In between the videos of houses collapsing from bombs, people burning in hospitals, children being pulled from rubble, and men separated and lined up, I see videos of the people in Gaza continuing to live - people charging their phones from solar panels, making a morning coffee and enjoying a biscuit with it, going to pick up money that was transferred, chopping vegetables and making a meal, sweeping the dirt from their tents, watching the sunset on the beach. Another day.

I make a morning coffee, go to work, put away groceries, fold laundry, and watch the sunset from the window. Another day.

I can donate eSIM cards. I can donate to families connected through Operation Olive Branch. I can boycott Sabra hummus, Puma, SodaStream, and others on the BDS list. I can learn about the history of Palestine. I can attend a protest. These are all things that fit neatly into my day to day life without much inconvenience. It won’t stop the war.

Climate scientists and activists know that it is already too late. We are seeing record breaking ocean temperatures. Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. On average over the last 5 years, over a million acres of wildfires are burning in California every year. 2024 broke heat records around the world. The heatwave in Mecca killed at least 1300 people. India saw its longest and hottest heatwave on record with nearly 41,000 reported cases of heat stroke. Million of people around the world were displaced this year by flooding. It goes on and on. Another day.

Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why are we not dropping everything to do something? We expect someone - some concerned collective - to do something about all the horror, because nothing we individually do seems to really matter. And individually, we’re mostly preoccupied with the realities of living our day to day lives.

We can’t grapple with the big picture in any real way. One death is felt. A hundred thousand is a number. A few individuals seem to have outsized power to change the course of history. Global protests seem to do nothing to change material outcomes. The climate apocalypse is abstract. Your flooded house is real.

I truly believe we only have a couple of recognizable decades left in our collapsing world. What is there to do?

It seems impossible to talk about this. What is there to say? We find ourselves back where we started - preoccupied by how we’re currently living, which is how the general population of every generation has ever coped with its particular existential anxieties. We settle for creating meaning in the specific little ways in which we can love and care for each other as we’re borne ceaselessly into oblivion. It won’t save us.

Afaik there are two main ways of coming up with the paste: directly balancing/combining/mixing things that are already paste-like, or making a paste from a solid and a liquid.

Overview

These are my go-to ingredients to keep on hand.

Is there a way to organize this such that “combining x from y columns” always yields a delicious sauce?

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Balancing pastes

You’re already starting out with a base paste (or several of them) that’s full of flavour and all you need to do is adjust with thicker/thinner ingredients until you have the desired consistency.

Butter miso

• Thick stuff: miso

• Thin stuff: melted butter, pasta water

Melt however much butter you want. Dig a spoonful of miso and toss it in. Add pasta water until it’s the right consistency.

Some sort of spicy creamy noodles

• Thick stuff: peanut butter / tahini.

• Thin stuff: soy sauce, black vinegar, sesame oil, chili oil, noodle water

Get a bowl and add it all in. Mix it until it’s a thick sauce. Mix with wet noodles and noodle water.

Bechamel 

• Thick stuff: flour, cheese

• Thin stuff: butter, milk

Stir flour into melted butter over low heat. Add warm milk. Add grated cheese & spices. Maybe find a real recipe for measurements on this one - I’m less confident here in winging this.

Cacio e pepe 

• Thick stuff: cheese (pecorino) , black pepper

• Thin stuff: pasta water

Literally just stir in the cheese and pepper into the pasta with some pasta water until it’s a sauce. I think it’s fair to add butter/oil too.

Fake Puttanesca

• Thick stuff: anchovies, tomato paste, red pepper flakes

• Thin stuff: oil, pasta water

Melt a chopped up anchovy in some olive oil with some garlic and red pepper flakes. Add tomato paste. Add pasta water.

Making pastes

Powders (spices) + oils → paste

Heat up some spices in oil. Now your spices are bloomed, oil is flavoured, and it’s become a paste. Maybe remix with some other pastes? Harissa? Tomato paste? Sriracha? Gochujang? Fermented bean paste? Whatever. Toss with starchy water, broth, cream?

Spicy cumin noodles

Heat up some vegetable oil. Combine cumin, coriander, garlic powder, onion powder, red pepper flakes, green onions, szechuan pepper in a bowl (use whatever spices you have). Pour hot oil on top. Or do it the other way and dump spices into the hot oil. Toss with noodles. Drizzle some chili oil, soy sauce, and black vinegar on top.

It’s a simpler version of these noodles.

Aglio e olio 

Sauté some garlic and red pepper flakes and black pepper in a bunch of olive oil. Toss with pasta. I think it’s still good if you can’t be bothered to chop parsley or cut a lemon.

Spicier butter miso

The butter miso from above but bloom red pepper flakes, garlic powder, and onion powder in the butter. Add tomato paste and gochujang with the miso. Mix in water/broth. This is extra good if you toss in large frozen shrimp.

Blended solids + liquids → thicker paste + thinner

This category is more involved than the other ones: there’s the extra step of preparing the solids and building up flavour in them. These are less of a late night sauce unless you’re really motivated.

Roasted vegetable sauce

Roast some vegetables. Roasting builds flavour. It could be red peppers, eggplant, butternut squash, zucchini, etc - whatever you want to roast! Combine them with maybe some other flavours you’ve got going on the stovetop like shallots or garlic or tomato paste, etc. Simmer with some stock and cream (or milk or yogurt or whatever else). Blend it.

Bean based sauce

Beans don’t have a lot of flavour but they do become really creamy. White beans like cannellini, chickpea, navy, etc work great. You’ll want to cook them with a flavour base (spices? onion/shallot? garlic? anchovies? another paste? some stock?). Blend half of the mixture for the sauce. Keep the other half for some diversity of texture. Here's a real recipe.

Pesto

Pick a green and a nut and blend them with olive oil + garlic & salt).

Recommended future research and work include an examination of the relationship between pastes and soups.

With a digital camera, I’ll snap 100 pics in 15 minutes and attend an optometrist’s appointment in Lightroom afterwards: does it look better with 1 or does it look better with 2? But with film, it all takes a beat longer. The scene is metered. Frame lines are noted. The focus is dialed. Double checked. Shot. Wound. Sent to the lab. Whatever comes back is what it is (mostly).

It’s slow. It’s expensive. It’s terribly fun.

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Throughout the year I reminded myself to not be precious about it. Take the photo. Shoot a roll on the 20 minute walk to drop it off at the lab. Just take the photo. It’s the only way to get better.

Over thirty 35mm thirty-six exposure rolls and a year later, it’s a bit better. “Better” for me means building up a more and more accurate intuition for how to get a particular frame that I have in mind. It’s knowing how different variables (subject, light, time, film, accessories, lens, camera, development, scan, paper stock, etc) interact and change the final piece, and being able to go off of gut feel, turning calculations into instincts.

A year later, I’ve worked on some of the basics and have a few photos I really like, but I’ve still barely scratched the surface.

What I worked on last year

• Mostly 35mm with 50mm lenses

• The basics — how to load the film, how the cameras work.

• Being able to find focus (and faster).

• Starting to get a feel for what shutter speed / aperture I need based on the lighting conditions and film sensitivity.

• A general feel for a few film stocks at box speed. I went through a lot of Portra and Ultramax and tried some Fuji, Ektar, Ektachrome, Cinestill, a few experimental ones and a few b&w rolls.

What I wanna work on this year

• A deeper feel for a few film stocks. What they look like pushed. Shooting at not-box-speed. More Cinestill.

• Different field of views. Expanding into a wider angle and some sort of telephoto. More medium format.

• Shooting more black & white + home development. Sampling various black & white film stocks, maybe choosing one to go deep on.

• More portraits.

• Using a tripod. More low light photos.

• More interesting photos. I’m tired of the rule of thirds and symmetry. I want motion. I want God; I want poetry; I want sin.

(goddam there’s a roll of portra 400 w/flash that might be my favourite of the year tho)

The sewing machine was a Christmas 2021 gift from my partner. I was delightfully surprised to find something I hadn’t known I wanted. The last time I’d done a sewing project, it was for a second grade Secret Santa. I made a pillow with the santee’s name on it, cut out of felt, hand sewn, and stuffed with cotton balls. It wasn’t very good but I did try very hard. The neatness required didn’t seem like the hobby for me. But my partner saw it from next to me on the couch.

TikTok had been showing me a lot of videos of people taking up sewing as a creative hobby. Some of them were to-be fashion designers and a few were professionals, but most of them were just doing it for fun. Someone cropping a sweatshirt and shortening a zipper. Someone adding pockets to their pants. Someone making a dress for fashion week, haphazardly gliding scissors across some thrifted fabric with no pattern and no plan.

A few of my favs:

• juulian.c - upcycles thrifted finds (embellishments, exaggerated shapes), narrating his process and figuring it out along the way

• Nicole McLaughlin - everything she does is the coolest

• tailorsatelier - tailor in NYC with practical guides

• evan.ihde - shares the joy of technical sewing skills

It was one of those confidently chaotic videos with jagged cuts and figure-out-as-we-go ideas that convinced me to just go for it; start somewhere. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s just for fun.

It’s a seven step incantation to thread the machine, which feels overwhelming the first time and rote by the fifth. Then, the rhythm. Hold the top thread. Raise and lower the needle to make a knot with the top and bottom threads; pull it tight. Place the fabric under the needle. Lower the presser foot. Drive. Let the fabric pass gently. Stop. Snip. That’s the first stitch. There are four ends to be clipped after every stitch and they’ll gradually tumble with the fabric odds into a detritus bunny under the table. Repeat.

Observations after a few totes, two pants, a vest, and some alterations:

• Truly I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle if you tie the thread around its neck and raise the needle to exactly its highest position.

• If the tension isn’t right you’ll end up with a giant ball of thread at the back which you’ll have to pluck apart with scissors and clippers and fingernails.

• There’s a foot for that. Rolled hems could be so much easier if only you had the foot for that. You’d feed in the fabric and the foot will make sure the fabric rolls under the needle right where it needs to be.

• The button hole foot is brilliant. It can make a button hole that perfectly fits any sized button! You put your button in a little button holder and the machine will sew a stitch the length of the button — it’ll know when to stop! 

• Don’t pull the fabric. The machine will sew in a straight line if you don’t mess with it. 

• Sewing is physical labour. 

Mostly, it feels like magic that I can just draw on a piece of paper what I think pants should look like, trace that onto fabric, cut it out, sew it together, and have a pair of pants I can wear. Making anything feels like magic when I know almost nothing about it. There’s creativity in the constraint of being able to do very little and the freedom of not knowing the way it’s supposed to be done, not being classically trained, not knowing whether the technique is ‘right’.

Making websites used to feel like that - the first “hello world” on a page (make the background red)! The first mug thrown, glazed, and fired. I want to maintain that beginner’s delight with just having made something. But I’m often soon flopping in the inadequacy of a taste vs skill gap and spoiling the fruit of knowledge from the littlest bit of experience into criticism, instead of cultivating it into the generosity of a bountiful expertise. It’s probably about enjoying the process, or something like that. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s just for fun. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s just for fun. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s just for fun.

I haven’t tried using a pattern yet even though I’d learn quicker if I did. But the fun part is figuring it out. What do the pieces look like laid flat? Which sides get sewn facing each other? What gets flipped inside out or folded over? I’m a seam rotator, baby! You think you know what a pant fly looks like until you try to put one together.