J.K. Rockin' on the tumblrphone

Is it groovy

Is it smashing, baby

Is it shagedelic

Does it give you mojo

start wanting rice. (or, if you are traditional, simply recognize your constant desire for rice.)

measure out two cups of rice. then one more. then two more. then another. this seems fine. you love rice. there is no way that this will backfire on you.

remember that your great-great-uncle’s recipe says it should be soaked overnight.

become consumed with despair.

decide to soak it for half an hour instead, acknowledging that the final product will be inferior and anger your ancestors but will still satisfy your now almost-overwhelming need for rice to be inside your body much faster.

remember that you should have set the water to boil when you soaked the rice. goddammit. 

once the water boils, put the rice in until it is half-cooked. the eyeballing or intuitive method is less effective than a timer but that’s how your aunt does it so you feel compelled to meet her standards.

now that the rice has fluffed up, realize how much rice six dry cups really is. holy shit. you’ve fucked up immeasurably. 

take a minute to dwell upon your failings.

grease a baking dish with butter. this will never be as elegant as you want it to and your fingers will get greasy, but the slightly shameful, self-indulgent joy of licking your fingers afterwards will make up for it.

pour the rice into the dish. wonder immediately if you actually buttered the dish beforehand and if you’ve just fucked up. 

melt approximately one thousand pounds of butter in the microwave and pour it over the rice, pondering your imminent death from rapid-onset arterial clogging. put a small pat of butter on the top to properly gild the lily.

put your pan into the oven, which you have absolutely preheated after your previous lack of foresight. shake the rice once or twice while it bakes to make sure the butter is well distributed. resist the impulse to climb into the oven with the rice. for the last ten minutes, sit next to the oven and count the seconds until it’s done.

remove the dish from the oven. shed a tear or two at the perfection laid before you. if you are dining with others, this is the time to serve the rice while making passive-aggressive statements about how oh no, you don’t need any help, you just made dinner all by yourself, you can serve everyone as well. (this is still fun if done alone, but optional.)

CONSUME THE RICE.

realize that you have eaten half of the dish in one sitting. no matter how much rice you made, this will always happen. 

put the leftovers away, if there are any, and enjoy a cup of chai while marveling at the amount of food you have just eaten. if possible, fall asleep in an armchair, sitting up, head tilted slightly back, like a grandpa.

1lb / approx. 2 ⅓ cups basmati rice (any long-grain rice will do)

3 tbsp salt

8 tbsp / 1 stick butter (you can reduce this if you don’t want to have a heart attack)

Put the rice in a pot and cover it in cold water and salt. Let it soak overnight. (If you don’t have the time to soak it, rinse the rice with cold water until it runs clear.)

Edit: The reason you want to soak basmati and other aromatic rice before cooking is to preserve more acetylpyrroline, the compound that gives aromatic rice its characteristic scent and flavor. Soaking rice allows the grains to absorb water, which reduces the cooking time, which means less time for the acetylpyrroline to cook off. It’ll still taste pretty good if you can’t do this, but you don’t want “pretty good”, you want mind-blowing, so for that perfect flavor you’ll want to soak your rice overnight. The soaking process also washes away the layer of starch on the outside of the rice, which allows the grains to separate rather than sticking together; this is why you want to rinse your rice thoroughly if you don’t have time to soak it.

Preheat your oven to 325°.

Boil three quarts of water in a separate pot. Once it’s at a fast boil, drain the rice and add it to the water. Boil for 5-7min or until one grain tastes half-cooked, but not soft. Pour the rice into a colander and rinse with cold water.

Edit: This step also helps get rid of any remaining starch on your grains, for perfectly separated rice. If your colander or strainer has large holes, you can put a paper towel/cheesecloth/clean dishcloth on the inside in order to drain your rice. Pour carefully if you’re using a paper towel, though, and put a bowl underneath your colander; I once lost a heartbreaking amount of rice when my paper towel got oversaturated and tore open.

Liberally grease the bottom of your baking pan with some of your butter. Pour the rice on top. Melt the rest of the butter in the microwave and pour on top of the rice.

Bake for 45min. (If you like, cover the rice for part or all of the baking time, but I find it gets less crispy on top if you do this.) Shake the pan a couple times during baking to ensure that the butter distributes throughout the entire dish.

Eat.

Serves four. Can easily be scaled up if needed (or down, but why would you do that?). Best enjoyed with a nice cup of chai.

not sure why i rewrote the copy on the men’s clothing section of the uniqlo website, but i did it. the words are different now.

and here’s one that didn’t fit in the photo set:

To start, with only lite spoilers and rearranging of film events to fit their chronological in-world order, let me first give a run down of the film's basic shtick…

Evelynn Wang is a middle aged first generation Chinese American immigrant running a laundromat with her husband, a mousey but extremely big hearted and quirky man named Waymond. When they were young, and fell in love while living in China, Waymond convinced her to move to America with him and out of disapproval of Waymond and the move in general, Evelynn's father(unnamed) disowned her. That same father, now in poor health and apprently with no other family or support left in China, has recently flown to America from China to live out the rest of his life with the daughter he disowned and the husband he disapproved of.

So, as Evelynn gets ready for both a Chinese New Years party, and a dire appointment with an IRS auditor, her (not exactly clear on age? 20s?) college dropout daughter, Joy, is also discussing introducing her girlfriend, Becky, to her grandfather —something Evelynn does not really approve of. Also, although she is not yet aware of it, her husband, Waymond, is also attempting(and thus far failing) to approach her about the subject of divorce; not to actually divorce her, but to use the possibility of a divorce to force a frank conversation about the state of their marriage, and what Waymond sees as Evelynn's long standing and growing dissatisfaction with their life together.

(Oh, and although it was technically clipped from the final script as a concrete detail, all indications from how they are characterized inicate that Evelynn and Joy struggle with undiagnosed ADHD.)

With that as the set up for the story, this overwhelming stress in her life aligns with(or perhaps in a sort of cosmic destiny sense, triggers…) her awakening to the existence of infinite parallel universes. And she is faced with the choice to either continue her mundane life as planned, or accept this call to adventure as the savior of multiple realities.

The the threat to all existence that she is the many worlds' savior from is a kind of ascendent form of her own daughter, Joy, who in another reality was pushed to excel at reality hopping by her mother to the point where she was overwhelmed by the pressure to succeed and by the infinite possibilities of the multiverse. To escape the anxiety of an all seeing existance, this villainous Joy, dubbed Jobu Tupaki, has created a kind of blackhole as a nexus of multiple realities all collapsing onto themselves.

And, finally, to avert this world ending crisis, Evelynn must learn to channel into herself, the knowledge, experience, and skills of her many other selves. She does this at first to match and challenge Jobu Tupaki, and later to understand and potentially negotiate with her.

So what does this have to do with Buddhism?

The mytho-historical origins of Buddhism are in the life and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, generally presented as a story of a young man living an inordinately sheltered and privileged life who has an encounter with the old, the sickly, the dead, and then an ascetic.(someone in the, often but not exclusively spiritual act of self-denial; living while refusing luxury in an act of self-discipline.) These experiences are referred to as The Four Sights.

This isn't in and of itself particularly important in the context of the film, but the first 3 sights make Siddhartha for the first time aware of the difficulties of being alive; to lose youth, to lose health, and to lose life. And he becomes aware that all living things share in these experiences, and subsequently that the individual and ego driven experience is not unique. But the 4th sight, of the man in self-denial makes him aware that people can live without attachment to those things in the first place. And this begins his spiritual journey in search of Nirvana thru, among other things, meditation. And via said mediation he becomes Bodhi:"Awakened." (from which the epithet Buddha:"Awakened One" is derived.)

Okay... so without letting this spiral too out of control... What is Nirvana? Apart from an iconic Gen X rock band fronted by Kurt Cobain?

Nirvana is the state of being of having escaped from those worldly sufferings. In some, perhaps more supernatural, perspectives it can be interpreted as literal immortality, but more practically it means freedom, not from the experience of aging, but the fear of aging; If you don't value something like vanity, you don't fear its loss, and if you don't fear losing it, your life is not governed by navigating around that potential loss.

It also involves an escape from the endless cycle of death and rebirth implicit to Buddhism as a religion rooted in its preceding Hindu theology. (This same root in Hinduism is where the idea of karma comes from: the idea that what you do in one life incurs consequences in the next life, for good and for ill.) And part of the Buddha's role as an all-seeing and all-knowing figure is that he can also see his other(past) lives. This escape and the prerequisite ability to see and to understand and to empathize with all living things through your own awakening to your infinite experiences in many lives, and the universal suffering that comes with living and aging and dying, is the goal of Buddhist teaching and study; To understand your place in a much MUCH bigger picture and find peace in a life free of the push and pull of expectation and external societal pressures. That's Nirvana.

Now... In relation to Nirvana is the concept of Anatta: "The Non-self." The concept that there is no such thing as a "true self" or a "false self" and that individual identity is mutable; nothing exists in a singular finite state, least of all people. (This btw is a point of conflict for a lot of would be Buddhist scholars in the west, where it conflicts heavily with the insistence on trying to preserve or otherwise find in Buddhist philosophy some trace of the Christian "immortal soul.") And adjacent to this, the concept of Sunyata: "Emptyness"/"Nothingness."

And Sunyata is where the black circle symbolism comes from. Sunyata is literally composed of the sanskrit word for "empty/vacant/void/nothing/hollow/zero" etc… and the suffix indicating a state of being, often translated as "-like" or "as (if) __" or "-ism." In fact, the circle itself actually old enough that it shares its origins with the arabic numeral zero; It is one of the oldest and most basic human concepts of visualizing "nothing."

And it is of course the reference at the core of the Everything Bagel in Everything Everywhere All At Once. (that's right, I'm actually still talking about the movie!)

So, this is where the film actually starts its Buddhism crash course, more or less… Evelynn is caught in the endless wheel of life and suffering, or as she summarizes it, "Laundry and taxes and laundry and taxes…" And this life is disrupted by the appearance of the Sunyata, the menacing black circle Deirdre draws on one of the disputed receipts, which threatens to end everything. And indeed "Everything" is embodied in the daunting pile of receipts, in the many events taking place on this one single day, by the unspoken ADHD sensory overload, and by the existence of the multiverse itself.

Like the Buddha, Evelynn becomes aware of her other lives. But while the Buddha's understanding of the cycle of reincarnation is about past lives and their sequence, Evelynn's induction into the multiverse is the understanding of parallel lives and of alternate potentiala. This in turn manifests as what is called FOMO*(Fear Of Missing Out) a kind of jealousy and envy and anxiety that comes from feeling like you've missed your opportunities, most often triggered by seeing other people fulfilling the potentials you haven't.

*Stick a pin in this, because we'll come back to it...

So, Evelynn's path to enlightenment starts with her experiencing her other lives, but what helps move her forward is not some critical accumulation of her own experiences, it's when she realizes that the life she wants to experience, to see and understand, is her daughter's: the villain, Jobu Tupaki's experience. And she endeavors to find in that empathy some kind of peaceful resolution.

And in Buddhist art this state of heightened awareness is illustrated as the opening of the 3rd eye: The Eye of Consciousness. And the cultivation of this third eye is a core tenet of Zen Buddhism in particular; a sect of Buddhism that emphasizes self reflection thru meditation, and the contemplation and application of the Sunyata.

(There's actually a whole tangent I'm cutting here about the bodhisattva, Guanyin/Avalokiteśvara: An Indian god turned Chinese goddess, characterized as one who sees everything, who displays infinite mercy, and who has 108 different forms(including, according to the tibetan sect that revere him, the dalai lama). I think there's a definite through line here, from the Buddhist figure to Waymond to Evelynn, but it's a but much and honestly not as concrete as the rest of the symbolism at play, so I'm just tabling it...)

And it's a little less overt but the scene with the rocks over the canyon in the movie also directly evokes a meditative exercise of imagining yourself as a stone. You are stable and immobile and of sufficient size, functionally immovable; you exist in nature, as a part of nature, and in opposition to nature. You can be navigated around and over and under, and both do not disturb the scenery around you, nor are you disturbed by it, and while you may be unlike much of what is alive around you, you are none the less a part of the scene.

The emulation of a stone-like demeanor in relation to the stressors of life emphasizes that you needn't give in to the push and pull of the world around you; you don't need to capitulate to the pressures others put on you, nor do you have to assert your control over them to avoid being victimized. You can simply exist as a part of the larger picture without disturbing others or being disturbed.

And finally the concept of Mudita: defined as joy felt on behalf of others for their own wellbeing. Opposite of things like schadenfreude and FOMO.

So, here's our return to FOMO.... I'm not sure the exact relation but the term showed up a surprising amount in interviews surrounding the film, particularly in regards to Ke Huy Quan's long absence from acting, but I get the impression this was a keyword that Daniels used during writing that spread into the way the cast talk about the film as a result. And it makes sense both in regards to the ADHD themes, the midlife crisis, and of course the resolution of the film's grappling with self-destructive nihilism.

But also, obviously, I'm sure you notice, this specific kind of "joy" is embodied directly in the character, Joy, Evelynn's estranged daughter. Because not only is the solution to Evelynn's restlessness and sense of unaccomplished life something she can overcome through the legacy of her daughter; not by her daughter's "success" in conventional means(which all context implies she has pushed her towards in the pass to the point of breakdown) but by her joy in living a self-fulfilled life. Evelynn can be happy by knowing she can allow Joy to be happy.

But also this works metaphorically, in that reconnecting with Joy means reconnecting with (sympathetic)joy. She forgot what being happy was, for herself but also for others, and by rediscovering that concept she can overcome her own dissatisfactions. And indeed the ultimate form Evelynn attains in the final fight is one of sympathetic joy, and of mercy.(see: that Guanyin theme I only briefly touched on) See used her opened 3rd eye to see the lives of other people and to grant them the joy she herself lacked and longed for, and in turn found that joy for herself. "Be kind" Waymond says, and in that kindness, that selflessness, Evelynn finds her salvation from the endless cycle of suffering of life. She becomes enlightened. She reaches Nirvana.

And this is, btw, why the film DOESN'T end with optimism and hope and individualist concepts of self-actualization and overwhleming positivity being some kind of solution to negativity and depression. And why the nihilism is non treated as synonymous with some western concept of "evil" in direct opposition to "good." Because the innately Buddhist philosophy at the roots of it is all about personal balance and being at peace with reality rather than at odds with it. And that means embracing the bigger picture, rather than trying to force it and one's self into some limited perspective of what "should" be, rather than simply what is.

Generally, yes, being healthy makes people happier and have better quality of life. But people then turn this into a moral problem, and make it other people’s problem.

If someone else is doing something unhealthy:

Is it hurting you? Is it hurting anybody else?

Is it useful to think of this deviation from the social ideal as “unhealthy” or is it a natural part of human variation? (See: having no libido/sexual desire/sexual activity being treated as inherently unhealthy and something that needs to be “fixed” by… pressuring people to have sex they don’t want? Telling them there’s something wrong with them for not having sex? Is this actually a question of health or is this a question of forcing conformity to a narrow ideal? Who gets to decide?)

Is it something where “fixing” it would actually make the person happier? Or would removing societal pressure to “fix” themselves solve their problem instead? (Does that fat person need to lose weight or does society need to stop treating them like shit? Does that intersex person need hormone treatment and surgery or does society need to stop demanding that male and female are wholly distinct and binary classes with restrictive definitions that people’s bodies need to be changed to meet?)

And, crucially: even if you decide that YES this person is unhealthy… does that merit treating them worse because of it? Is it fair, useful, or kind to treat unhealthy people worse than healthy people?

Even if you argue, well, people who are disabled or have chronic illnesses can’t help it, I would never treat them badly for being unhealthy, only people who are unhealthy due to their own choices… Most people make some unhealthy choices all the time. There is no reliable evidence that drinking alcohol is ever healthier than not drinking alcohol. Most people know this and still decide to drink alcohol sometimes. Is it reasonable to discriminate against people who drink a glass of wine with dinner because they’re making unhealthy choices? Is it reasonable to treat people like they’re bad people for getting drinks out with friends on Friday nights? Most people would say no, that’s completely unreasonable! Then why do we do it about other things we deem to be “making unhealthy choices”?

This is also the argument used to discriminate against people with HIV/AIDS. They’re unhealthy because of the choices they made, so it justifies treating them badly.

"too many authors in the current market are focusing on selling 'spice' instead of telling interesting stories"

"oh yeah, i agree. i started reading one that i heard a lot about and it just wasn't-"

"and it's all of these women reading their fucking mommy porn out in public like FREAKS"

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

Greece suspends asylum applications for migrants from North Africa by Laura Gozzi (BBC).

Greece passes draconian legislation with prison terms for rejected asylum seekers by Helena Smith (The Guardian).

Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say by Lucile Smith and Ben Steele (BBC).

Bill on Detention Centres for Asylum Seekers Published by Jelena Ćirić (Iceland Review).

Italy sends 40 rejected asylum seekers to Albania by Karl Sexton (DW).

Record number of migrants, refugees reached Canary Islands by sea in 2024 (Al Jazeera).