india is waking up (finally) to good-ish bread. bakeries actually bake now, rather than heap layers of cream and icing on generic sponge base. I have finally - after more than a year of trial and error and bayesian updating - found a source of daily bread that is not priced to somehow mimic import costs. most of last year I flitted between rare self treats of expensive sourdough loaves from L'opera outlets in VK malls and tastes-like-sand (and lacks character) factory made (i refuse to call that 'baked') bread from popular brands. despite the trashy quality these brands are oligopolies in this market. but slowly a renaissance is occurring. erstwhile cake shops are selling daily baked bread. my preferred one is Angels in the Kitchen. plain simple bread baked with flour, multigrains, salt, sugar, water, yeast, and sometimes some nuts and raisins. breakfast is a delight again. lathered with 5-seconds warmed butter in the microwave that smoothens and melts over the slices of bread, and is therefore re-lathered so it shows after absorbing in. dairy-fat on simple bread: that's my wake-up caffeine.

and by the way, sourdough is not supposed to be fancy and expensive, because it is not some special kind of bread but the oldest simplest method of turning wheat into easy to digest food with some shelf-life.

coming back to breakfast though, the perfect one cannot end there with buttered toast. is followed by a fistful of mixed nuts and raisins (and/or dried berries) with cold yogurt. yogurt is one thing you can count on anywhere in this country. thick lumpy fresh yogurt without the heaviness and creaminess of greek yogurt. but the mixed nuts must include some salted roasted cashews, without which nuts are boring. now I have had multiple conversations with people in india trying to rid them of their misconceived bias against cashews, without any success. someone has whispered into ears in this country, especially that of middle aged or retired parents - who anyway wear the mantle of authority on public knowledge - that cashews make you fat and are bad for your cholesterol levels. my personal dig into this claim has revealed it to be not just false but harmful, in that cashews are actually good for our cholesterol levels, and (just like most other nuts) release energy slowly such that they in fact reduce hunger pangs and snacking, and therefore possibly helping control overeating and obesity issues. but they won't listen to reason or scientific evidence. good for me though, I usually end up receiving a somewhat regular supply of roasted salted cashews from either set of parents in them trying to keep those gifts out of sight and out of their mouths.

and yeah, have you seen cashew shells? or probably they were a second layer of casings that cashews wear when in their natural habitat inside their shells. you can eat this layer in fact with the nut, and it gives a slight bitter tinge that kinda complements the cashew's plain-ish taste for which I eat it. thinking about it, it somewhat resembles the plain-ish-lack-of-taste kinda taste of avocados and also coconuts.

Joan Didion used to have (maybe still does) fridge-cold coca-cola and nuts (that her mom regularly sent her) for breakfast. maybe we should exchange notes.

I wonder if Joan Didion is working on something these days, if there will be another book. and I am somewhat ashamed that it took me a Netflix documentary to finally read her. Her words are so apt, so carefully chosen, so brilliantly expressive. and i donno why i felt like she is superhuman, that image of her receiving the honor from Obama and simply thanking him and walking away without one look at the crowd, walking that frail body of hers and only reaching out for that one arm of support. a tiny woman. but so big.

i want to write like her, not literally, because i dont think i could. but like her. write because without it i wouldn't be alive. because writing is a compulsion, to understand myself, to converse with myself. write because i must.

although my writing (if I will ever be able to call it that) might also be on very different subjects than hers. I'm still waiting to publish my first paper in some journal. after more than I can count or remember rejections. after the core point of the paper has changed because of the many rejections, after it got rejected many times since then. I've always known i was stubborn and i also knew it would serve me well in some way. i still dont know whether this time will be the one i've waited for or i'll wake up another morning to another "we are sorry" email. i'll cry again, angry tears. tears of hopelessness of failure of rejection. i will ignore the comments for a couple of days, still angry, still dejected. but then some fine day i will get back to it. send it to another journal or rewrite it once again with or without changing much. its funny how this one paper is still alive in me. I have almost thrown away the other two of my dissertation, one because a reviewer pointed out another paper by other authors (a working paper then; published now) that did something very similar to what i thought i was the first to do; and the other because i felt it was full of holes that couldn't be plugged. i might still pick up the latter some day and try and do a brief on it. maybe after the one i am working on now can somewhat claim to be finished.

why is it that i have never yet written about all this? is it because i doubted this to be just a phase? that i was waiting to quit one day, to finally realize that this was beyond me? i still live with that doubt though. despite it, despite being unemployed, i still work however. because i must. even though this might all be worthless crap. but till i know that : i can still dream that this is the first comprehensive analysis of the topic. that it will start a small literature; or at the very least help someone else find a clue to their answers.

the paper i am waiting to get back from the journal though - i realized a few weeks ago - has a major typo, in three different places. the same wrong word which means exactly the opposite of what it should have said. i must have been tired when i wrote it out, or simply confused as i often get - if an increase in A causes a decrease in B I can often state the opposite and get lost in my words - even though I know, even though I was the one to find it out. ah well. just hope they understand it is a typo. and if they have to reject it, how does it matter what reason they give.

coming back to Joan; her words on the flower power movement in Haight Ashbury in the 60s:

"We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerves about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling.

...

They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

...

As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home". "