Day 35 - Operation Profit

— 3 minute read

Tuesday.

Made an experiment today of a curry out of nangka muda (young unripe jackfruit) and homemade peanut tempeh. It was delicious. The peanut tempeh had a sweet distinct taste of peanuts which I found quite interesting, as opposed to normal soybean tempeh. The next tempeh candidate will be black beans. After that probably chickpeas.

Otherwise I'm not sure what there is to report. Are beans the main composition of my life now?


I wrote a poem yesterday, which is something I rarely do. I'm penduluming between extremes of cringing sometimes and thinking it's not bad other times. I can never decide. I guess I will need to leave it for some time and view it with detached eyes later on.

I must say that the nib pen is working for the creative process. I'm actually making marks on the paper for the sake of making marks on the paper, in the sense that the enjoyment is in the transferring of ink from pen to paper (such a rewarding feeling when you get a smooth straight line) and so whatever that is written/drawn ceases to be the point. Which is what art educators like Robert Henri advocate for. Art is about the state of mind you're in when you're making it, and the painted canvas is just a byproduct of this process.

Even though I still wonder if the byproducts are any good.


Today I spent some time reading and updating the annotated bibliography on AI and human rights in Southeast Asia that I'm building. I find it very useful to do a summary of a paper after reading it, to retain some information and for later on when I need to revisit it. Made it open as I thought that it may be useful for others who don't want to trawl through pages and pages of academic literature.

Otherwise I'm still plotting on the new research project that I'm building and it's good fun.


Harvested some leaves from my henna tree, which I will use to dye my hair tomorrow. For many months I had been lazy and using store-bought henna powder, which is simple because you just stir in the powder without having to harvest and blend the leaves, and it doesn't leave bits of leaf residue in your hair after the dyeing. But in the spirit of being self-sufficient I am going to use my homegrown leaves this time.

Also very tempted to buy microgreens and keep some to grow - Operation Seed Growing didn't yield anything and I was quite disappointed. It seems a natural progression to now transition to Operation Get Sprouts And Grow Them. Then Operation Set Up Competing Microgreen Company. Then Operation Profit.