I've been slowly but surely eliminating commercial beauty products from my routine. Partly because I don't want to slather carcinogens all over my body and partly because I'm cheap. So far, my favourite replacements are:

• Shampoo: wash hair with an egg, rinse with apple cider vinegar diluted with mint tea or water. Warning: do not have the water temperature too high or you'll end up cooking the egg.
• Hair oil treatment: Treat your hair with a mayonnaise pack or just plain olive oil.
• Facial Toner: Create a mix of any of the following: rose water, orange blossom water, apple cider vinegar, green tea, white tea
• Facial Moisturizer: I can't say I've found a replacement but using a yogurt based or cream based mask everyday helps significantly reduce the amount I need. Mix yogurt with any combo of: honey, oatmeal, ground chickpea flour, mashed up fruits (strawberries, papaya, avocado), tea, turmeric, cinnamon & nutmeg, lemon juice, etc. For extra moisturizing, squeeze lemon into 10% or 35% cream and let stand to curdle. This will make a thick, skin lightening mask that will exfoliate due to the extra lactic acids created by adding lemon to the cream.

My fave blog for more DIY recipes and ideas (includes DIY household cleaning products): Crunchy Betty

Enjoy!

1) Sushi Kaji will ruin you. Do you remember that time you gorged yourself on sushi when you were in Japan, and when you came back, every time you went out for Japanese, it was all a massive gustatory disappointment? Remember how long it took you to re-acclimatize yourself to eating sushi in a land locked city? Sushi Kaji will ruin you in the exact same way.

2) Do not order the more expensive meals unless you are at your most ravenous. Let's get one thing straight first: I can pack away a lot of calories in one sitting, especially for a woman of my size. In fact, on a good day, I can out-eat most of the men I know. So when I say ravenous, I mean it. The portions of each course are deceptive. They are quite small, and you might think in the first hour of your three and a half hour meal that you're going to have to grab a second dinner. But as the sushi keeps coming over the counter, you begin to realize that you might be in over your head. The dishes seem never-ending - each one just as subtle and delightful as the last, so you couldn't possibly leave anything but a little smear of sauce on the plate. I did not eat to full capacity, but I was getting there, maybe 80%. I did not eat breakfast or lunch the next day; I simply wasn't hungry.

3) Beyond overall caloric intake, it is really the sheer freshness of each ingredient that will overwhelm. Everything tasted so wonderfully fresh and even the modest ingredients and dishes - razor thin scallions, sweetly biting ginger slices, udon noodles that dance on the tongue - were quite splendid. As such, despite the delicacy of each course, overall, it felt completely gluttonous.

4) You may be witness to a particularly brisk decapitation and evisceration of a giant shrimp for your sashimi course. First, the head is separated from the body, then the shell and legs are stripped off, translucent flesh still pulsating while the eyes and antennae of the head wave about. This is immediately served to you, attractively plated, with the still moving head as the centerpiece. You are staring into the dying eyes of the animal that sacrificed its life for you. It might actually be observing you too. There is something very visceral and honest about the whole thing. Animal lovers may wish to stay away.

So in zen practice, cultivating compassion is a really big deal. The idea that you would invest all this time to be able to focus the mind without cultivating any compassion is like, as my teacher explained, cleaning your glasses but not bothering to put them on.

But I won't lie, I struggle immensely with this. I've noticed that lately, I've become more intolerant and judgmental, easily irritated with others, and less patient. I find myself increasingly frustrated with some of the young adults around me. I am intensely annoyed by their apathy, their complacency, their lack of responsibility for their own lives and those of others, and I will be quite frank - the majority of people who are like this are privileged, middle class and well educated which makes it doubly irritating. I feel like we are of an age when we can finally have the experience, the skills and the power to make real contributions to society and instead of galvanizing together and getting excited about this, what I see is the opposite: whinging, boredom, pettiness, irrational anxiety, etc.

"Oh my god, we're getting so old."
"It's all downhill from here."
"Is this all there is?"

Are these people for real? Sometimes I want to shake people and tell them: I hope you realize that your attitude is utterly bizarre! Most people in the world would kill to be bored like you are bored! You are capable and have so much to offer and you are selling yourself short! It is so obvious to me that in 20 years time, the people who harp on like this are going to look back at themselves and realize that they have wasted some of the most potentially fruitful years of their life feeling inadequate, being immature/self absorbed and not appreciating their health and social privilege, not appreciating what an amazing country Canada is.

Now, I realize that getting irritated is 100% unproductive. My bitching about other people bitching about their lives is basically a waste of energy. I'm reminded of M. Aurelius. He writes (and I paraphrase), ask yourself when you're irritated by stupid men: Can the world ever be free of stupid men? Of course not; so do not become irritated over what is inevitable.

But the thing is, I don't think it's normal for grown adults to be this apathetic and immature. In fact, I KNOW it's not because it's NOT like this in other parts of the world. N. Americans are incredibly complacent, self absorbed people compared with other societies. This is not a judgment, this is a simple fact. I believe we can do better for ourselves. But I have no idea how to proceed from here other than I would like to cultivate more compassion for others.

People of a Feather is centered around the Sanikiluaq community and the people's intimate relationship to the Hudson Bay, its wildlife, and its seasonal patterns of change. Ever since damming projects began to develop in the 1970s, pumping fresh water into a salt water system during the winter (as opposed to the spring run off), seasonal patterns have become erratic and unpredictable, resulting in massive die-offs of the eider duck population and increasing danger to the people living in the Sanikiluaq area.

Unlike many docs about an "issue", especially an environmental issue, People of a Feather is not about selling the audience a neatly packaged theory and then hammering home the evidence. While it obviously presents its case, it also remains open in its structure and provides relatively little in the way of analysis and omniscient voice overs, choosing instead, to focus on the lives of Sanikiluaq residents, in particular, the good humoured Simeonie Kavik. And really, it is by this open endedness, this vastness of cinematic experience, that the complexities of ecological change in Sanikiluaq emerge, making its impact subtler, yet more profound than that of more tightly structured, polemical docs. The immensity of the northern landscape, caught in these incredibly beautiful time lapsed shots, bypass both reason and emotion, and directly move the heart.

I really don't know how to describe seeing the northern sky and knowing what infinity is. Suddenly, the bareness of your own life becomes so palpable. Your mind feels cleansed of all illusions and the illusory things that focused so much of your attention, that held such a gravity, become like fluttering bits of rice paper, all these pretty, silly little bits and pieces of things. You become aware of your body, its sinews, teeth, hair, blood. Your heart is rent asunder. Your ego pours out like blood and landscape pours in like electricity, like liquid fire.

When you feel this way, what we are doing to the north becomes like the worst kind of violation. But People of a Feather does not attempt to incite the viewer to anger or sadness. It only invites you open yourself up to this violation. To see more than just the pretty things.

Girl Model is a doc that follows Nadya, a 13 year old Russian and self described "country girl" working as a model in Tokyo, contrasted with the highly conflicted yet emotionally deadpan observations of Ashley, a former model and the scout who recruited Nadya. It's shot mostly in a verite-esque hand held style with numerous grainy scenes, lending a certain grittiness to a subject that we normally associate with a high sheen glamour.

The trajectory of this film is fairly predictable. Naive young Nadya is taken for a ride by her Japanese modeling agency, Switch. Her lack of both English and Japanese place her at an unsurmountable disadvantage, so that even if she was clever and mature, she would still be easily exploitable. Despite the promise of a minimum of two paying jobs and $8,000, Nadya has difficulty getting work and leaves with $2,000 in debt. I wish the film had broken down the finances of this type of exploitation but it's not really an investigative film.

The more fascinating character however, is Ashley, who takes a cut and profits, if we are to judge by the opulence of her stylish American residence, quite handsomely. The film portrays her as someone with deep contradictions that appear to be maintained solely by remaining in a state of perpetual emotional numbness. So while she possesses a clear dislike, if not outright hostility toward the industry, she is very much someone who is deeply embedded within it. And while she professes to care about the models she recruits, she continues to exploit these girls for personal gain. Her detachment, especially as a former model with a better ability to empathize, is stunning. In one scene, she visits Nadya in her Tokyo apartment, crinkling her nose in distaste and commenting on how bad the shower is. She doesn't once ask Nadya how she is adjusting, coping and feeling - unless this was edited out of the film.

Ashley's main concern seems to be freedom. She's free to travel, she free to make her own schedule, she's free to choose the girls. She also appears to be free of any sense of morality or human closeness. In contrast to Nadya, who despite being alone in Tokyo, is more than often depicted in relation to someone else - her modeling roommate, her family, her mother, etc., Ashley is always alone.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend watching this if you are looking for an expose of the modeling and fashion industry. Actually, it's about watching someone who seems completely broken. Kind of depressing.



Anyways, the better part of this cinematic experience was watching the preview for People of a Feather. It looks fucking amazing, utterly gorgeous. And for some reason, as I watched this preview, it really hit me, how much the landscape is changing there. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I couldn't breathe. If I was at home, I would have cried. I really don't know how or why this struck me so profoundly just then. It's not like I was unaware of this. I remember talking to elders up north, about how the fish didn't taste good anymore, and how it was getting harder to hunt caribou and how the ice road kept melting earlier, that kind of thing. I remember those who didn't agree with all the oil and gas speculation in town, how they were not some fringe minority, and how their voices never made it to the official levels, the levels where all the power and money are.

I don't know why, but in a strange way, I like being blindsided by emotion, especially emotions I cannot explain rationally. It's like something telling you, "Pay attention. Pay very close attention. This is fucking important and you don't even realize it yet. You don't even know what "this" is." I think I am going to have to watch this doc as well. I do miss the north, I still dream about it, and I wonder when I'll return.

I'm always curious about what kind of music, which tracks and which albums, people listen to obsessively or suddenly feel an intense emotional connection to when falling in love and when breaking up. For me, the lyrics don't mean a thing, but I know for others, they are the catalyzing aspect of the connection. And I don't know about you, but listening to falling in love music has always been able to transport me back to that moment in time in a powerful way, but breakup music simply doesn't move me in that way. The temporal association is just not there.

LOVE MUSIC
80s New Wave tracks: New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle, Erasure - Always, etc. (Let's dance!)
Fuzzy electronica: Milosh - You Make Me Feel, CocoRosie - Promise (Let's stay in bed all day and merge into each other!)

BREAKUP MUSIC
Radiohead - Kid A (OMG capitalism is so fucked up! Modernity is emotionally sterile! Wah!) <- For some reason, I found this album incredibly comforting even as I found it disturbing.
Kate Bush - Aerial (OMG the world is so beautiful! Your breakup is just a transitory experience that fills out the incredible nature of being alive!)

I grew up with classical music. All the adults in my family and that I knew listened to classical, such that I believed as a child that becoming an adult meant listening to classical exclusively as if it were some kind of biological directive like growing taller. My family went to the symphony on the weekends. Even though it would always be a matinee, I would have pretty clips in my hair and get dressed up in a party dress with a giant bow at the back and wear black patent leather shoes paired with frilly socks. Whenever we were in the car, we played a game with my father. He'd turn the radio onto classical 96.3 fm and my sister and I would try to guess the correct composer.

It was a time when I was completely unaware of class and how culture relates to imperialism, the bourgeoisie and so on. My sister and I loved the music for the music. For many people, the popular songs of their day immediately remind them of their youth, but for me, it's also whatever composer I happened to be listening to obsessively at the time in the way only teenagers can obsess.

It's only until I became older that I became aware that classical music represents something very different to other people than what it does for me. That it carries with it, an aura of social privilege and civilized, western superiority. I appreciate the time that I had when I didn't know all this, but I realize that the only reason I could do so was because of my privilege. I am very aware of this now.

But despite all that, there are moments when it is still just the music, and only the music.

You all know I have my Freudian moments. I am of the opinion that most ppl choose partners that echo the relationship dynamics they had with their parents. In particular, if hetero, sons with their mothers, daughters with their fathers. So when you hear a woman complaining about her horrible psycho bitch MIL, just think on that for a moment.

Incidentally, all the mothers of my serious partners are strong willed, independent women who don't subscribe to gender norms. Shocking, I know.

Before the internet, the average person's access to new music was heavily guarded and controlled by media gatekeepers. Now it's a free for all. So how do you discover your new music now? My strategies in order of descending frequency:

- I visit the websites of labels I like. Ninja Tunes, 4AD, Warp, Kranky, Subpop, etc.
- I visit mainstream alternative curators. Right now, it's Epitonic and sometimes Stereogum and Brainwashed.
- I read a genre specific blog, John Terauds' Musical Toronto (classical music).
- Follow artists I like on Twitter
- Recommendations by friends and other artists
- Occasionally, live shows, opening acts
- If I like a song I hear in a store, I'll ask the staff what they're playing. This happens a lot on Bloor W.

I've tried programs like Last.fm etc. but their suggestions are always off and they frustrate me. My most fave strategy capitalizes on the total randomness that I love about the internet. I think of a word, plug it into a website like Grooveshark or YouTube and listen to whatever comes up. (You'll get a lot of misses but you'll also find gems that you would never, ever find otherwise.) Today it was "bubblegum" and I found this cute video! For some reason, I can't handle gore and violence when I'm ill. I want everything to be cute and nonsensical.



On a completely different note, or maybe it's the wrong kind of nonsense, Sasha advises a woman with self described OCD who wants to bleach her anus. The best part about this letter is that the writer displays many of the hallmarks of Freud's classic anal retentive personality - obsessed, fastidious, controlling and stubborn. All the letter writer needed to be a textbook case was one more sentence to describe how stingy she is with money. A little stuck at the anal phase of psychosexual development much?

OK, I must be getting better b/c I can string a few sentences together. Let's hope this uptick continues.

So, ever since N introduced me to this circuit training YouTube channel, I have stopped going to the gym and my fitness levels have improved dramatically. I've never gained this much muscle mass so quickly and I've taken to flexing my biceps in front of the mirror like a narcissistic teenaged boy. (Sad b/c they're not at all impressive - only impressive to me.) Anyways, I thought I'd share the channel because after doing a lot of research, I've reached the conclusion this type of exercise that combines strength training and cardio is way better than most popular regimens, esp women, who tend to just hit the elliptical for an hour. (btw, outcastspice, swimming works on this same principle because it combines resistance training and cardio - instead of body weight for resistance, you're using water, plus there is the added benefit of low impact to the joints). Just ignore the dumb names of the videos ("Look Better Naked Workout", "Thong Shape Up") and try to get used to how hyper the host is. I don't follow her plan - I stick with one of her workouts for a couple weeks and keep a record of how many more reps I can squeeze out in the same time. I love how low-tech everything is. All you need is a little space and a pair of trainers to take the impact off your joints. You don't even need to get a timer; I found one online.

Sorry to talk about work again, but I am really nailing these tough assignments lately! I wish I could like, high five my boss.

Had an intense zen sesh today. I had this huge shift. But b/c I've been running on so little sleep lately, that didn't last very long and my brain was all, NOW THAT'S ENOUGH FOR TODAY YOUNG LADY and I fell asleep!

I must confess that I have not been making much progress on B&T as of late. I think I need to restructure my day to make more room for Martin H. When I was young, I'd force myself to read literary classics, even if I didn't understand or enjoy them (I mean, I had "read" stuff like Naked Lunch and Ulysses by grade 9 - meaning I'd read every word but had no clue what was going on, like zero comprehension). I'm glad I developed that tolerance and persistence as a teen.