It all started last week when I could find nothing to eat, lingering around the kitchen in the unsuccessful search for food through cupboards and the refrigerator…I returned to the fridge a few minutes later hoping something new would have somehow materialized (you know we all do it…), having hit rock bottom I thought to myself, “Geeze!, I need to learn how to cook, last time I tried…the flies pitched in to fix the ripped screen doors and the cockroaches hung themselves with my dental floss =|”.My dreams of Martha Stewart one day inviting me to live with her are slowly fading away and though I’ll keep my fingers crossed, I’ll have to do something about it in the mean time.Off I went to sign myself up to a local cooking class, of course as always with my paranoias and what not I thought it would be a good idea to go in disguise but as you can see from the picture above my incognito attempt wasn’t to subtle and the cooking teacher (Mrs Xu) asked me to remove the wig and glasses at once.

This was one pissed off looking Asian lady…the first thing she asked us was to make something simple and explain it to her, so off we went and did our thing and before I knew it the time was over and it was our turn to explain it to her…what she left out however was the fact that we had to do it in front of the whole class =|.The guy to my left seemed to be as nervous as I was when his turn came to go up there, Mrs Xu asked him, “Please explain your dish”, Andrew I think he was called said, “It’s, uhhhh, a hamburger? I don’t know”, Mrs Xu’s angrily nodded him off and called me up, as I swallowed some saliva and thought to myself “bloody hell…why did you go and make a hamburger/sandwich as well!?”, I walked the corridor in between the work benches experiencing what it must feel to walk the green mile, I looked at her as she saw my plate and you could clearly see the expression “oh, not another one!” pass through her mind…you’d be surprised at what the sight of an Asian lady frowning her eyebrows, clinching her fist around the chopping machete and widening her eyes can do to you…I was inspired! if only to save my hand from ending the main course of her next meal, I said: “…delicately braised tips of beef, ground, in a marinate of spice mayonnaise, topped with a thick, soft, creamy tang of melted cheddar, counterweighted by the crisp, cool freshness of water mist lettuce and sprouts will all dance gently in your mouth with the surprising rhythm of a pickle…”.It actually looked pretty good, pitty it tasted like what I’d assume grass after a cow regurgitates it would taste like but she’ll never know…

From my short lived (yeah Martha, still waiting…) cooking lessons though I gained many experiences which left me ponding, the secrets behind words, quotes and why I appear to be so random =)

“I Said 6 Glugs Matty!”

“First mix 6 glugs of milk with the eggs” she said, “6 glugs?” I asked, “yes…how am I going to teach you how to cook if you don’t know what a glug is!?” she answered, “forgive me, could you please explain what it is?”, “A glug ‘you ignorant buffoon’ (she didn’t say it but I could sense it in the tone) is the sound the jug of milk makes when your pouring it…6 of those”.

Words are symbolic, no word actually means anything…they are sounds that have been agreed upon to have a mutual contract of what they mean.’Sapi’ may mean “to have wisdom” in Latin but in Bahasa Indonesian Sapi means cow…so this site is basically the study of cows for them.Each language provides a way to communicate in our reality, in the world there’s about 3,000 languages altogether, does that mean 3,000 different realities exist? Nope, I believe theres over 6 billion.

Every person grows up in a different way due to genes, circumstances and conditioning, we experience emotions that we associate in our minds with words that closely resemble the definition of our experience and upbringing (the word “Christian” has a different effect on me than on a Muslim), “I’m shaking and my heart is beating faster, this must be ‘fear’ “, that could also fit in with the definition of what many feel when their in love…, though fear and love go close together but we’ll go into that in future articles.A simple example of this would be to try and describe something, if I said “…and she had beautiful dark silky hair…” I could be mentally picturing Monica Bellucci’s hair while saying that while you could be picturing the ponytail hair on top of a horses bum.

There were these two elder women close to me cooking who were talking about bad experiences with men, how their husbands are jerks, don’t like to show affection, are too insensitive, controlling/jealous, but they didn’t stop to wonder why that was…, when a woman says “I Love You” it sometimes has a totally different meaning to what a man means when he says it, a girl could relate the feeling of love as an incredible emotional affection towards someone followed by physical attraction, the admiration of a persona or the passion for them, while a man could relate love to having a strong physical attraction above all as well as sharing things in common, amazing passion or sometimes men see women as objects to protect like young children and they consider that as love.

I wanted to test out my theory to see if it had any validity to it, there were a few lemons lying around the place so I cut them open and left them around the bench, every time I saw someone nearby I said “Suck on a lemon!”, I could immediately observe how they swallowed a chunk of saliva which the mental thought of the lemon juice had produced in their mouth…, how can merely words create a physical reaction over people?, if I had yelled “FIRE!!!” I’m certain they would have all gone in panic mode till they realized it wasn’t true…but a simple word could cause that temporary physical reaction, because our distinction of words and reality has become one.We are all misunderstood and frustrated because words can only lead to a misunderstanding, the trick is to never allow words to affect your judgement before you observe what someone says to you has any truth in their actions, if someone says they hate you or love you…study their gestures and actions to see if it’s true, our emotions have nothing to do with words, if we had been dumped in the middle of the jungle as babies and grown up language-less…would our emotions disappear? cause most of us are always using words in our heads to think and analyze everything even our feelings but what if we had never learned them? we would solely rely on our basic instincts of emotional sensitivity, perception and observation…

Remember this; You can only communicate words, the meaning is always supplied by the listener.

“Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication…Do You Know Who Said That!?”

Is what she asked when she was explaining how we should make the presentation of our dishes, followed by a “It was Leonardo Da Vinci!”.I knew the answer, I have used the quote before, but I remained silent lost in thought of the condescending way she said the name of the author.For me using quotes has been a difficult task on my blogs, as much as I love them, I find them dangerous in a way, quotes are conclusions someone has come to after much thought and deliberation, they understand all that is involved in that conclusion…they have analyzed and studied the possibilities, perspectives and variables and have come to that final thought, it’s like Einstein’s “E=mc2″, thats the final formula…but to work with atoms you have to understand the concept of how he reached that conclusion, so even if a quote passes on a lot of wisdom, we won’t be able to use it unless we understand how they came to the conclusion of that wisdom and even worse…we will be deceived thinking we are wise because we understand the quote’s meaning, it merely makes us copycats of someone else…cause what are quotes and information? It’s not our own mental revelation, it’s being taught through the passing of borrowed recycled knowledge that some brilliant mind may have come up with but we limit ourselves to use the final result of the investigation instead of coming up with our own original observations and revelations…we use the words of others, to express our own thoughts, but then we add the authors name attached to it, is it to use the name as an authority figure? By using the name of a known historical figure does it make it more truthful than if it were your own words? or is it a matter of “I have the same thoughts and agree with this brilliant mind in history…does that make me brilliant as well?”, The use of others words to describe our own exact emotions and thoughts…kind of takes away the whole point of being considered ‘unique individuals’ now doesn’t it? =S

That’s why I try to use stories, anecdotes or analogies in my writings to let the reader come up with his own conclusions and realizations, because not only do the words inside a quote influence the individual perspective as we have observed the power of words above, but if the reader comes up with his own conclusions and judgments then they will have had to go through the process of analyzing and understanding how they got there.It’s nothing new though…Buddhist for centuries have used analogies to pass their wisdom and information, or they simply tell you…”Observe nature, observe the river”, if you analyze and observe something long enough you come to your own revelations, “the river is like life, you are the water in the present moment…always moving and changing, and the banks on each side are the passed and future, static and unchangeable till you reach there”.

Words are the most extremely limited way we have of communicating with others, if your eating food or lets say listening to music with someone for example and your enchanted with with what your listeing to and then feel like commenting about it with that other person…what do you do? you can say “oh how beautiful that was…the melody, the lyrics blah blah” but if the other person didn’t feel that same emotion you did while hearing it, no matter how many words you use to try and describe and convey what you felt, the other person can only understand the words your saying but not the experience you went through unless they did as well and even then it will be biased to their own personal emotions and previous experiences.A person who has never experienced the beauty of doing something cannot understand what it is like with the use of words, because words are narrow when it comes to describing anything that involves sensations, the only thing that can be conveyed successfully and 100% of the time solely with the use of words is emotionless and dead things such as mathematical logic and information.To understand the world we live in requires more than just the gathering of existing opinions and to advance as individuals and a humanity we must take it upon ourselves to discover things nobody could ever teach us.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

“This Is Not A Consistent Dish, If You Worked At A Restaurant You’d Be Fired!”

Agreed, restaurants require the chef to be consistent in the food they serve or else nobody would return, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make the same dish with the same ingredients I previously made to come out tasting exactly the same, it’s boring, dull and dead just like our precious words.

Words and quotes are dead because they are consistent, consistency is the repetition of that same things over and over again without any innovation or change in meaning…just keep doing the same thing over and over, as I have mentioned before, it demands you to be as stupid today as you were yesterday and the day before that.It’s a silly concept to be consistent, as people who are growing through learning and experiences we change our opinions and perspectives all the time (heck I must go through 5 different personalities everyday) yet we are socially expected to stand by our beliefs with a lifelong conviction…”I’m a Catholic”, it’s narrow minded to lock yourself in one idea for ever even if it can be wrong, because your not sticking to that idea out of agreeing with it or finding it truthful anymore, your sticking with it because its a matter of honor to stand by your initial belief, kind of like many loveless marriages.That’s why I never regret doing or saying anything…because I know I did what I thought was right at the time and due to my lack of consistency I am able to appreciate if I was right or wrong at the time.
But thanks to Mrs Xu I have come to one conclusion…from today on I’ll be consistent with my age, if you ask me how old I am I will say 21, if you ask me the same question in 36 years I will still say I’m 21, cause thats what everybody seems to want right? consistency…

“You are so weird Matty, why are you so random???!“, thats the reaction I got from my brief interaction with the other cooks, It’s not the first time I’ve been told that and I’m certain it wont be the last, but I’ve never felt the need to have to explain why I like to be random…because I believe people should be intelligent enough to figure it out themselves, it’s directly connected to the whole “consistency” delusion, consistency is basically to be serious, to follow one line of thought and have a narrow way of looking at things (it has to be if you plan to repeat them all the time), when someone is talking to me about potato’s, I’ll answer them with frogs, I can rapidly find a connection with both (potatos = South America, main food sources = potato, corn + hunting, hunting = arrows with poisoned tips, poison = frogs saliva), but I’m random on purpose cause I enjoy the shock value it creates, they are expecting me to continue with the potato talk which will make their brains follow the same dead train of thought, when I answer something that’s not in that train of thought they are startled, surprised and shocked, it’s like mentally bitch-slapping them to wake them up for a few nanoseconds and leave them with a “WTF?!!” expression on their face.

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