1. To review: not long ago I made a green curry and served it over rice. I had about a quart of curry left over. A couple of days later, I marinated a small pork roast in about a pint of the curry overnight and then used the rest of the curry as a braise to slowly cook the roast. I served myself a bowl of pork, curry braise, and rice. I stored the braise, later added green beans, spinach, potatoes, and the last of my rice (about a cup) to it, and the result was a delicious green curry pork stew. Today, I thawed a quart of chicken stock, put my leftover stew in a pot and thinned it with chicken stock and turned the stew into soup. It's really good, very comforting. I have about one more serving or so of soup left and a small amount of chicken stock, too, so, on Saturday, I'll stretch the soup a little more and will have made these few ingredients into about five meals, all similar to one another, but none exactly the same. It's fun!
2. I decided not to start a new book today. Instead, I completed an acrostic puzzle, watched Michigan throttle Purdue, and decided to spend some time, with the aid of PBS and Amazon Prime Video, under water. Back in November I watched the Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher and later on I listened to an interview on Fresh Air with the man featured in the film. So, for the first time in my life, I've had the octopus on my mind, marveling over what an intriguing creature it is.
Well, while reading Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders -- and having not read the table of contents --, lo and behold, I turned a page and WOW! Nezhukumatathil's book included a meditation on the octopus! Nezhukumatathil marvels at how attuned the octopus is to its environment with three hundreds suckers on each arm, suckers that detect texture, shape, and taste. The octopus is a shape shifter, can instantaneously change its color and its texture, whether hunting or protecting itself. Nezhukumatathil imagines that the octopus feels "something almost like pity" for us humans given all that s/he can do and all that we humans cannot.
After the basketball game, I decided to go to my PBS app on my smart tv and see if I could find any octopus shows.
I found one. It's called "Octopus: Making Contact" (Season 38, Episode 1). In it, David Scheel, Professor of Marine Biology at Alaska Pacific University, decides to put a salt water tank in his living room in Anchorage and make it the home of Heidi, a day octopus. He and his teenage daughter raise Heidi and they study Heidi's intelligence and emotional life. Scheel's work and research extends far beyond this living room tank and this episode also takes us to Australia's Jervis Bay where Scheel studies a colony of octopuses in an underwater site nicknamed "Octopolis", where octopuses living there call into question assumptions about the octopus's life of solitude.
I hadn't had quite enough of this subject, and, just before I went to sleep, I watched the first part of the first episode of Ocean Odyssey: The Blue Realm and plunged more deeply into the world of cephalopods. More on this in another post.
3. In between octopus programs, I watched the first two episodes of the second season of Midnight Diner. I really hate to give anything away about these stories. I was so happy to watch them fresh, with no idea of what they would be about, that I would hate to spoil this experience for another viewer.
What I will say, though, is that I am enjoying short works. Much like Aimee Nezhukumatathil's short meditations in World of Wonders, much like Donald Hall's short essays in Carnival of Losses, and much like the haiku, I find that the short episodes (under 30 minutes) of Midnight Diner are concentrated, intensifying their emotional impact. It's why I never watch more than one or two episodes at a time. I don't want these stories to all pile on top of each other in my mind in a single session. I want to savor them slowly, just one or two at time. I'm going to return to World of Wonders and do the same thing. I'll just reread one or two of Nezhukumatathil's at a time, let them sink in more, as if they, like Midnight Diner episodes, were the brief chapters (or sections) of the Tao de Ching.
No comments:
Post a Comment