and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I've never really done the restuarant review thing on this blog. I've mentioned movies, talked about books, and maybe referenced a few fun video games, but I'm no Omnibus Ebert.

I think I'd write more reviews if I thought anyone cared. Social participation, afterall, is about trust and worth, right? A calculated and unemotional debate on the abstract position of money in society fleshed things out for me last night. Money, argued my evolutionary psychology friend, is just a form of trust (or usefulness). Payment by society (other people) for your services represents the trust that society has in you to do your fair share, to help out, to be useful. Money, in the end, is a proof-of-concept device intended to measure worth - but it has likely gone horribly wrong. When the first caveman traded a sharp stone for a dead animal, he probably wasn't thinking about Nigerian scammers, credit card fraud, and the Powerball. He also probably didn't realize the precedent he was setting and the eventual waterfall of change he would cause.

Oh well, I'm being long winded. A friend of mine with a rather unfortunately high cholesterol level just gave me an update. He was initially measured at 309.

got my cholesterol tested again after 7 weeks of lipitor, change of diet, and increase in exercise. doctors were right...it went down...to 302.

Which has me asking myself: how much trust was traded in these transactions? What sort of value or worth has been placed on seven weeks of lipitor and various doctors visits for, what is in the end, a 2.2% drop in his cholesterol?

And it has me asking myself how much I excercise and how many veggies I eat and how often I floss my teeth and I have to be honest.. sometimes it is just good to eat some food.

This weekend I spent almost the entire time in my apartment making food. Certainly, I wasn't hovering over the stove for two days straight but I did spend most of my mental efforts towards food.

On Saturday I cooked a garlic chicken curry. It was simmered for two hours to just the right consistency. Large chunks of carrots and potatoes intermingled with the onions and cluck-cluck, thick with soupy sauce, and onions, ginger, and peas were added to the mix as well.

I maxed out on white rice last week so I used some red quinoa as a base but the curry could fly on its own. The chicken was perfectly tender, juicy, and perfectly simple to chew. I thought for sure I had overcooked it.

The thing with cooking is that its like a choose-your-own-adventure on speed. You have short windows of opportunity in which to change the direction of the story but when those windows are gone, you can never get those opportunities back.

Which is why you should enjoy and appreciate those times when the adventure has a deliciously happy ending with the discovery of untold treasures and beautiful maidens.

This happy ending was a leftover story. Sunday brunch (admittedly with a bit of a dinner flair, on the clock side of things) started with bacon and eggs, over easy, and hash browns fried with garlic and onions with bit of cheddar cheese shaved in at the last minute. This seemed perfect, really, with the addition of an english muffin and a mug of vanilla chai tea, but I have a weak spot for leftovers and when it occurred to me that all things grease and oil and eggy goodness would probably go together, the curry came out, and in minutes the beauty of a truly mouth water meal was presented.

Part of me cringed at the health issues inherent in such a breakfast but I couldn't think too long on these thoughts of angina, death, and heart attacks. Truthfully, I did not care. To put it to Woody Allen, as he once said it,

"You can live to be 100 if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be 100."

And me, that meal? I barely wanted it to end.