So. Coming back from bringing my aunt to visit relatives in South Carolina, I had no milk in the fridge (on purpose because I hadn't wanted to leave anything behind that might spoil) and was in desperate need of coffee. And I need milk in my coffee.
I did, however, have tins of milk in the cupboard. But, owing to an unfortunate combination of circumstances in the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad month of June, I had no can opener. My choice would have been evaporated milk, but it did not have the easy-open, pull-tab top. The condensed milk did.
I need milk in my coffee, but--and this was something of a surprise to me when I discovered that it could be done, coming from a place where 3-in-1 coffee sachets and instant coffee with spoonfuls of sugar is Just How It's Done*--I do not do sugar. However, when other people do condensed milk in coffee, it's delightful (witness barako condensada and Vietnamese coffee). And I thought to myself how bad can it be?
Answer: not bad at all, actually. It's...it's all right.
I say this in the tones of Arthur Shappey describing something as "all right" rather than "brilliant". I might have been better off bringing the coffee into work and grabbing a few little buckets of creamer from the break room (I know no moderation when it comes to milk in my coffee, and dread the day when my system finally goes "nope, you can't have dairy anymore").
So I had an open can of condensed milk that I didn't know how to use, and the next logical step was, of course, to see if I could make bread with it.
(This makes sense. To me, at least.)
I could. I found a recipe. I tried it. And it looked delightful.
"Looked" is the key word here.
I know where I went wrong. It was in trying to frantically multitask before I had to make myself get some sleep before going in to work and blindly trusting the directions instead of seeing how they adapted to the kitchen I'm not yet entirely used to. I ended up with an externally lovely loaf with an unsalvageable gooey interior maybe 2 slices in from the end.
Devastating,
So I ended up not just not having milk, but also not having a fresh loaf of bread. Not that I had a fresh loaf of bread to start with, but the absence of it was more keenly felt. (It was the potential of the fresh loaf of bread, you see.)
I did, however, have a very stale loaf from eons past in the fridge, which was in surprisingly good shape. The next logical thing then was to find a good recipe for bread pudding. Which I did. Because I am a rational human bean, and it made sense to me at the time.
The bread pudding turned out considerably better than the Tragedy of the Condensed Milk Loaf.
I'm still working on that--working on consuming that, I should say--but since I did eventually go and get the milk, I now have milk that I'm trying to use up (and a glass bottle with a $2 deposit that rather surprised me) so I am once again looking for recipes that aren't the one for the milk loaf that I usually fall back on. Because variety is the spice of life and I am in need of some low-key excitement.
This has been the long and bread-y ramble no one asked for.
*I would like to thank "The Hounds of Baskerville" and John Watson's "I don't take sugar" for this revelation. Mind was blown when I tried coffee that way and learned that sweetness wasn't compulsary.
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Ahhh, the nihilism that comes from being confronted with a medical bill for a 5-day hospital stay in America that is somehow more expensive than my whole college education in the Philippines.
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So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is the “civic duty” of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and autonomy.
[...]
Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we change the conditions of our communities.
What do we get out of voting that we cannot directly provide for ourselves and our people? What ways can we organize and make decisions that are in harmony with our diverse lifeways? What ways can the immense amount of material resources and energy focused on persuading people to vote be redirected into services and support that we actually need? What ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into efforts that have immediate impact in our lives and the lives of those around us?
This is not only a moral but a practical position and so we embrace our contradictions. We’re not rallying for a perfect prescription for “decolonization” or a multitude of Indigenous Nationalisms, but for a great undoing of the settler colonial project that comprises the United States of America so that we may restore healthy and just relations with Mother Earth and all her beings. Our tendency is towards autonomous anti-colonial struggles that intervene and attack the critical infrastructure that the U.S. and its institutions rest on. Interestingly enough, these are the areas of our homelands under greatest threat by resource colonialism. This is where the system is most prone to rupture, it’s the fragility of colonial power. Our enemies are only as powerful as the infrastructure that sustains them. The brutal result of forced assimilation is that we know our enemies better than they know themselves. What strategies and actions can we devise to make it impossible for this system to govern on stolen land?
We aren’t advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European politic, or some other colonial fantasy of “utopia.” In our rejection of the abstraction of settler colonialism, we don’t aim to seize colonial state power but to abolish it.
We seek nothing but total liberation.
Voting Is Not Harm Reduction - An Indigenous Perspective
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