2008-11-28 - 2:33 p.m.
Imagine Me This Way
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Imagine me rolling around on the floor on a tube made of foam, eating homemade baklava, reading the Thousand and One Nights and wearing golden slippers. I haven't yet done all of these things simultaneously, but this currently sums up some of my favorite things, as well as being highly amusing image of me to entertain.
About riding around on foam tubes, this is how YouTube taught me to massage my iliotibial band, which is an evil group of leg muscles that can cause terrible knee pain when they forget how to relax. The iliotibial band is all but impossible to stretch. (Some people said that they knew iliotibial stretches, but they were wrong. I tried them and found them to be bum muscle and hamstring stretches.) The only way to relax the iliotibial band and silence the pain in what I've affectionately named my Grandma Knee is to massage it. This may done by rolling around on your side on a foam tube which has, thusly, become my new hobby.
About the baklava, unsurprisingly, I couldn't find phyllo pastry here in ever-so-uninternational Hachinohe, so my baklava is made with pastry dough rolled out as thinly as possible (which isn't very thin at all). The result would be better described as gooey nut tarts than baklava but they taste really good and, having mastered the Nanaimo bar (an important step towards which was replacing the cocoa with hot chocolate mix which makes them kind of salty, but in a good way), making baklava has thusly become my new winter hobby.
About the Thousand and One Nights (I'm not even halfway through all of them yet so, to anyone who may be wondering at this point, no, Arabian Night related jamborees are unlikely to end anytime soon), I just finished reading about the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (so good) and gained a lot of useful information from the story of Sympathy the Learned. I learned, for example, that ambition is the cause of all misery and gluttony the cause of all illness. Also, everyone may be rest assured that next will be a good one because it will start on a Thursday. During years that start on Thursdays governors and wazirs reign with justice and integrity for the general benefit of the human race and fruits, cereals, honey, flax, fish, cotton and grapes will be abundance. (For that matter, does anyone know how much donkeys cost these days? Because this year started on a Tuesday, among other things, donkey plague should've caused the price of these animals to increase sharply.)
About my golden slippers, they're golden ballet flats with abstract cutouts of cat's heads (or are they garbled Studio Ghibli characters?) stuck, collage-style, to the tops. They barely shine at all but the color of them is, unmistakably, gold. I think that Xavier would like them. Or at least, for some reason, I tend to think of Xavier when I'm wearing them. It's kind of hard to come up with outfits to wear with these shoes. I believe that if you choose to wear golden slippers, the rest of what you're wearing should be pretty plain. Still, I really do like them, as do seven-to-thirteen-year-old girls, as does (I assume) Xavier.
