Recipe: a delicate soup

Inspired by navy bean soup and minestrone, this soup is light, quick, and easy. With the proportions below I made maybe 7 bowls of soup, but I ate three right off the bat, so your call as to how many "servings" that means.

Ingredients:
- oil for sauteeing
- chopped onion (1), garlic (2 cloves), carrot (1), a little bit of celery (half stalk)
- chopped sausage (one link, I used sun-dried tomato/basil/chicken)
- pasta cooked to minimum recommended time (one cup, I used whole-wheat gemelli which is al dente in 5 minutes)
- handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
- can of navy beans
- double-handful of spinach
- peppercorn in a pepper grinder

Instructions:
Sautee onion, garlic, carrot, celery until it's all fragrant and garlic and onion are soft. Sautee in sausage, push to bottom of pan to brown if you like. Sautee in tomatoes for a moment and then add water and bring to boil. Five or so minutes later add navy beans and bring to boil. A few minutes later add the spinach and cooked pasta, turn off heat. When you like how the spinach looks, ladle into serving bowls and grind in some delicious black pepper.

Commentary:
It's not heavy like the navy bean soups I've had at restaurants, and the tomatoes don't dominate, unlike most minestrones I've known. The broth is light, thickened only by the beans, and the cherry tomatoes and carrots haven't disintegrated. Since the soup is cooked quickly, the ingredients retain their individuality and character, floating in the golden broth like edible gems. No salt added because the sausage had salt enough and the navy beans add a little more. Pick your favorite sausage to influence the flavor of the soup, and you don't need a large link. I used one of those little chicken sausages they sell at Trader Joe's. So the soup isn't totally homemade, but I give it points for being easy to make, nutritionally well-rounded, visually appealing, and yummy.

call me a critic.

i had a spasm of insecurity a moment ago. i've just gotten home from watching "open your eyes," the original spanish movie on which "vanilla sky" is based. at the end, i didn't say much until someone asked me what i thought, and then i had to say, honestly, that i didn't like it, for the following reasons, etc.

in retrospect i don't think i went overboard; hopefully i was concise and didn't drag it out. not liking a movie's no crime, i know--but sometimes, ok, perhaps many times, if i don't like something, like a movie or song or idea, i don't just dislike it. it annoys me. and i want to articulate why. and perhaps threaten to become annoying myself.

a part of me really likes frank people and blunt people, and feels that interestingness goes a long way to offset a person's lack of social niceties (social niceties a bane as well, in the extreme). but i have known people that i find to be too abrasive, so i've a limit. i hope i don't overstep my own limit. ah well. people like whom they like, birds of a feather etc, and it all sorts itself out in the end.

well, i never guaranteed this blog would be interesting. thanks for tolerating this insecurity-examination talked out loud. to be frank, honest, yet gracious! oh, i bump into furniture too often to be that last one!!

well anyway, if you've gotten this far, and are curious, here's a review that's closest to how i feel about the movie:

http://www.culturevulture.net/Movies/OpenYourEyes.htm

on rottentomatoes.com it was one of four bad reviews out of a majority positive response (81% on the tomatometer).

My Creationism; to do list; George Oppen

I couldn't sleep anyway.

What bolted me out of bed, at last, was this idea: the Creator I believe in created the potential for beauty. Secondarily, our divine duty is to help the world realize this potential.

The thought stems from somber paranoia. I had already listed in my head a thousand things I should do, want to do, ranging from ambitious achievements to acts of appreciation and love. When the list got long enough a fear struck me: what if something happened to me and I couldn't get to all these things on my list?

The to-do list and theological thoughts have tangled roots in current concerns. My grandmother was in grad school, I think, when she first experienced those insomniac nights when one's mind is full of ideas, not necessarily academic. Today my mom took my grandmother to radiation therapy. On the patient sign-up sheet, my mom saw the signature of my high school speech coach. My sister graduates this Saturday with a Master's in teaching, and I'll be teaching for the first time this fall. One thing on my to-do list is to visit or send some note of appreciation to my favorite teachers from high school and undergrad.

Rather than rocks and rivers and strands of DNA: potential for beauty, for good things (feel free to speculate on sources of "bad"). I probably got the capacity for this idea from George Oppen, who likely got a similar notion from Heidegger; the latter I've hardly read but the former occupied my undergrad thesis. 3 am and I'm trying to chase down, in Oppen's Collected Poems, some line like, "before there was being, there was the potential for being," more the sentiment than the phrase.

I can't find the line I'm thinking of, but I'm seeing again how great this poetry is, and how close to my heart the methods and themes. I Google Oppen+Heidegger+Before to no avail, but happily find there's been recent scholarly activity on Oppen (when I was searching the litcrit world five years ago, scholarly interest in his work seemed unfairly small, but growing).

I've relinquished my desire to be a literary scholar, but some part of me feels that old urge to tell the world about these poems and this poet. I know exactly two people ever check this blog, but anyway, ask if you're interested :)

The arc of his life went from young avant-garde poet to WWII soldier to communist exile and avowed nonpoet to poet again (post-Stalin), entwined with lifelong love, fatherhood, and ending with Alzheimer's disease.

Here's one of his poems (not my favorite or most famous, but it's open in front of me and thematically relevant).

WORLD, WORLD--

Failure, worse failure, nothing seen
From prominence,
Too much seen in the ditch.

Those who will not look
Tho they feel on their skins
Are not pierced;

One cannot count them
Tho they are present.

It is entirely wild, wildest
Where there is traffic
And populace

'Thought leaps on us' because we are here. That is the fact
of the matter.
Soul-searchings, these prescriptions,

Are a medical faddism, an attempt to escape,
To lose oneself in the self.

The self is no mystery, the mystery is
That there is something for us to stand on.

We want to be here.

The act of being, the act of being
More than oneself.

Math for the people

Below is from an e-mail for my teenage cousin in the Philippines, who wanted help for a "why is math important" assignment in school. Caveat: anally retentive types may have bones to pick with a few details below--I know I do--but the intended audience is thoroughly layperson, and rather than be pedantic I just wanted to get some general ideas across.

1. Why do you study mathematics?

I study mathematics because I enjoy it, and I enjoy it because it's beautiful. Math is interplay between logic (what you know is true) and intuition (what you think is true, but can't yet say exactly why). It's an art form, in some ways.

2.Why mathematics is very important in our everyday life?

With good reason, many people criticize math for being irrelevant to the real world. It's true there are hardcore math fanatics who spend a lot of time creating and contemplating wild abstractions with no clear connection to anything tangible or practical.

But a lot of math is tangible and/or practical; you could say it's the skeleton of the real world:
- Logic is math, and logic helps keep us from being fooled.
- Patterns are math, and patterns show up everywhere, e.g. the pokey points on the outside of a pineapple.
- Time is the topic of calculus: the derivative of where you are going (location at a certain time) equals how fast you are going (speed). The derivative of how fast you are going (speed) equals how fast you are getting faster (acceleration).
- Space is studied in geometry: how many oranges you can fit in a crate, etc.

Math also answers practical questions such as: can I afford to take out this loan? Is it better to buy one, get one at half price, or to get 30% off everything? If the survey says 52% of people prefer the incumbent, is that a meaningful lead or just chance? Will building this bridge reduce traffic? How can we build it so it won't fall down? Etc etc etc.

But when it comes down to it, however important math is practically, I think it's important in the way that music and poetry are important, and that's why I include the section below.

- - - - - -
You might not believe me that math is beautiful. In an attempt to illustrate, here is one of my favorite purely mathematical ideas:

There is more than one kind of infinity.

Which of these is biggest?
The number of words you could say if you could talk forever.
The number of days there would be if time went on forever.
The number of stars in the sky if the sky went on forever.
The number of ways you can put a stone in the palm of your hand.

The first three are the same kind of infinity. But the fourth, the infinity of your hand, is a different kind of infinity, and it's bigger! The first three are called "countable" infinity, which is as big as the set of whole numbers (1, 2, 3, etc). The infinity of your hand is an example of "uncountable" infinity, the same as the infinity of the plane or the line, i.e., the set of all real numbers including infinite decimals (1.234..., pi=3.14159256... etc). The number of ways you can put a stone in your hand is biggest, because, for example, you can put the stone right in the middle of your hand. Or you can put it a little bit to the left. Or you can put it a little bit less to the left but not quite the middle. And so on, forever, like the number of exact points in a line. This is bigger than the whole numbers 1,2, 3, etc, because those sit on the line, but so does a whole lot more.

Another illustration:
The number of musical notes you can sing (do re mi, etc.) is probably finite.
If you had a magical vocal range and could always sing higher and higher, the number of notes you could sing would be "countably" infinite.
But the number of -tones- you can sing just between "do" and "re" (go from one note to the next but gradually, in the way a flute can but a piano can't) is "uncountably" infinite like the points on the real line or in your hand. Again, the notes are like 1, 2, 3, etc. But the tones, like the points on the real line, include 1, 2, 3, and also all the points -between- 1, 2, 3, etc!