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Peasant Gruel

2022-10-10

4 minute read

As I was milling about the kitchen this morning I was also thinking:

sleep is the medicine

I didn't manage to sleep early much last week, and I think my mood and productivity took a real hit. I'm going back on what I put in my last post - my 'goal identity' for the goals worksheet will be 'well rested individual'

porridge that tastes like porridge

I've been putting nutmeg and cinamonn in my porridge for as long as I can remember, up until today. Last week I tried mixing chopped dried apricots and walnuts into the porridge as it cooked, to soften the apricot a little and add some sweetness. It was awful, they turned quite bitter and unpleasant. I threw half of it out. The memory was still fresh in my mind as I made porridge this morning, and the needless addition of fluff felt to blame, so I left out the cinammon and nutmeg and just used:

Stirring on mid heat for 10 minutes or so. I serve it with banana, chopped walnuts and greek yoghurt. It was awesome, the milk brings out a subtle creamy-oatyness. It felt like I was tasting the oats. I read somewhere (and can't find it now) something about upperclass european cuisine moving towards meat stocks and "food that tasted like itself" in reaction to the accessibility and use of spices by the poor folk to create their dishes. That's how I felt with the porridge this morning, though I know removing two spices from a water-milk-oat slurry is the only thing I could've done to bring it closer to peasant gruel.

It's always fun to be there. I really feel like I'm just hanging out, but I want to frame that in a less negative way. Why does work have to be boring and bad? Bring in a volunteer to the gallery so your workers have someone to hangout with. The sun shines into the courtyard, there's few visitors on a sunday, we can all sit outside and talk about art, and study, and life.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

From The Gate by Marie Howe

I'm still not sure how to display poetry in this blog

Block quotes, codeblocks and <pre> all seem to work fine, but not perfect. I did a 2 second google and found these discouraging quotes from the Distributed Proofreaders wiki "There is no such thing as poetry in HTML" and "HTML was not designed to semantically represent poetry."

blockquote

John 11:35 - Jesus wept

My issue with blockquotes is mostly semantic, in that it's not a quote, and that it doesn't preserve line breaks and whitespace

codeblock

John 11:35 - Jesus wept

My issue with the codeblock is entirely semantic. It ought not to go in a <code> block because it's poetry, not code (practically true, though I wish it weren't)

pre tag

John 11:35 - Jesus wept

This is the best option, and adding a 'poem' class would help too. It doesn't have a markdown shortcut, which makes it a little less pretty to write with in my journal. However, I did build this site builder myself, and I could in theory add my own plugin to the markdown parser to output <pre class="poem"> when I use (for example) @@@. It could look like this:

<style>
    pre.poem {
        font-family: serif;
        font-size: 18px;
        padding: 14px;
        border: 1px solid var(--b_low);
        border-radius: 2px;
        overflow-x: auto;
    }
</style>

@@@
And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
@@@

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

We will see, I think the design needs more consideration. I'm far more happy to toil over small styling changes than I am to implement js interactivity - I feel like any CSS styles I put in this journal will eventually be part of my 'personal style' that I can bootstrap other personal projects with.

listening to

Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow - Coheed and Cambria

questions