Some photos by popular request

Well after the responses I’ve had from people I guess I will keep writing about random shit (but maybe I’ll try and ponder things a little more before I post them for my own piece of mind). However some good constructive criticism was to keep posts around 1000 words, and put more photos in so I’ll try and take that on board. Admittedly I have been a bit lax with photos. But I just don’t really like them!!!! But I have taken some with the intent of putting them up, and I want to make good of that intention so here goes. There’s a few up on Facebook as well here (I don’t think you need an account to view them).

These have been accumulated over the past little while, I hope you all enjoy :-). They’re not in any particular chronological order.

Actually the first I’ll write out because it was just a collection of quotes by famous people in the front of the menu in a vegetarian cafe near here:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chance of survival on earth, as much as an evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein

Actually I’ll just write that one. There are some other good ones from people like Pythagoras and some other famous people, but I like Einstein. And yet I still eat meat. What a hypocrite.

This street runs along the side of the 3 Kings monument and shows how bad the pollution is here. In fact this is a good day, a lot of the time you can’t even see the hills at all. It does make for some quite nice sunsets though.

This is one of my dancing related injuries. I’m sorry if you have a foot phobia, I don’t really see the big deal. But I’m quite proud of them (there’s a matching one on the other big toe and a new one about that big on my heel as well).

Behold!! A Thai fresh produce market. They’re really good at fresh produce over here, you never get anything wilted despite the heat.

It turns out I’m quite good at food carving. A potato and a carrot.

Some more pretty flowers near my house.

My first attempt at home cooked mango sticky rice. It tasted pretty damn good I have to admit, although I didn’t have a bamboo steamer for the sticky rice so I had to boil it. It was still pretty sticky, but more in a custard way than a bread way. But that’s OK for mango sticky rice since you then cook it up with sugar and coconut cream anyway. I've since tried steaming the sticky rice in a bamboo steamer (which left it tasting funny), and a handkerchief which worked fairly well. But I don't really think it needs to be steamed when you're just going to add coconut milk for a rice pudding like this.

OK, here’s something I find really strange and funny all at once. I’ve noticed that a lot of the temples have what I can only describe as soft-core porn in amongst their artwork. It’s never explicit, but I’ve yet to find another explanation for some of the positions you find people in. This one is fairly tame, but it’s not that uncommon to see all sorts of groping going on, or threesomes. It’s really strange. This one just has some extremely optimistic topless Thai girls on it, floating above the Buddha statue in the middle. Buddha, boobies, Buddha, boobies.

Here is another one I found on the wall of a building.

A peanut I think. But I’ve never seen a raw one like this before. It’s quite pretty and tasty too. The flesh is actually mostly clear before they’re roasted.

Have a look at this mango!!! Notice the relative thickness of the pip comparative to the flesh. It’s almost nonexistent, while ours at home have humungous pips. Australian mangos == So lame, Thai Mangos == So good. I have found some of our thick pip variety over here, but these ones are much better.

A picture I shot on the way down the mountain around Doi Sutep (A big temple up here on a mountain). I find at this point that I didn’t include any pictures of the temple itself, but to be honest temples are kind of all same-same but different, and usually very touristy. You’ve seen 10 and you’ve seen them all, just on different scales. Visit Thailand and you’ll know what I mean. But THIS is pretty.

CHOCOLATE. That’s all. We got sick.

This is the Somtom Ninja near the Chiang Mai gate, which is the gate in the south of the old wall in Chiang Mai. Somtom is a traditional Thai seafood salad made with: Lots of chilli, garlic, dried shrimp, pickled whole crabs, fish sauce, other random seafood, green papaya, tomatoes, peanuts, and probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten. It’s really great so long as you don’t get the pickled crab. I tried that one time and it was hard to finish, especially with 10cm crab legs stabbing me in the tonsils. This guy makes the best somtom I’ve found yet, and he makes it super fast. Hence Somtom Ninja.

And that’s that. I hope you like them :-).

One thing I will talk briefly about though is a peculiar habit people have when they’ve got a camera. They’ll walk into a really beautiful place, snap a bunch of photos of everything for later, and then walk out without actually appreciating anything. I saw it happen a fair bit when I went up to Doi Sutep. I kind of feel like there are times when a camera is good, but photos are really artistic more than anything. Snapping a trillion photos of a temple or images of the Buddha is kind of silly because I think it completely misses most of the impact of actually being there. I guess I have nothing against taking photos of them, but surely it should remind you of how you felt when you were there. And if you don’t actually take the time to appreciate it at all in the moment then the photos are just like a postcard you can show to your friends rather than anything meaningful.

Actually another thing I feel compelled to say is: I rescind my assertion that Thai people are so healthy. They eat TONS of fried food ALL THE TIME. They will literally deep fry anything in batter, from bananas, to scorpions, to chickens feet. Somehow they don’t die from it like we do. But I think if you avoid the fried food the rest is pretty healthy.

Narcissistic self indulgence

I read a good quote in a book recently: “Most conversations are monologues in the presence of another person” (Magnificently Insignificant by Noel Odou if anyone’s interested). That’s basically what I’m doing here. I end up writing these great big posts about life and random thoughts going through my head, much of which is fairly unstructured and probably semi-incoherent. Most of it in fact belongs in my diary and I often get half way through writing a post and wish I had a copy-paste from my computer to my diary. I guess I could print them out later and paste them in. But anyway, what I’m getting at is that it’s really one way, it’s often quite candid, there’s no input from anyone else, and I’m basically just preaching my opinion at a captive audience who initially tuned in for travel updates from me. That’s if I haven’t scared everyone off already :-P, I actually have no idea how many people even visit this page anymore. I’m still not 100% sure why I even write the stream of consciousness ones, maybe it makes me feel connected to people back home, or maybe I hope to provoke thought in people. I do get some emails back sometimes from people wanting to discuss a topic or something, so maybe that keeps me going. Maybe it’s just that the stuff I physically do each day doesn’t really seem that important or interesting. Oops, here I go again, it just kind of happens and suddenly I’m getting all long winded.

So anyway, I guess I’m asking for advice, I feel a bit like I’m abusing this blog for my own ends, and maybe I should stop preaching my opinion and realisations I have. Is it interesting or do people find themselves skipping paragraphs and rolling their eyes at me? It’s a democracy people; nothing’s going to change unless you speak up! So I want the good AND the bad.

This is kind of why I’ve always been against blogging in the first place!!! It’s strange that people feel so self-important that they have to share their life with the world, and here I am being the worst kind of culprit!!! (2499 words of mental diarrhoea today people!!!)

Beating my drum

I was sitting in a cafe just now eating brunch and thinking about what to do with my life.

Actually, let me segue into breakfast for a second. I believe breakfast should be the largest, most intentionally awesome, and least rushed meal of the day. None of which is true in the west. Many of us skip breakfast; I’ve certainly done my fair share of that when I was working, which is why I started the trend of eating when I got to work, but it’s still invariably rushed because I always felt a bit guilty about it. The problem I think with rushing in the morning is that it sets you up to be rushed for the day, not consciously having time to care for yourself, your intentions are all up in the air and belong to whoever and wherever you’re rushing to get to. Even when I did stop and make breakfast in the morning, it was by necessity something quick, usually not sustaining, and eaten far too quickly. To me the morning should be a time to prepare yourself properly for the day, for meditation, some kind of gentle exercise to wake your body up and your appetite going, then a big and healthy meal to get your body on track and metabolism regulated properly (not too much sugar, plenty of fibre, vitamins, salt if the weather is hot, in the end I think it really depends on how you’re feeling, but it’s the best time to tune into what your body actually wants to eat because it’s likely the one time of the day it actually needs food after not eating for 10 hours or so). Then I think it’s important to sit for 10 minutes or so and let it all settle. Then is a good time to walk out the front door, feeling relaxed and in control of your life, and go and tackle whatever needs to be done. Unfortunately that seems to mean I don’t leave the house until around 12. So I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work in the morning again. Unless I seriously rearrange my life habits so I can get up between 4 and 6 and start meditating then (which is apparently the best time for some reason, I’ve no idea why, but there is something a bit special about the world when you get up then). Then I think dinner should really be the smallest and probably not eaten after 8pm. I’ve heard that around 30% of your body’s energy goes into digestion, which makes sense to me because if I eat too late I don’t feel rested the next day. Whereas if I eat early, or at least only eat something light like noodle soup with broth if I’m eating it later, then I wake up feeling much more rested and my guts feel better.

So anyway, back to my thoughts on my life. I believe what I’m doing over here is commonly called seeking, and you actually meet a surprising number of people doing it. It seems to be what some people do when they reach a certain age and don’t really feel like the world is as it should be for whatever reason. But we don’t really know WHAT it should be; just that it shouldn’t be how it is. So we seek. I recently read a book called Manhood by an Australian psychologist (which I would recommend to everybody of any gender). In this book he had a proverb of men who aren’t sure of some aspect of their life going off into the mountains by themselves and banging a drum until the solution becomes clear. Obviously he doesn’t mean we all need a drum and a wooden lodge somewhere, but I certainly know what he means. I suppose it appeals to me because its wording speaks to a fairly tribal and primal element of myself (and I’ve no doubt that was his intention). I think this seeking that some of us do is a modern day version of this kind of “spirit journey” or whatever you want to call it. We no longer have shamans or wise women to tell us to go and climb some mountain and sit on top, and we (or at least I) don’t have the blind faith that I’ll find the answer there even if did climb it (which is perhaps a shame, l think life would be much easier that way, blind faith seems to have a lot of power for those who are able to do it). The problem with seeking while travelling is that there are so many distractions, and you’re never really alone, so it’s probably an inefficient version of the “spirit journey”. But on the flip side you gain a lot of other very important experience and cultural mingling which IS thought provoking and challenges your way of life, so maybe it all evens out.

So anyway there I was “banging my drum” over fruit salad, eggs, toast, and amazing coffee, and thinking about the things I like doing. As I’ve already said I don’t like rushing to work every day, or even some days, so I don’t know that I feel like ever working 9-5 again unless I can reorganise my life to deal with it (unlikely to happen in the city).

I do enjoy programming, a lot. It’s one of my creative outlets, but that’s also sort of a problem. It stops being nearly such a creative outlet when I have to do it every day for other people or to some kind of schedule. I like to play with it, I like to program on the cutting edge of my understanding of the field, but that doesn’t really fit with business even though I personally learn much more when I program that way. When I’m making something I enjoy I can program myself into oblivion for 12 hours a day, skipping all of my meals until my knees are shaky and I’m so stupid from low blood sugar that I can barely form a loop construct. Which is very bad, but at least it shows how much I love it. So I would like to work out how to program and make money from it without losing my enjoyment of it.

I enjoy sewing and other physically constructive things, but couldn’t see myself doing either all the time. They both stretch my brain in fun mathematical ways, but there’s a lot of tedium in the middle.

I really enjoy socialisation which is one reason I’m not sure I want to be an engineer. My social skills withered at ACS, which is no reflection on the people there who are great, but social skills take practice like anything else and I just wasn’t getting enough and that made me really unhappy. So I’ve considered trying cafe work or something similar, which pays me to be social and might also let me structure my life closer to the way I like it. This would also give me spare time to spend on programming projects, which hopefully might make me some money. Either way I know that social skills are very important to me and they take practice, so whether I get paid to practice, or pay someone else to do drama courses or whatever, it has to be part of my life.

I also want to write fiction one day. I’ve thought this since I was in my late teens, although I’m aware again that this would take LOTS of practice. But there’s no better time to start practicing then now. Actually I do write (as you may have noticed, quite prolifically at times :-P ), both my own diary (or this blog when my pen runs out of ink), and random pieces of fiction which never get finished and never see the light of day. But it’s quite fun. I write mostly for myself, in the same way that I sketch sometimes or paint. But then I also feel that writing for other people is much more fun than for myself. Just as showing a sketch to people can be fun. It seems natural to want to share these things, as personal as they sometimes are. So I think that someday I would like to try and publish a book. That can wait and be built upon as I write other random things and gain life experience. You’ve no idea how hard it is to write confidently about things that you actually don’t understand. Like how good somebody is at playing chess for instance, unless you’re a chess master can you really write about what it’s like? What if you make a mistake, somebody somewhere will pick up on it.

And yet again I also have urges to run away from civilisation and buy a patch of dirt somewhere and have a cute cottage with stone walls, a massive kitchen, and no TV, where I can grow veges in the garden and maybe keep a cow and chickens so I can make cheese and yoghurt and cakes and omelettes filled with fresh picked aromatic herbs. And then butterflies, small birds, and people I like could come and live with me and we could have cuddle puddles and cook amazing food and feel a little bit sad as the world we were born into dies a slow and painful death. Hopefully by that stage we will have planted enough trees around our house to keep the air clean, and be high enough on a mountain that we won’t be under water, and Google will have uploaded all the information in the world into satellites so that future civilisations don’t make the same mistakes and so that we can still access Wikipedia to help resolve arguments. Yeah, that actually sounds pretty good. Hopefully the butterflies and small birds find us before they all die. But (only slightly) more seriously, I was thinking I might like to WWOOF my way around Oz, because I really want to see more of our amazing country. That would lower my living expenses to almost nil, and I could STILL program in my spare time, and I spent half my time growing up on a farm so I reckon I’d probably manage. Plus I’d still be meeting people from other countries and getting new viewpoints and getting my socialisation fix. The cottage can come later.

And then come children. Do I ever want children? A friend of mine once told me that she wasn’t sure she wanted to bring children into this world, she wasn’t sure it was an ethical choice, although I think, like me, she didn’t yet know. (Oh shit, I just wrote another massive segue on education, but I really should stay on topic so I deleted it). And there are biological things going on in our bodies, especially with girls it seems, that make us crave children. I guess it’s not something I can say for certain until it happens or never. But I bring this up because I sometimes feel that I’m being irresponsible by throwing life and good careers into the wind just to see what else there is. Jumping off cliffs just to see how I land. I do think children need stability (and a lot of other things), and money, although fairly unnecessary to raise kids in Australia as my parents proved, still makes stability much easier to provide. So am I being irresponsible? Perhaps I should just knuckle down and get some money under my belt, whether I have children or not it’ll make life easier later. But then I come back to reality and the fact that money doesn’t actually exist (as a financial adviser I met recently who supports himself from the stock market said). (Oh shit, I just went on another massive rant about my perception of the stupidity of money, the faults capitalism and communism, and internet censorship in a supposedly liberal democracy, you guys are lucky I’ve got my relevance filter on today).

Anyway, that’s got to be enough for today, it’s far larger than I intended and I didn’t even write about what I meant to in the first place, storytelling in: literary fiction, pen and paper role playing games, and computer games. Comparisons between mediums, my personal enjoyment of them, and how I think it’s important for development and creative expression.

Am I ever going to run out of random shit to talk about? I’ve no idea. I’m sorry if you just don’t care, I try to separate posts into ‘travel’ related ones and ‘random shit I’m thinking about’ ones, so you can just tune into what you’re interested in.

Songkran

Well, I survived the Songkran festival without any major injury. Thai people really know how to party, that festival is freaking crazy!! You get soaked wherever you go, but people tend to congregate around the moat where there’s an ample supply of water. There you get regularly demolished by buckets of thrown water and water pistols of all kinds, some of it with ice in it which is a shock to the system in this kind of weather. Heaps of the businesses on the moat road convert to discos for a few days and supply barrels of water for passerbys to reload. The roads themselves are jammed up with scooters, utes, tuk-tuks, and sorngtow all filled with people and more barrels of water doing drive byes on each other and generally getting soaked as well. There’s so much water being thrown around that it’s ankle deep in the streets in some places. Then they have stages set up with music and festivities, and foam machines which bury entire intersections under froth. And of course the ever present food, massage, and assorted knickknack stalls set up everywhere. I ate so may Thai rotis, my favourite being banana and egg with sweetened condensed milk, that shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s. On the first day they take all of the Buddhas out of the temples in Chiang Mai (there’s a LOT) and they carry them around the city on floats with traditional dancing girls, flag holders, music, etc. Then you’re supposed to throw this holy water on them which has safflower and other spices in it. I believe that’s where the water fight itself is supposed to have started, by tipping this same water on the neck or shoulders of another person you’re blessing them. You would often see people do this to children and older people. Then there’s the more rowdy areas where everybody is drinking (Thai people love to feed you a mix of Thai Whisky and Chang beer, which actually doesn’t taste nearly as bad as it sounds, but it gets you really drunk really quick). Even so Thai people tend to be nice about throwing a bucket of ice water all over you, where as the Australians, Americans, and English tend to throw it as hard as they can in your face while whooping hysterically. Well, that’s an incredibly broad generalisation about a lot of people, most of whom aren’t actually like that, but you know what I mean.

So on top of Songkran I’ve been tearing up dance floors across Chiang Mai. There’s been a few beach festivals in a local forest which were really cool, I didn’t get home until the sun was coming up from the second one. Then the other night I had a coffee at around 9pm because I’d really wanted a dance for days but had been too tired. So then a friend and I hijacked a bar and started a crazy dance floor in it and ended up with a bunch of other crazy dancers joining us, and someone thankfully dragged me home at around 4am because I really needed to sleep but hadn’t realised it yet. And then again last night, but no coffee so I came home a bit earlier. And it’s a bit funny because I keep seeing the same people around, like this Thai woman who runs a guest house and restaurant just down the road which I love to eat at. I run into her at every big party I go to, and often just out randomly as well, she’s great fun. And I’ve had a few situations now where people will come up and chat to me for a while, and I’ll eventually work out that I must have been dancing with them at some stage and just forgotten their face. But anyway, it’s time to stop for a bit I think, I’m not drinking much but it invariably blows out your budget anyway, and the late nights are starting to add up. Plus I’ve accrued a bunch of dancing related injuries, like blisters on both my big toes and a new big one on my heel, and 2 REALLY old black toes from Protoculture back in Oz. It’s amazing how good you feel after a big night on a dance floor though, if I stay out late and sit all night then I really feel it the next day, but if I dance the night away I generally feel pretty good.

The political situation exploded right before Songkran with that clash between the red shirts and the army. The death toll was up to 23 I think yesterday. I’m not sure how much you guys hear about it all, I guess you get some of it on the news. I’m not 100% sure what happened myself but I gather there were grenades being thrown at the army and the army shot back. And I think they’ve been trying to capture the red shirt leaders as well, they may have got one, and I know another one escaped out a window of the hotel he was in. It’s all a bit crazy and will probably kick off again now that Songkran has ended. That said I met a fair number of tourists who travelled up through Bangkok to get to Chiang Mai for the festival, and they all said everyone was very nice and civilised, although one girl did get tear gassed by an army helicopter. We had truck loads of red shirts in Chiang Mai too but they were all just joining in on the festivities and waving flags at the same time. Nobody is targeting tourists at all, I think it’s perfectly safe so long as you don’t get caught in the middle of a protest or accidentally walk past a phone booth with a bomb in it. There are SO many other ways to die in Thailand (or anywhere else for that matter); I really don’t feel like this situation is very high on the list.

Dentists and water festivals

I went to the dentist today and he said “Berry good teeth, zig zag, but berry good. Keep on flossing”. So take that all you head-shakers whenever I pull out the floss at all hours of the day. And it only cost me $6.66 all up, including the check up and 2 x-rays of my back teeth to check for cavities. I do love Thailand.

Bangkok city is going crazy right now, the anti-government activists aren’t backing down, they’ve stormed parliament house during session, and are physically protecting a TV station which the government is trying to shut down. Rocket propelled grenade attacks still seem to be ongoing, although it seems like they’re trying to hurt property rather than people despite a few injuries and deaths. The leaders of the army are apparently refusing to physically break up protestors despite being asked to by the government. You see Thais all over Chiang Mai huddled around little radios and TV’s listening to rabble rousing speeches (I don’t understand the words, but the tone is fairly universal). Chiang Mai itself is still emptying, literally every second shop is closed down, although tourist numbers seem to have stabilised they’re still very low.

It’s Songkran in one weeks time, the Thai new year celebration, and from what I hear Chiang Mai is THE place to be for it due to it being a traditionally northern Thai festival (apparently derived from an Indian festival), and the presence of a moat. Basically it’s a massive week long holiday where you can’t go outside without being drenched in water of questionable origin. And it’s not just water pistols, but buckets of water as well. Hence it’s surprising how few Thais there are here. So I’ll obviously be sticking around for it, although the dentist seemed to think it’ll be pretty small this year.

A treatise on the dangers of eating

Many of you may find this post amusing. I am world renown for eating far more than should be physically possible considering my size. Since coming away I have regularly out eaten every single person I’ve come across, regardless of their size. Not because we’re competing, but because I just eat that much. I frequently end up with leftover food funnelling down the dinner table towards my seat. I believe this penchant for overconsumption seems to come from a number of places. One is that people who haven’t yet eaten with me often scoff at my assertions of over nourishment and tell me that they’ll fatten me up. They generally admit defeat if I ever do eat with them, but I think this had left me with a desire to overcompensate and prove I don’t have an eating disorder. Another is that Tony (my little brother) and I would egg each other on at the dinner table to finish everything on our plates with cries of “Never give in to the enemy!!!!!” It’s possible you had to be there to understand this strange custom, but that left another ingrained desire to avoid wastage and force every last bit down. Another is that I hate wastage, especially when people leave that last spoonful of rice scattered unevenly across their plate because they’re too lazy to scrape it up, usually forcing somebody else to remove the plate from the stack, take it to the bin, and expend additional time and effort scraping the culprit’s plate free of debris before putting it in the dish washer. Yet another (and certainly not least) is that I REALLY LOVE FOOD! I love going through the flavours of things and trying to identify what gives it that extra little kick or why it’s so full and rich. I love to go out to dinner alone so nobody is around to distract me while I close my eyes and savour super tasty meals. And of course we’re just conditioned in the west to eat enormous meals and not to leave food on the plate. So I’m in the habit of never leaving anything to be thrown out. Surprisingly to me I’m completely out of touch with my body in this regard. I force every last bit down regardless of whether I need it or not. Since coming to Thailand I’ve become even worse, it’s so easy to over consume here when everything is so cheap and I can eat 5 completely different (and extremely tasty) dishes for only one dollar.

On Tuesday 30^th of March at approximately 9am I climbed into the back of a sawngthaew (literally “2 seats”, these take the place of buses in Chiang Mai and much of S.E. Asia. They are basically utes with a canopy over the back and a long bench seat on either side of the tray). Around an hour later, after visiting a local market for fresh produce, we arrived at the cooking school where we were to learn to cook amazing Thai food. Around 4pm I arrived back at my hotel, having eating 8 meals in about 5 hours, 6 of which had been right on the upper edge of my not inconsiderable chilli tolerance. I believe I posted that night about feeling rather unwell, but hoping to feel better before going to see some jazz. Well, I saw the jazz, and it was good. But the next day I awoke with serious problems. To cut quite a long story short, I stretched my guts so badly and aggravated them so much with chilli that they swelled up. I had periodic intense stomach pain (~10min mean, with a range of [3, 60) minutes for the engineers out there), and minor flu like symptoms like weakness, headaches, and overly sensitive skin. I can hear you all cluck and say I just caught a stomach bug, but I don’t think so, and neither does the doctor I saw over here, or my doctor back home. They both think it’s likely I have a stomach ulcer due to an overproduction of stomach acid. Which kind of sucks at this juncture, but I have wondered that before only to be told at the time that it was fairly unlikely. So I think I might go and get that checked out or it’s going to sit on my mind until I do. So anyway, that’s getting slightly off topic. So I stopped eating like I had because eating got my stomach acid going and caused me a lot of pain. I just ate fruit for a few days, and then eased back into watery soups and the like (NO chilli), and I’m going to avoid meat, chilli, beer, oil, cigarettes, and coffee for the immediate future as they all contribute to stomach acid issues. In fact I really wasn’t eating a lot there for a few days because starving myself meant my swollen stomach was empty and feeling much better than when I ate anything. And once I’d got over feeling like I’d been kicked in the guts by a rugby team, I started noticing how much more energy I had for the rest of my body when it wasn’t all going into digesting and moving a metric arse load (excuse the pun) of food through my body. However I’m now faced with a new dilemma. Given my new awareness of the fact that I feel much better if I only eat when I’m actually hungry, and then only what my body feels comfortable with rather than everything on my plate and anybody else’s within a 3 chair radius. Given that, I’ve got to try and undo a lifetime of habitual overconsumption. And I have to practice tuning in to the sense of fullness from my stomach when I am eating so I stop when I should. AND I need to tune into my body’s hunger so that I eat when I need or consciously want to, not just when I can. I sat there in front of a massive bowl of soup the other day with a good few hundred mls of liquid and vegetables left in the bottom, and tried not to eat it. It was amazingly hard; you’ve no idea how hard. I never leave anything on my plate so long as it tastes good. I kept sipping at it and eventually had to place the bowl precariously on top of a stack of dishes on the other side of the table to stop myself. Then 5 minutes later I was glad as my lagging sense of fullness informed me I’d still eaten too much and that I would now feel bloated for 15 minutes.

This is another case in my life of being aware of and differentiating between “I need”, “I want”, and “I can”. Generally I’ve been eating first because I can, because it’s available. Which blends into I want because it looks tasty. But the two are distinct and I have trouble with both. Least frequently I eat because I need, because I’m actually hungry and my body needs fuel. This occasionally happens when I program or study because I’m consuming so little energy and moving so infrequently that my body doesn’t inform me it’s hungry until something happens like somebody mentions food, or I smell something cooking. I’d like to drop the “I can” altogether. This is just “mastication of opportunity”: I’ll finish off x because John Doe can’t and I don’t want to see it wasted, or I’ll get some cake just because Jane Barrett is and it seems like I should (No that doesn’t happen, Jane Barrett has impeccable taste in cake, but you understand what I mean). “I want” is the hardest and really depends on my body at that point in time I suppose, but I’m not against indulging in culinary delights when the occasion arises. But I want to be more conscious of when I choose to eat for want, because that can easily bleed back into eating because I can. And of course if “I need” to eat then I should, but at that point I should really ask what my body feels like and put that into it. I can usually tell what it does or does not need. For instance the thought of chilli during the days where my stomach acid was burning through its lining made me feel ill. Likewise when I’m actually hungry I don’t usually feel like chocolate even though I may want it. Usually when I’m actually hungry my body would prefer me to eat a certain kind of food which contains things it needs. I find it hard to be aware of this in some situations. For instance at work when a meal is just something to get me to 5pm, or when faced with a lot of choices for things “I want” which can sometimes droll out my body’s “need” awareness. But my experience is that practicing something only takes about 2 weeks to start becoming natural, or habitual. And that’s at the core of this I suppose: habit, which to me is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. I think being aware of your habits and consciously designing them to aid your life or fulfil a purpose (even if it’s just to stop you locking your keys in the car, one of my first experiments with habit) can be extremely beneficial. And likewise, being blind and unaware of our habits (as we all are of some) can leave us slaves to our own minds in certain aspects of life without even realising or understanding why as this experience has clearly shown me.

In other related news: I continue to lose weight despite the extravagant levels of overconsumption I reached before my food related injury. I was 55Kg (121.25 pounds for any backwards Americans out there) according to the doctor’s scales, a year low as far as I can tell, and that was only the first day or so after getting ill. 2 of these 3 kilograms I lost before departing Oz. The most probably causes based on current symptoms and general wellbeing are apparently thyroid problems or diabetes, neither of which I believe. Intestinal parasites I also rule out. So I’m just going to see how I go after recovering from this latest setback, and maybe go to the hospital if I drop any more kilos. I’ve no idea where those 3Kgs came from as I can’t imagine I’ve ever had 3Kgs of body fat, and the thought of losing any more weight seems fairly dire to me. I don’t feel any skinnier though, I was doing yoga every morning and actually feeling quite fit before this week, so I don’t really understand.