Cakes and potatoes, milk and honey.

The best thing about having a mid-semester exam during your normal class time is that you have one less lecture to catch up on - says me who just realised she had one less lecture recording to listen to (yay!).

I took my earrings out to clean yesterday and am generally getting less squeamish about sticking the thing into a hole in my ear lobe.

Also Brendan and I recently walked past our local suburban fried-food takeaway place and had a potato cake each and it made me very satisfied because I probably haven't had once since high school or something.

We have also been experimenting with chiffon cakes, and I'm planning to try this one for mother's day. Our first one was a pandan chiffon cake, except instead of buying pandan essence which is what the recipe called for, we accidentally substituted it for this strange red-coloured pandan-coconut syrup which tastes ghastly rich and turned our cake a light shade of pink (this was after we already added green food dye to the cake mix which is what pandan chiffon cakes are usually coloured). Also I bought it from an asian grocery and because we didn't have cash, the cashier literally and right in front of us marked up the price by 25% (which was really just an extra 50c) because we wanted to pay by card. It all happened very fast and I wasn't sure what was happening and afterwards Brendan said he was pretty sure that was illegal and we blamed each other for not having the guts to call it out. So yeah, that's the story of how we didn't stand up to an asian mum cashier (it was scary ok!).

I also read Milk and Honey which has been on my reading list for a while. I don't really read much poetry and you should see some of the goodreads reviews (they're not all very nice). Basically a bunch of people saying "oh, I didn't know that if you un-capitalised your i's and put random line breaks in your writing the result would be a NYT bestseller". As with a lot of (more contemporary) art, people tend to judge its value by how hard or technical it would've been to produce - and if it's something they could've easily done themselves then it's not art. I'm not sure if that's the only way (or even the best way) to value art. Art should also be understood and valued by how it makes you feel and if you don't connect with the artist, then that's fine, but claiming you could've reproduced something just as good doesn't seem like a fair criticism to me. Because even if you could physically reproduce it, would you be reproducing the same meaning in your artwork?

Sure, Rupi Kaur's writing looks like a bunch of sentences with some randomly placed line breaks, but I'm not sure it's that easy to reproduce her words. First of all you need to have something to say, and a lot of her writing is really her philosophy on relationships which not everyone has insights about. Secondly, even if you do have those insights or experiences you need to have the courage to share them, even the raw and uncomfortable ones.