One handmade gift at a time: so far 5 out of 6 of the Christmas presents are bought were purchased on Etsy - none at a massive chain/mall/what have you.  Hell yeah.

On other news, Mark put “Starship trooper” on and I want to kill myself.

I wrote something about virgins for Comment is free, which was good fun. I expected a flippin’ blood bath in the comments but it was a rather civilised and interesting discussion, if you don’t count the deleted remarks claming charming things such as “lesbian women don’t really exist, they’re just heterosexuals who had failed relationship with men” and “virgins are cool because men want to go where no men has been before”. Ugh, what f%ckhe@ds.

Could you describe what virginity is? I know I can’t. Is a virgin someone who never kissed, or never touched? Is the loss of virginity about sharing one’s sexuality for the first time, therefore creating a new bond with another person? Or is virginity a burden, something to get rid of? Is it a cultural belief subscribing to the notion that the man “takes away” away something from his partner by having penetrative sex (and if so, what about lesbian women)? And let’s be straightforward: do oral and manual sex count? Furthermore, is abstinence a badge of honour to proudly display, an attribute guaranteeing the moral purity of the person who decides to hold on to it? (read more)

Inspired by Pink of Perfection

1. Is it wrong that the first thing I thought of is Caramel vodka?

2. Tiffany lamps

3. Interpol (the band, although I like the organisation too)

4. Old books with leather covers

5. Cooking

6. Crafts blogs

7. Feminism

8. Getting into political arguments

9. Candles and fairy lights

10. Farms, urban and not

11. France Inter

12. Going to the cinema to see independent movies

13. Chocolate

14. Handwritten letters and cards

15. Prince

16. Soups

17. Antique sewing machines

18. Paul Auster

19. Rosemary

20. The Guardian

21. X Files

22. Black skirts

23. Patchworks and quilts

24. Musk-based perfumes

25. Magpies

26. Corsets

27. Bangs

28. Sleeping while it’s raining outside

29. Surrealist paintings

30. Peonies

31. Hampstead heath

32. Health food stores

33. Coconut rice

34. Steam punk jewelery

35. Clean sheets

36. Dance

37. Morning coffee

38. French pastries

39. Vancouver

40. Dorset cereals

41. Ghost stories

42. Hand crafted brooches

43. Story telling

44. Caramel tea

45. Etsy

46. Silver rings

47. Montreal

48. Writing

49. Female role models

50. My mother and grandmother

51. Mortars

52. Eyeliner

53. Late night conversations

54. Drawings

55. Scarves

56. Farmers’ market

57. Vampires

58. The sounds of gardens at night

59. Jumping from a small cliff

60. Eating out

61. Dark wood floors

62. Autumn as pictured in American movies

63. Tattoos

64. Old frames

65. Women’s curves

66. Internet lingos

67. Pockets in coats

68. My future bike

69. Teddy bears

70. Blogging wars

71. Camden Town

72. Cardigans

73. Pianos

74. Folk stories

75. Poets

76. Douglas Coupland

77. Fridays

78. Sex ed

79. Emo bracelets for boys

80. French strikes

81. Cats

82. Watching TV series

83. Gender studies

84. Oddly shaped vegetables

85. The name Charlie

86. Cherries and berries

87. Libraries

88. Craft fairs

89. Crows

90. Sirops

91. Polaroids

92. Yard sales

93. Attic bedrooms

94. Cigarettes, sometimes

95. Navel gazing journaling

96. The sea

97. Lefty activism

98. Old recipes

99. Scully, my cat

100. Mark, when he’s nice!

I wrote this for Comment is free:

I first heard about fanfics a couple of years ago, when my best friend and I stayed at his 13-year-old cousin’s house in France. We were chatting about music in her bedroom when she confessed to being a rabid fan of the boy-band Blue, whose rise to fame in 2001 was as quick as their demise in 2005. Seemingly unfazed by our teasing, she proceeded to grab an enormous folder packed with pictures and handwritten pages. “Those are my fanfictions,” she proudly said. “I’ve been writing about Blue for some time now and I also share my stories with other girls on the internet. They’re mostly about me and Lee Ryan, he’s my favourite member of the group”…

Ah, rice pudding. The English name sounds horrible, but as a child riz-au-lait was one of my favourite desert. My grandmother would use left overs from paellas to make a really simple one, which I would then coat in fake (read: not homemade) caramel. It would always end up being a messy, sticky mess, but what joy. Seeing that evenings around here have gotten much more quiet and enjoyable without television blaring in the background, I thought I would use half an hour to revisit the recipe. As it turned out, Mark had bought me some fancy caramel chocolate today (with £10 note he found on the floor walking to work this morning!) and the marriage between the two is perfect.

Riz-au-lait (rice pudding)

Ingredients

1 cup cooked white rice

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 small anise seed or 1 cardamom pod

1/2 vanilla pod

1/2 semi skimmed milk, 1/2 vanilla soy milk

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 chunk of orange peel

Recipe: bring all ingredients to boil, and shift to low simmer as soon as bubbles are forming at the surface. Cover for 40 minutes - until the rice has absorbed all liquid (be sure to check nothing is sticking to the pan). When done, take out the pods and peel ad let cool for a couple of minutes. Serve hot or cold, sprinkled with some vanilla sugar and caramel chocolate. I also strongly recommend it with caramel tea - oh god yes, caramel tea. I might make myself another cup and listen to more Nick Cave, who I have a bit of a weird crush going for at the moment. Weird because well, dude looks uhm, unique.

Last week Mark and I took the Eurostar to visit my mother and grandmother and the first meal we had upon arriving at my childhood’s house was my grandmother calls ’soupe Corse’ (being that she is from Corsica, which explains her temperament and probably mine - it runs in the family). To many others, the soup is known as ’soupe au pistou’, which is simply a lot of vegetables with a lot and a lot of basil and garlic. It truly smells beautiful and if you are about to finally cut the basil out of your garden for summer, it’s a great way to use it all - in one go.

Ingredients:

Eight cloves of garlic + olive oil

A giant handful of basil

One potato

Four carrots

Two celery stalks

Two courgettes

Tomatoes (I used cherry ones, red and yellow)

White kidney beans (two thirds of a can, I used dry ones soaked overnight)

Three cups of chicken stock (I used the one made my Mark, but you can use an already made one, vegetable or chicken)

Half a teaspoon of salt

Recipe:

Cut all the vegetables (minus tomatoes and potato) in small cubes, and fry them gently in olive oil for five to ten minutes. Meanwhile, put tomatoes in boiling water to skin them. Mash them roughly with hands, and add to vegetables along with the beans, garlic (cut in small pieces) and the basil - finely chopped, or puré’d. Add the potato, whole but without the skin. Add salt and chicken stock and let simmer for 45 minutes or low heat. When the potato looks about to crumble the soup is almost ready; mash it and stir to add substance. Serve hot with garlic bread.

Sold TV yesterday* = Morrocan cake baked, pisto soup done and freezed (in my TINY freezer), chicken stock done, hair shampooed, people in the house clothed and smelling good, plans made for tonight and it’s only 3 in the afternoon. Uh, who knew?

* for 25 pounds to a local guy who then forgot to take the remote control.  Pwned.

[Bleeding liberal post alert]

I am getting angry watching a documentary about soy campesinos in Paraguay. They are pushed and evicted out of their own land by Brazilian land owners who champion GM crops so the West can consume soy produces - a £3 billion/year industry. Not only that, but we of course use soya to fed pigs and poultry, whereas South American farmers can’t feed their own families, and mothers living near soy monoculture plantations using illegal chemicals are giving birth to children with severe birth defects.

It’s a bit like ‘green fuels’, isn’t it? So promising until it quickly appears that it isn’t. You would think that drinking soya milk and eating soy based products would be a good gesture towards animal welfare in this country, but you turn around and you’re still ethically fucked: giving up milk produced by cows pumped full of antibiotics to drink soy milk made of genetically modified beans spread with chemicals isn’t something which appeals to me. I would guess other options, such as coconut milk and rice milk, would pose the same problems. Organically produced cow milk therefore sounds like the most reasonable solution, especially since my allegiance always went first to people’s welfare rather than animals - and yes, some will be quick to point out that intersectionality between politics, ecology and green policies is always at work.

I don’t know man. Sometimes I despair. This is only vaguely related, but the more I think about it, the more I want to completely stop setting foot in supermarkets. I figure the only reason why I am hesitating to do so is laziness - living in front of a Tesco is convenient indeed, the opening hours are accommodating and the produces are cheap (but absolute shit).

We don’t own a car and live in central London, which makes it difficult to go anywhere picking up local produces at co-ops, but organic bags delivery schemes do exist, and the one I have been using for a while is great. The difficult thing to source outside supermarkets are always silly things such as flippin’ toilet paper and bread. Dude, bread! I wouldn’t have this issue in France. Mark makes amazing bread loafs but doing on everyday isn’t exactly ideal, and our freezer is too small to store anything. Y’know, because flats in London are fucking too small to have proper freezers/fridges in, which in turn makes it hard to save meals, food and money, it goes in circles and you get the drift, which makes me think that only the rich can truly afford to pat themselves on the back with a satisfied smirk for being eco-conscious.

Elsewhere, one year ago: Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, land activist killed in dispute over GM crops, via the Independent (check me out, quoting competition!)

When a Brazilian peasant organiser led a group of landless farmers on to a European-owned farm last month he was making an environmental protest as well as seeking farmland for about 20 families to cultivate…

I think I’ll go drown my guilt/powerlessness in my yearly bath, listenning to The Moth podcast.

Picture via CC - Jon Åslund.

I have insane blog crushes. They most often than not come and go, and those which are here to stay are cataloguednin my blogroll. Sometimes my love for journals runs so deep that I have to read every.single.entry ever published by the athor, which makes it diffiult if their personal and sex-ed writing has existed online for a decade or so, or if the blog contains too many recipes, and too little time. Last month I have developped two gigantic blog loves, and while one (Lagusta’s blog) if completely understandable because its content runs very much in parallel of my politics, the other (Nie’s dialogues) does not. Not one bit, not one iota.

I found nienie’s blog via Soule Mama, in an entry in which she elegantly and discreetly hinted at the tragedy the Nie family was going through. I feel ashamed to say that it is the trauma she is currently going through which brought me to her writing (same thing seemed to have applied to many readers who took on following her blog). I was quickly won over by her examplary life, her wit and her joie de vivre. I sincerely wish her as much courage she will need to get through this horrible episod of her life - and I dont doubt that she will do great, because her force and will to live radiates through her writing.

Much like Dooce, Nei manages to set aside and make time for small moments to be recognized and appreciated, which is a form of blogging I have come to appreciate an awful lot in the past few years. And so there I was; entranced in her blogging world and in awe of her prettiness, until I realised a little link which said ’spiritual enlightenment here’. As a quick click led me to the mormon.org site, my heart sank. And as I scrolled down further and noticed posts in which she cheered for Mitt Romney, my heart sank further. When I finally read an entry in which she called all democrats crazy, I not only felt belittled, but also sad. Why? I rarely, if ever, give myself permission to like someone who is vehemently republican, evangelical and pro-life for to boot.

Somehow, I kept on reading. Every single entry she ever wrote. And I came to the very uneasy conclusion that even though I have nothing but contempt for her politics, her life still should be inspiring to countless of her readers, for she seems to be a great person leading a joyful, optimist, caring life.

For me, this is key. If religious people ever wanted me to convert, they would be so much more successful at it by impressing me with discreet happiness and simplicity (for I might come to the conclusion that their serenity steams from their religion, be impressed and look it up) rather than with evangelical ploys and judgmental rants which for the most part are falling on deaf ears.

As for lagusta’s blog, well, she is Nei’s polar opposite. She’s ace, and the kind of woman I would love to be friends with, mainly because her unapologetic line of feminism (minus her take on transgenderism) really appeals to me. I found myself reading her entire blog a couple of weeks ago (lusting after her truffles too) with a mix of astonishment (’dude, you can’t really say that about women who have kids!’) and admiration (a cycling washing machine? Sister puts her money and effort where her mouth is. It is both refreshing and flippin’ inspiring).

And while she is way closer to my beliefs than Nie, some of her lefty principles go too far for me. No, I can’t consider going vegan, even though I really, really understand people who do. But my culture, my family’s food heritage and recipes, as well as practicality/price go in the way. And I have a bit of a hard time being told that I am just stupid or heartless for consuming eggs. This is something that constantly amazes me, how wrong evangelical vegans and animal-rights NGO such as PETA can be: you don’t recruit people by calling them heartless and stupid polluters committing murder. At best, you’re preaching to the converted and generating negative publicity which will have ‘outsiders’ looking down on you. At worst, the masses will call all vegans batshit insane and will catalogue them under ‘not even worth arguing with annoying hippies’.

I find it sad. Primarily because I love food, do care for animal welfare and the environment, and yet I would like to have a discussion about eating ethically but within my own standards, which might mean eating organic meat once a week, having sustainable fish dishes occasionally, and using free-range eggs in my cooking. But this conversation won’t ever take please, since hardcore vegans see me as a deranged psychopath. And I in turn think their outlook is so entrenched in an ideology which doesn’t take into account personal experiences and circumstances that I lose patience.

I end up thinking that both religious peeps and vegans definitely have something interesting to say, and their outlook can be inspiring. But because their discourse is framed with intolerance and the inability to listen and empathise, they end up losing potential followers (not that I would ever in a million years adhere to Mormonism, a religion in which no woman could ever conduct a meeting with older men. But I often consider vegetarianism and veganism as something that could work for me and what I stand for).

Mark and I agree that people who claim to love autumn usually are pretentious arty posers, also probably into posing in a park reading some Dylan Thomas poetry while puffing on cigarettes. But… autumn is slowly growing in my heart this year. I stayed home today as I as feeling poorly, and Scully and I hung out watching the Gilmore Girls in bed, eating ratatouille, carving a pumpkin in the evening and roasting the seeds with whole cumin seeds for later comsuption.

Did I ever post about my love for Alain Bashung? He’s one of the very, very few French singers with whom I am absolutely in love (another one would be, uncharactically, Christophe [last fm link]… Two others, more contemporary, would be Emilie Simin and Camille). Bashung is a true poet, a dark and French version of Leonard Cohen. His lyrics are very dense and confusing, but he has been singing for 30 years or so now and is pretty much intoûchable. He unfortunaly declared having lung cancer last year, but stil, dude is in the middle of a national tour around France, sounding amazing and determined.

” Je tuerai la pianiste
Afin que l’on sache
Que la vie d’artiste
N’est pas rose, n’est pas sans tâche”

In other news, we decided to sell our tv for a few bucks (we never watch anything of interest, and only have 5 channels anyway) but no one is interested. So, if you want a free tv, holla at me.