strike up more convos, tell more jokes, listen more, tell more stories, ask more questions, etc. And it's genuine. It helps with the sales mindset that waiting tables relies on. That night gf and I had our weekly tango lessons and I think it was the single best class we've had.

About tango (if our massive readership has any experience), I find the close embrace far easier than the open embrace. Open E felt more mechanical and technical and made it way harder to simply feel the music and improvise. It's possible that it was simply harder for the first classes where we were getting the basics down and now it's just clicking, but it seems more than that. When we go back to doing open E it still seems technical, though it's easier having done closed E for a couple classes now. I feel like open will be a lot of flashy fun later when we know what we're doing. Right now, though, I loooove feeling the rhythm of the music and dancing accordingly. My lower back starts to hurt because I'm in the habit of bending down to my partners (I'm 6'1"), and I need to rectify this tendency, but it's a blast.

Religulous. Again.

Aak, girlfriend, and I went to see Religulous the other night. I enjoyed it immensely. Of course, he picked some pretty weak proponents of religion to argue with, so it was easy to make them look ridiculous. When I invited roommate and her mate to see it they turned it down because they didn't want to see Bill Maher talk down to idiots for two hours, and that's exactly what it was. But you gotta hand it to him. Or at least I do. It was funny. He interspersed discussions with clips that usually mocked the person he was talking to. There was one particular clip of some TV show called Hell Town that had me laughing long after it had passed. You know, one of those laughters where everyone else has moved on and you're still there trying to stifle for about ten minutes because you don't want to piss them off.

The thing I like was how ballsy the movie was. It's true that once you come to matters of faith you're supposed to stop asking once someone throws it out there. I wonder what sort of mortal danger Bill Maher is from whackballs right now. I also liked in the end how he took a stand. It wasn't just two hours of debunking and mockery. He gets on his soapbox and talks about how we need the hocus pocus of religion out of the world's decision making processes. I didn't expect that.

As I'm sure has happened with other people, post movie consisted of a pretty fun and lengthy conversation between us. I don't believe in any religion, but I am curious about whether or not it has had a net benefit on mankind historically. Probably yes, I say. Pissy anti-religious people like Bill Maher always point out wars, terrorist events, and other killings such as the crusades, 9/11 and other suicide bombings, the inquisition, and other easy to cite very very bad things as reasons why religion is devastating to mankind. Fair enough. But how much has human kind survived and thrived based on the stabilizing force that religion creates for all of us? I mentioned this to Aak, and he mentioned how he was doing research for his anthropology class on Muslims. I don't remember the details, but he talked about a bunch of rituals that some people at some event were doing. (I think it was an open-air market?) He'll have to comment on the specifics if he cares enough, but it made my point pretty well.

I just wonder if it's possible for people to have such a stabilizing force that will spread moral behavior without cooking up what I believe to be utter fictions. I don't need to believe that some white bearded guy in the sky sent his son/self to "save" me by getting whipped with a cat of nine tails. I can simply accept that it's wrong for me to steal my neighbor's possessions. Why? Because if I can steal his, he can steal mine. Plus life is so much more enjoyable if you get along with and take care of one another. No resurrections necessary to teach me that.

Back to the movie. I was bummed that Bill Maher didn't spend more time with people who seemed level headed and faithful. There was an astronomer priest who I wanted to hear more from. There were others I can't think of at the moment. He certainly could've found some more. But I would have loved to see someone challenge him.

All in all, a well spent 10.75.

Ha! Sometimes I need to read more before I post. In looking for the above link, I found the post that Aak has already written about this movie. Oh yeah, I forgot about the Japanese Animism.

Well, now I've spent a bunch of time on this and it's going up anyway.

Hikkikomori no Anime

A "hikkikomori" in Japanese is one who secludes him/herself from society, staying in an apartment or a single room all day and night. This is a growing phenomenon in Japan. Sometimes it's in a family house, sometimes in an apartment. They usually don't have jobs, relying on parental allowance.

I'm in the middle of a series called "Welcome to the NHK." "NHK" is the name of the big channel in Japan, like our NBC. The main character of the anime comes to believe that "NHK" stands for Nihon Hikkikomori Kyokai (Japan Hikkikomori Association), and that they are the creators of a conspiracy to keep him isolated and alone. This being an anime, there's a sweet girl who takes an interest in him and tries to get him to change his behavior.

Watching this anime, alone, in my room, after a weekend of studying alone, in my room, made me feel very hikkikomori-like. Even when the character's lifestyle inspired revulsion, as in his madcap flipouts in the outside world, or as in his obsessions with erotic dating games or, later, a WoW-based online game, it felt like I was the target audience of this strange program. Then I began to think it was all a conspiracy. The makers of this anime knew what kind of people were in their audience and geared it exactly to them.

This is part of a movement I have noticed. Otaku things have become anti-otaku. My only other example is a Nintendo DS game I picked up, called "The World Ends with You."

The World Ends with You's protagonist is someone who distrusts everyone, has no friends, and walks around with headphones on so he doesn't have to interact with anyone. The game forces you, through the character, to interact with other players. A prominent feature of the game is working together with your partner, simultaneously controlling both the main character and the secondary. Working together is the only way to survive and beat the enemies. Another feature of the game is looking into other people's minds and reading their thoughts. This "gets you into other people's heads." The gameplay incentivizes putting the game down; you earn points by only playing a certain amount any day. Finally, an interesting feature is that, when you are near someone else with a DS, there is an incentive to interact with that other person: you ask them to turn on their wireless signal, you turn on your game and sense the incoming signal, and you get points/items that you otherwise would never have gotten.

So the game is designed to wean you off of the game world and inject you into the real world.

Hikkikomoris are a growing problem in Japan, and these kinds of anime and games are interesting ways to address the problem. Too bad they do not speak to the source of the problem at all. Japan is in many ways a terrible place to live; societal pressures are just too much for some people. Change the society, and fewer hikkikomoris will appear. Simple as that.

Mr. Hatandcoat Fears Lexical Change

Or, rather, my mostly-absent co-blogger is annoyed by it.

Just ask him about the word "ignorant." For years, he's been very bothered by the use of "ignorant" to mean belligerent. You know:

A: "Did I tell you what Marvin did?"
B: "No, what'd he do?"
A: "After I told him to be careful about taking long smoke breaks, he rolled his eyes, said 'whatever', and slammed my office door so hard my picture of Princess came off the wall. He is so ignorant."

This sets H&C into a prescriptivist fury. He has asked a woman who he frequently heard misuse "ignorant" what she thought it meant. She said, "I don't know, belligerent?" He looked it up on m-w.com and proved her wrong.

Luckily for H&C, the word "ignorant" has not changed its meaning (until now) from the time it was incorporated into English. Unfortunately for H&C, he's been spelling it wrong his whole life. "Ignorant" was originally spelled ignoraunt and probably sounded a lot more French.

The trouble with being prescriptive about language is that language has no standard. Language is not static. The rules change, meanings warp, fade, or are completely opposite of what they used to mean.

The word "nice," for example, entered English meaning "foolish, stupid." Here's a list of its transformations through the ages (taken from etymonline.com):

1. foolish, stupid, senseless (1290)
   
2. timid (before 1300)
3. fussy, fastidious (1380)
4. dainty, delicate (1405)
5. precise, careful (1500s)
6. agreeable, delightful (1769)
7. kind, thoughtful (1830)
   

(If you want to go back before English, "nice" came from Old French where it meant "silly, foolish." It came from Latin nescius, which meant ignorant.)

Whether or not there is a standard, I suppose you could argue either way. It's clear that language is always changing, though. Since it's always changing, how can there be a standard?

The main point of this post is to tell H&C that another of his annoyances is now in the dictionary. H&C told me last night that he hates it when people say "people of the female persuasion." He says that "persuasion" there makes no sense. Unfortunately...

1. The act of persuading or the state of being persuaded: “The persuasion of a democracy to big changes is at best a slow process” (Harold J. Laski).
2. The ability or power to persuade: “Three foremost aids to persuasion which occur to me are humility, concentration, and gusto” (Marianne Moore).
3. A strongly held opinion; a conviction. See synonyms at opinion.
4. 1. A body of religious beliefs; a religion: worshipers of various persuasions.
   2. A party, faction, or group holding to a particular set of ideas or beliefs.
5. Informal. Kind; sort: “the place where … rockers of any gender or persuasion can become megastars” (Christopher John Farley). (answers.com def)