crack jack

you would be surprised that after eight days, my chocolate soufflé batter still hadn't deflated, and managed to give this:
though i wouldn't be so sure about whether the eggs inside have gone bad already.

with the glasgow love theme playing on my computer, it's time to look at the making of a watermelon ice cream that wasn't, and some of the things i penned down earlier this year:
time is ever-flowing. even though everything outside seems so inanimate and unmoving, time still moves along like a river. and we're just the people who stand and look at the river flow past, continuing on it's never-ending journey to return to where it came from. in a way, we're like the boy who plants a light bulb and hopes that a chandelier will bloom soon enough. but soon enough isn't quite ever soon enough. and then soon enough we find out that a light bulb does not give us a chandelier.
this was my first time chopping up a watermelon. scooped the flesh out, and you can see that the watermelon is just so full of water. i mashed up some of the flesh to drain out even more of the juice. (only the juice went into the ice cream.)

what does it feel like to be unable to be with the person you love? is it Unloved, or Loveless? or maybe it feels like a flower destined to bloom and wither away, petal by petal, like tears falling drop by drop. but tears are just tears - secretion of the lacrymal(?) glands. (some people can't even cry. or do people run out of tears?) and tahoma is merely a facebook font. it's weird how some things you share with someone mean so much more to you than it does to the other person, and 有些东西需要某些人去做才会有意义.
the three components for my ice cream: yolks with sugar, watermelon juice, milk with cream.

why do so many songs sing of romeo and juliet, or 梁祝? why is there always a famous pair of star-crossed lovers in literature? somehow, the star-crossedness of that one couple is more worth remembering than the hundred million other fairy tales which ended with Happily Ever After. then again, Happily Ever After is such a disney creationthat started with snow white. (did you know that in the real story of the little mermaid, ariel dissolved into bubbles when she waited endlessly for the prince?) sometimes, we would love to believe in Happily Ever After. i think to do that, we must not Grow Up, and we must be Forever Sixteen.
i boiled the milk/cream with the watermelon juice, which turned the whole thing a very gentle pink. after tempering the yolks and sugar, i cooked the custard again, but it never really thickened. maybe there weren't enough yolks, or the watermelon juice just made it too watery.

are we still like the boy who plants a light bulb, hoping it will bloom into a chandelier? i think we must realise that in winter the bulb should crack, no? then maybe there'll never be a chandelier. day after day, just standing in the doorway, looking at that light bulb, hoping it will bloom, and falling apart inside.

but we could be like le petit prince and watch the sun set 43(?) times in one day. still, i like sunrises more; everything just gets lighter and lighter. sunsets, on the other hand, are so dramatic, so blazing, so overly used that they border on romantic cliché.
after hours of manual churning, it became clear that there would be too much ice to make this ice cream smooth. so after adding in the chocolate chip seeds and doing a few more rounds of churning, i called it a watemelon granita, though a granita should not have dairy products in it. it was icy, crunchy and sweet.

so there, the ice cream that wasn't.

some people believe that every person, animal, plant, object is but a storm cloud of atoms. theists question the evolution theory by asking how intelligence could possibly evolve from a single cell, so in the same way we ask how Consciousness could arise from storm clouds of atoms. neither seems possible. then, every action you make - it seems - has nothing to do with your Consciousness; there isn't even consciousness: there's just a mass of atoms, doing what they are pre-destined to do. (so what does it mattter if bits of you get chipped away, fall apart?) and so it follows that there is no Virtue, no Moral, no Hope, no Faith, and ultimately - or sadly? - no Love.

it also means that you had no Choice but to fall for someone stupidly, ridiculously. at this moment i'm reminded of what neil gaiman once wrote about Love:

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

(if Love even does exist in the first place.) of course, i believe we're more than just storm clouds of atoms (though i can't explain why); i believe there is Consciousness, Choice, Virtue, Moral, Hope, Faith and Love. while we can't prevent what we can't predict, we can definitely (choose to) enjoy this beautiful day.

in some way, the glasgow love theme also makes you feel like everything is getting lighter and lighter.