Life update (and Soylent review)

Hi all!

It's been ages and ages, I realize, but I never intended to let this blog die. I've just been in the midst of writing up my dissertation and job hunting. I'm going to be defending my thesis in a couple of months, likely in late January/early February, so that's been my main focus for a while now. I haven't gone on any really interesting trips since the last time I posted, and while I have been cooking some and have been to some awesome restaurants (most notably Eleven Madison Park last May!), I haven't been doing nearly as much foodie stuff lately. The most interesting thing I've done food-wise lately was cook borscht (which turned out really well, admittedly) and to try out Soylent. If you aren't familiar with the product, it's basically a drink designed to replace food -- it's balanced so that if you consume nothing but, you still fulfill all your nutritional and caloric needs without needing to cook or prep anything.

But Jennifer, you say -- you LOVE cooking! AND eating delicious new things! Why on earth would you replace food with something like that? Well, for one, I love to try new things. And I really like the *idea* behind it -- making it easy to get all your nutrition from one source in a relatively inexpensive manner (~$2.30 per bottle right now, cheaper in powder form) seems like a good idea to me. And if I'm ever going to replace food with something else, now is the time -- like I said, I'm in the middle of writing up my thesis. I'm *busy* and when I'm not busy I'm frequently *tired* and don't feel like cooking up something complicated. If you compare the frequency at which I've been cooking for the past six months ago to any other six month period of my life since moving into my own place (albeit with roommates, but also with a KITCHEN) during my junior year of undergrad, you'll notice a SHARP drop in how often I've been doing so and a SHARP rise in take-out and super-simple instant type dinners which require minimal effort. Also, it's named after a famously cannibalistic product which I find, frankly, hilarious. Know thy audience, I guess.

Anyway, they recently updated the product so that it's no longer just in powder form -- originally you had to mix it up yourself whenever you wanted it, but now it comes in conveniently pre-made bottles which I can grab on my way out the door if I'm in a hurry. They're 400 calories a pop, so in theory you can drink 5 bottles a day to get your full 2000 calories, but I maybe have one or two a week at most, when I'm tired and hungry or in a hurry to get somewhere and need food fast. Good for a quick breakfast or snack. I bought a 12 pack a little over a month ago and recently received my second one last weekend.

Taste-wise, it's kind of like a cross between unsweetened soy milk and those last liquidy dregs of oatmeal that collect at the bottom of your bowl, in that it's got a bit of thickness and texture. It tastes fine. A bit bland, but really, I like soy milk, and that's the closest thing to it, I think. Thick soy milk with a hint of oatmeal. Fine for a bit, for a meal here and there, but if I lived off the stuff I would get cravings for actual flavor pretty fast. 

Anyway, that's all for now, this was meant to be a quick life update mainly. No promises for future update schedules because right now my dissertation writing is the most important thing.

Going the Distance

So, I just realized (today) that as of maybe a week ago, Benson and I have been dating for over 10 years now. We've never celebrated dating anniversaries or anything, and I don't know the exact day we did start, to be honest, just that it was a few days before the Superbowl, which is a thing that I can look up. (I just remember being super giddy and seeing the Superbowl up on a screen in the student center, so I can't really get much more specific then that. Kind of random how memory works sometimes.) We've been doing the long distance thing since graduation, which means of that 10 years, 6.5+ of them have been long distance. 

So! To celebrate/brag/give support to other LDRers on this occasion, here are some date suggestions and general advice for things that we've done long distance. I don't claim uniqueness or creativity for any of these, by the way... I've definitely looked at ALL the articles online on doing stuff long distance. 

- Talk. Skype. Call. Figure out what times of day work and just schedule when you can make time for each other, and make this HIGH priority in your life, even if you are going crazy with homework or presentations or paper writing.

- DON'T talk. You have a ton of work to do? So do they? Just put Skype up in the background and work on your stuff in companionable silence where you can occasionally glance up and smile at the other person and listen to them working while they try and figure out why their code isn't working, dammit, and you wrestle with trying to find the bit in this stupid paper that is relevant to your research. It doesn't even need to be work, just hang out and browse the internet together. Leading to...

- Youtube videos, articles, and general internetness. Just, if you are doing nothing and interneting or listening to music on your own (or simultaneously on each end of the line), if you find and interesting article or video... link it or play it back and forth. You know how the "oh that reminds me of this other thing" chain goes. Similarly, things like Podcasts and audiobooks and music *CAN* be listened to at the same time over Skype. 

- Music! You can play music together and sing separately/together. Just rocking out to Bohemian Rhapsody together or putting on some Sondheim and singing along to Sweeney Todd. Benson and I have also gone another route a couple times -- he plays the violin, so he's played some jigs and reels on his end while I danced to them on this end.

-Games. Games with remote co-op like Monaco or Castle Crashers or Portal (which we often do over Steam, which has the nice chat and voice chat options). Or Vassal is a free system where you can download and remotely play many different board/card/dice games, including straight up cards. We often play cards, or games like Pandemic or Ghost Stories. We've also both just gotten our own physical decks of cards and played things like Cribbage or other games where you don't have to actually interact extensively with the discard pile and it doesn't really matter if you are playing with 2 separate decks. You can also just separately play games and recommend them to each other and discuss strategy, of course. But I'm assuming that "tell your partner about things that interest you and you think they might like" is pretty much understood in a relationship, long distance or not. Actually, it can be pretty darn fun to watch your partner play something you've already done as you wait for something awesome to pop up so you can watch their surprise and delight. (Stanley Parable, I'm looking at you. Benson literally just watched me play that game as I DEVOURED it and he kept laughing at me as I worked through it and was being boggled and bemused at different parts of the game. It was quite fun.) Online puzzle games are also an option -- we have finished all but a few levels of the NotPron online riddle, and are currently working on the Tim Tang Test. We've both worked together and separately on the puzzles. We keep the solutions as we get them in a file in Dropbox, naturally. Also, good to note that screen sharing can be quite useful for solving puzzles and things like that. 

-Many many movies and TV shows. Download the thing, Dropbox it, get on Skype and IM and count down from 5 and press play at the same time, then mute them and chat on IM about the thing as you watch. We usually have multiple TV shows that we've got in the Dropbox so that depending on our mood we can go comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, drama, etc. We keep up with a number of shows (ie Game of Thrones, Agent Carter, Hannibal, Mad Men, Doctor Who, Mushishi, etc), but also glut on old shows we're interested in (ie. Farscape, The Wire, Twilight Zone, Arrested Development). Movies are generally for weekends where we have more time, and keep those in the box as well. 

- Books and stories. You can read the same books at the same time, separately, and discuss them, of course, like Benson and I did on the Game of Thrones series. You can ALSO just take turns reading back and forth chapter by chapter, like we're currently doing with Dune. Also, short stories are great for this. I've read Benson a bunch of fairy tales before bed, and am now going through Kipling's Just So Stories for short stories. 

-Write/be creative.  As per the previous suggestion, Benson has been reading to me from Burton's Book of One Thousand and One Nights. And from that, we're working on a grand index together, summarizing the events of each story, which level of story it is (meaning, tale within a tale within a tale and which tale it is within), and where Scheherazade breaks off the story each night and which night it is. We're keeping the master file in the dropbox and splitting it up by story. I imagine this could work for other types of things, too.

- A wild and crazy blast from the past: Actually write letters. Physical letters. We've not been doing this one since Benson moved to England, but let me tell you personally, the joy of getting an actual physical letter is well worth the 49 cents it costs within the US. And you can do stuff like write in cyphers or with constricted writing that you don't tell your partner what the key or rule was and they have to figure it out themselves. Or make crosswords and word searches for each other. Or send sketches. Or puzzle pieces. Or care-packages of goodies, of course, though this is more expensive.

- Cooking. What? Yes. Cooking. We've only done this a couple times, usually on special occasions like Valentine's Day, and it takes some planning. But. Choose a recipe, and each of you buy the ingredients. Then set up your computer in your kitchen so you can Skype. Start sautéing, or chopping, or prepping each ingredient at the same time. Alternatively, you can just eat and/or drink together without syncing to quite that degree.

- Time Zones suck. But sometimes it's totally worth it to go sleep deprived for certain things if you are both eager to do the thing together. This is why Benson got up at 6am to watch the Breaking Bad finale with me while I watched it at 1am here. And yesterday we did the same thing for the premiere of Better Call Saul. And when our time zone difference was a little less dramatic we'd do stuff like watch the State of the Union together.

There are many other things you can do, of course, but this is a good selection. But I feel that making the relationship and time together a priority is the most important thing for making things work. Within that, you can be pretty creative. Keeping positive, planning out visits and things to do together in the future, also good. And for us, Dropbox and Skype are apparently the key to our relationship. Thank goodness for modern technology!