Dressed to the Nines

Nothing is more comforting than stumbling upon that one product that just works. That one product you know you’ll stick to forever because it is so good/dependable. Well, a few months ago, I found the perfect salad dressing: Wish-Bone’s Light Asian with Sesame and Ginger Vinaigrette.

Personally, this is quite a find being that salad is my staple food. I’m a lazy pesco-vegetarian. The last thing I want to do when I get home is spend time in the kitchen and prepare myself a decent meal. So more often than not, I would just toss a salad and call it a night. (Contrary to popular belief, well-prepared salads are filling!) The variable ingredient is the dressing, which I think is what makes the salad. Yet for the longest time, I had not found “the one,” that elusive dressing that would complete my salad.

My favorite flavor (by a mile) is Asian but, unfortunately, it is a rarity in our supermarkets. This I find ironic because Asian is a basic dressing and… aren’t we in Asia? If we can stock up on Italian or French, shouldn’t we have Asian too/first?

To be honest, I’m not much of a fan of the usual dressings like Thousand Island, Caesar, and Honey Mustard. I’m lucky if I chance on Kraft’s Catalina dressing or Sun-Dried Tomato vinaigrette but on most days, I make do with Clara Olé’s Orange You Glad or Dizon Farm’s variants. All these dressings are fine companions… but they don’t make the salad, at least for me.

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Minor Detail #15

Common sense is not one of my strongest suits.

I’m a big believer in multiple intelligences and that one intelligence is not necessarily better than the other. While I think I’m slightly gifted in some aspects, I’ve always wondered where the hell I was when The Maker showered common sense and street smarts to the world. It appears I possess neither; and either, I think, would make me an infinitely better individual.

I think it’s easy to rag on people who are slow, dense, or gullible. As my good friend Joan loves to blurt out with unadulterated exasperation, “COMMON SENSE IS NOT SO COMMON!” Though, personally, I think it would make me quite the hypocrite to drop such a statement. After all, who am I to demand of common sense from others when I myself am slightly lacking in that department?

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Wanderlusting

So 2011 was the year the travel bug bit. I revisited this entry I wrote last year and a few things have sprung to mind:

• I haven’t written a Minor Details entry in the longest time! Actually, I already have a list; I’ve just been putting off the writing task.
• My thoughts haven’t changed: I still want to work for an airline (because I want to go places) and I want travel to be my investment.
• I really did go all-out in terms of traveling last year. My passport is no longer pathetic.

I’m a frugal traveler. Or, at least, I scrimp on what I can (e.g., airfare, land transportation, accommodation) and splurge on the finer things in life (e.g., food!!!). For now, my bank account can only afford to take me to nearby destinations (i.e., Asian countries). But reading travel magazines and viewing videos such as the one below only stimulate my yen to travel and explore the world.  

Now is that brilliant or is that brilliant? According to the Mashable article that featured the video:

San Francisco-based Kien Lam quit his job, bought a plane ticket to London and then spent 343 days traversing the globe and snapping photos along the way.

Ah, if only quitting your job to tour the world were that easy.

Needless to say, Lam’s time-lapse project is incredibly inspiring. Of course I plan to save up big-time and explore the other continents (with luck, before I hit 30). Like you, I have a growing list of places I want to visit in my lifetime and seeing the breathtaking scenery in this video has only rendered me impatient — I want to go places, and NOW.

But my travel fantasies will have to wait. In the meantime, I am totally ripping off this idea and putting together a collective video of my travels at the end of the year.

Travel Blogging

I’ve been blogging for almost a decade now and the content has pretty much consisted of the same old, same old: favorite songs, quirky finds, (reality) TV, some (unfinished) ventures, and a lot of narcissistic urges. Lately, I’ve been thinking about refocusing the content of the site so that it wouldn’t just be a hodgepodge of random stuff, even though I like to call the blog, “my beautiful dumpsite.”

For now, I’m considering writing more travel-related entries. After all, I’ve been going on quite a few trips here and there for the past year. I wrote about this before here and here but, come to think of it, I never once posted a proper entry on a particular trip! And that’s a shame because half of my travel photos were wiped out when my hard disk failed me last August. So yeah, I plan to go down the travel blog route and document my local and international trips.

I have a long list of places I want to visit so I’ll probably post one destination per week (Wanderlusting Wednesday, yes?). Then, I guess I should still write about (or photo-blog) the places I visited in 2011, at least those I still have pictures of.

I told my friends that I wouldn’t book another plane ticket until I’m done with my thesis. But I clearly went back on my word, what with all the successive airline seat sales and promos! As of writing, I’ve already completed one trip (in fact, I just came home yesterday), thanks to the long weekend. My plan is to go somewhere every month (doesn’t have to be by plane). I’ve already made travel plans 8/12 months this year and I’m still researching feasible places to visit on my vacant weekends.

Resources permitting, it’s a hobby I’d like to sustain (because, really, traveling is more investment than expenditure). And since I love talking about my (mis)adventures with my friends, colleagues, and students, I thought, why not share my stories here?

Method to Madness

Lately, it seems that the only way to achieve “equanimity” is by sweeping things under the rug. Because trying to find the correct and seemly solution is so excruciating. This search for the essential and ultimate fix has brought nothing but trouble and grief. It makes you wonder if there really is a true way around this madness, a true way to find a meeting of the minds.

So, in the meantime, sweeping things under the rug is our quick fix. Evasion is our band-aid solution to keep moving because we can’t stand still. The question is, until when?