Weekend Progress Report

Accomplished this weekend:

I learned to cook with tofu and it was delicious! This is good, because I'm on a reasonably high-protein diet and I hate hate hate cooking with meat. With the exception of some types of fish, raw meat grosses me out in the extreme. I'll go to great lengths to avoid having to actually touch the stuff (usually a fork in each hand can do the trick, but I've certainly tried more creative maneuvers in the past). If I do touch it, I typically lose all appetite for whatever I'm making. There's been more than one episode of me throwing out large quantities of raw chicken because the process of thawing it got too icky and I couldn't take it anymore. And I don't even go near raw red meat except for the occasional, very carefully handled steak (is it my fault if I happen to make a mean steak marinade?). We're talking, like, once a year at best. What I'm trying to say is that I've got some pretty major meat neuroses. Plus I adore animals in general*, so it's probably not that long before I give it up and become a vegetarian**. So it's a really, really good thing that I can cook tofu, and that I LOVE it. I tried this recipe for marinated, baked tofu squares. If you want what I made, leave out the smoke flavoring, do slightly less soy sauce, replace the sesame seeds with flax seeds, and replace the hot sauce with a spoonful of salsa and a generous helping of cayenne pepper and chili powder. Oh, and throw in some cumin. Because, I mean, who doesn't like cumin? I ate them with my pesto pasta today (I kind of like random flavors mixed together) and I craved it for the rest of the day. So good!

I also learned to knit. Well, started to learn. More on that as it develops.

I made my New School Year Resolutions. I prefer to make resolutions at the beginning of the school year, since that's really how I measure time while I'm in school. After graduation I'll switch to the more traditional January method. Anyway, I made two of them. Here they are:

1. Write for at least one hour every day. (Not counting blogging...unless I get lazy later and decide it counts.)
2. Read scriptures for 1/2 hour every day, to be broken up into two 15-minute increments (one in the morning and one in the evening), or if that proves too difficult, three 10-minute increments (to be spread throughout the day). Possibly portions may include non-canonical study, ie Lives of the Saints or the Tao Te Ching. We'll see.

Hopefully if I stick to these resolutions I can actually be more of the person I claim to be - namely, a writer and a religious person. I'd also like to start some kind of formal exercise (for the first time in my life, no less!), but I'm not quite to resolution level with that one yet.

I found a dramatic monologue for my Auditions class, though I might not stick to it. Choosing monologues is the worst.

I got rid of Creepy Grocery Store Guy. It's a long story that I aim to blog about more fully once I've finished the guitar ballad I'm writing about it, but about a month ago I had one of the most bizarre pick-up experiences of my life while standing in the book aisle at Smith's. In a dramatic mix of idiocy and morbid curiosity, I wound up giving the guy my number. Fast forward a month, and he was still calling and texting (once he sent a model-pose picture of himself with the words "Do you remember me?" at the bottom. Weird, weird guy). Well, by Friday night the whole thing had gotten terribly unamusing and besides that I never wanted to be one of those girls who just ignores all your phone calls for months on end waiting for you to get the hint so I just texted him (I figured texting was acceptable since we never once spoke on the phone and besides that he doesn't speak english with a whole lot of confidence) and said the following: "You seem like a nice guy and i appreciate that you think i'm beautiful, but i don't think this is going to happen. I'm sorry. Please stop trying to call me." Short, to the point, not totally mean (right? I'm still a good person. Right???). Haven't heard from him since.

And I figured out what I'm going to say at my character presentation tomorrow for Lughnasa rehearsal. I mean, I need to write it all out and organize it, but I made all the decisions about background, likes, dislikes, and basically who she is in general. Which I'm told is a good thing that will prove useful in my acting (who'da thought?).

Failed to accomplish this weekend:

Read The Double for my Dostoevsky class. Looks like it's online plot synopsis time for me. Which is sad, because it's a really good book and I like it a lot. And I mean, I got halfway. That's pretty good, right?

Have a social life. Wait, 5 hours of rehearsal and 3 hours of a Burn Notice marathon while I "do homework" - those don't count as having a social life? Curses.

*But I'm a chronic pet owner which places me much more in the Animal Welfare camp than with Animal Rights Activists, who don't believe in animal ownership...but I digress.
**I should say, "become a vegetarian again" - I was a vegetarian for about 6 months of Freshman year and I loved it. But I decided to quit once I moved off-campus because I didn't know how to think about nutrition. Or cook. Like at all.

ALSO: I chose a new blog template. But that just happened and it isn't likely to stay this way for long, so it isn't in the main part of this post.