This week I delay gratification

To be honest, I just don’t trust people who can keep an open packet of TimTams in the fridge for two weeks.  Are you one of these? Can you take one biscuit and leave the rest, and not think about them incessantly until you’ve demolished the lot (rationalising that, hey, they have to be eaten some time.)?

Yes?

Well, I don’t trust you.

I mean, I’d trust you with my biscuits, should I ever require someone to mind a packet for me. It’s just I don’t trust that you are fully human, in the messy, unrestrainable way I am.

My brother Ben’s one of these types. At Easter we used to get two small, hollow eggs each (hidden in the lavender bush…yours too?). He’d be able to nibble at his Charlie Bucket-style, until June. My friend Zoe’s the same. Every spring she cuts all crap from her diet so she can shed her winter cushioning. Just like that. No fuss, no distress. “I just decide to do it…what’s the big deal?!” she says wide-eyed when I ask for her secret.

Self-controlled types are certainly oddities. They’ve also, of late, become a quirky source of scientific enquiry. Little wonder. A lack of will power – our inability to curb our over-eating, over-spending and overly-addicted-to-email ways – is killing us. Finding out what makes the self-restrained tick is only going to get hotter in academic circles, I tell you.

I don’t have much to say. It’s early. I’m getting my hair and makeup done in my sunroom, ready to go sky-diving in Picton.

I’m drinking this amazing Miessence antioxidant “Berry Radical” drink – a chocolaty “superfood” hot drink. Like a hot chocolate, but it only contains superfoods. You can add coconut milk, or have it in a smoothie, too. (PS Miessence is an Australian company that makes organic cosmetics…and rates highest on the Good Guide).

And reading Annabel Crabb’s speech on The End of Journalism during the week. It’s a must-read for anyone in this game and who loves Ms Crabb!!

While listening to the news, preparing for filming Good News Week for Monday. I’m on with Akmal again and hope he lays off the red cordial this time. Here’s me doing it last time…

And loving these Write A  Bikes that my beautiful mate Bill at The Cool Hunter alerted me to:

At the yoga school I’ve been going to since the first day (literally) I arrived in Bondi seven years ago, the instructor Rick, at the end of each class, invites us to “take it away” with us.

I want to take away what this guy's got going on (happy shot courtesy of Eugene Tan)

We’ve slogged our way through our nervous tension, our annoyance with the heavy breathing dude next to us, our tight arses holding onto the resentment of the week….and 90 minutes later we finally arrive at a sweet spot. It’s so easy to jump up and ricochet onto the next activity (get home to husband, dash back to work). But this simple reminder – take it away with you – always gets me.

I find so much of my life compartmentalised. I run from one scheduled thing to the next. Rarely am I able to segue the goodness of the previous activity or moment into the next. I’ll share a really good chat with the guy at the dry-cleaners. Then dash off to the next appointment down the road. And I don’t take the loveliness of the chat, or the languidness of my morning walk, or the buzziness of the movie I just watched away with me. I drop it and dart. Next!

Taking good energy away with you entails two steps, in my mind:

1. Capture the moment as you leave. Like a photo. There! Snap! That was great. That felt really good.

2. Hold the energy. Kind of like carrying a tray of drinks. Steady and aware. For as long as you can. And glide onwards into the rest of your days

I’ve just done this with writing this post. There! Snap! I like it.

I used to drink the stuff a bit. I got sucked in by the health messages.

don't get sucked in by the soy myth!!

Then I got told it’s a no-go for anyone with thyroid issues.

Then I learned it’s really a no-go for everyone. I know soooo many of you drink it in your coffee or tea.. Perhaps you’d like to reconsider that (and turn to FULL-FAT milk…more on this later):

Why do we think it’s healthy, then?

We’ve kind of been conned, to be honest.The story is this: in the olden days, tropical oils, like palm and coconut, were the basis of American food production. Problem was,  they’re not grown in the US …cos they’re tropical. So a campaign was launched to demonize the these oils and push soy (and corn) as the healthy alternative. We, in Australia, then adopted these health messages blindly and I”m guessing the soy farmers here ran with the bandwagon.

Why is it so crappy?

Most soy grown is genetically modified (GM) soy. DrMercola explains on his site:

Just a thought for this morning. It’s an old Buddhist story. Of a student who asked his teacher, “What’s the most important thing?”

The wise old teacher replies, “The most important thing is asking what’s the most important thing”.

Asking is engaging, caring, being alive, diving in. Not really knowing for sure – having an inkling in your heart – is what keeps us connected to each other, I think.

This week I face up to my whiteness

I’m so white it hurts. I’m achingly white, not in the alabaster sense. But in the beige sense.

Being white means I’m not the “other”. If you’re black or Asian, I’m what you are not. Whean they cast for home loan or Milk Arrowroot commercials, my type is assumed in the lineup, then they choose a smattering of “other” ethnic groups to make up the balance. (I speak from cringe-worthy experience here – in my teens I played the whitebread-girl-next-door-with-a-Labrador-and-husband in a number of lowbrow ads. I got the gigs because I was “typical”.)

My differences and my behaviours are not analysed or typecast. Because I’m the norm. That’s what it means to be white.

What also makes me white is that I’m blown away by the internet phenomenon Stuff White People Like. White people always are. I first came across the Canadian-based website in early 2008, shortly after it launched as a list of cultural quirks white folk are partial to, like going out for breakfast (#, 36), yoga, Moleskin notebooks, Banksy artwork, following religions their parents don’t belong to (#2), sea salt, listening to black music black people don’t listen to anymore (#116) and issuing apologies. I wrote about it back then (another thing White People like: claiming they were ahead of the curve). Since, the site has morphed into a New York Times bestseller and the site has clocked more than 72 million hits.

I’m 100 per cent Neo-Pagan and 96 per cent New Age. So says the results from the Belief-0-Matic test on Beliefnet.com that I just did.

I’m only 16 per cent Catholic…which might horrify my mother. I was raised Catholic, but didn’t go to a Catholic school…thank goodness. Mum and Dad, mercifully, didn’t like the draconican style of schooling (and couldn’t afford the fees). I’m least of all a Jehovah’s Witness.

Try the test out – 20 online questions. Breezy 10 minutes.

It got me thinking a little more consciously about what I really believe in. Actually, I didn’t think. My answers came out immediately.

I don’t believe in goddesses and gods, nor karma, except in a very organic sense of the word. But my beliefs allow for goddesses and gods and karma.

I believe everything makes sense as an infinite organism that emerges from the same conscious soup. My eyebrow hair, that ant, the grit of sand under my nail, are all merely different cellular expressions of the same energy and flow. Even a gloomy thought or a breeze – all energetic expressions, as valid and necessary as my fifth toe. And my left ovary.

A stack of you have asked me how to go about buying a single-speed bike.  Here’s a little guide, based on my experience.

1. Be very sure you want a SS bike! They’re not for everyone. They have NO gears. Correct, none. So it means riding it like you did a BMX as a kid to get up hills – bum in air and waggling. I would say you have to be very bike-fit to enjoy one, unless you live in a flat area (Melbourne is SS heaven). The benefit of no gears, of course, is that it’s a more agile, lighter, flippier ride.

2. Be sure you don’t ask for a fixie. Many people mistake the two. A fixie is a fixed-gear bike. It’s a SS, but with no brakes. When you stop peddling, it breaks. Which makes them something of a kamikaze ride. My hub is a flip-flop – which means I can switch to a fix gear if I want.

3. You can build your own or buy off-the shelf. I did the former with a friend and there are some wonderful people about who can team with you and make it a fun, care-full experience. Because that’s what this caper called life should be about.

My frame and saddle are 50 years old and from Paris. The wheels were carefully selected. The chain perfectly calibrated.

The beauty of an SS is it’s agility and to really enjoy them it is best that they are a refined, light, perfectly calibrated thing.  And to treat them like an art project and build them with light materials and have them built by kids who know their stuff.

The Customised experience

This is all about finding someone fun to do the project with. Best idea: when you see a bike you like, nab the rider and ask who built theirs.

If you life in Sydney, there’s a very cute chick in Bondi called Lucy who builds custom bikes. She started building them when other cats around town couldn’t build the one she wanted. She runs her business Vamp Garage from a garage, refurbishing vintage pushbikes with contemporary design and parts and Brookes leather saddles. She even custom-designs the stickers to give your bike a theme (if you like!). Or can take your pre-loved wheelie and transform her.

Here’s Lucy:

Oh. Yeah. I’m quinoa obsessed. For now. So are many of you, it would seem, because EVERYWHERE I go people tell me they discovered the stuff on my blog and …blah, blah, blah.

So, here we go again. I came across this recipe for quinoa crumble on the New York Times website. Fills the gap in my baking repertoire.
It can be made into a berry-rose crumble. Or a plum and fig crumble. Or the one below.

* The crumble part – you can store it in the fridge for months.

* Or you can sprinkle it over porridge.

* And just a reminder: always rinse the grain SUPER well before cooking.

Quinoa-Oat Crumble Topping

This topping can be used to make any number of delicious, gluten-free crumbles.

1 1/4 cups gluten-free rolled oats

1/2 cup quinoa flour (grind quinoa in a spice mill to make the flour)

1/3 cup unrefined turbinado sugar

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon salt (to taste)

3 ounces (6 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cover a baking sheet with parchment. Place the oats, quinoa flour, sugar, salt and nutmeg in a food processor fitted with the steel blade, and pulse several times to combine. Add the butter, and pulse until the butter is evenly distributed throughout the grain mix. The mixture should have a crumbly consistency.

This is a random Monday factoid: there’s a perfect reason why your fingers and feet turn to prunes in the shower.

So says Mark Changizi author of The Vision Revolution and Director of Human Cognition at 2AI Labs in Psychology Today. Basically we prune-up because we’re former apes. And it saves brain power:

Pruney fingers are not an accidental side effect of getting soaked …but are, instead, highly efficient rain treads that help us primates grip the world when it is wet…

Without wrinkled fingers you would need to possess two categories of behavior, one for dry conditions, and one for wet. That would require more brain space than you can spare. Lucky for you, you can get by with just one set of behaviors (“all-weather-behaviors”) because your fingertips and feet “know” when to change from race-tire-smooth to rain-tire-wrinkled…

The strategy of “subcontracting” out brain responsibilities to low-brow reflex-like mechanisms is one of the oldest tricks in evolution’s book..

The rest of the article goes into deeper thought about the role of this subcontracting…and how much of our sophisticated behaviour (speech, writing) has evolved around it. Good. Stuff.

This occurs to me this morning as just wonderful. Everything fits in somewhere. Everything exists perfectly. Everything exists for a reason. Eyebrows – they protect our eyes from dust. Women living in drought-striken countries go through puberty later – to reduce the number of extra humans being born.

We, as humans, are creative expressions of inevitable patterns in nature.

But these patterns aren’t just random. They have a purpose and direction – they move forward, they move us toward “better” and “smoother”. Quantum physicists talk in this way – about consciousness dragging energy forward. And many describe this motivating force as “love”.

What do you think?