Night of the osmanthus

  I've been trying to get into this habit of trying new things every week. One of the things I'm doing right now is to cook at least one new recipe each week, and also bake a thing once a week(end). This week, I tried to make Italian meatballs, and there's no pictures, because it was a complete failure. Tomato sauce was spraying everywhere, the stove needed so much cleaning, and it took forever to cook the centre of the meatball. Taste alright though, but the presentation and the cooking process was just... ugh...

  I've been trying to make some rolls in the past few weeks, and I pretty much failed every time. It kept on coming out more like a biscuit, so this week I'm trying out something simpler. I'm going to make chocolate chip cookies. Will probably show it in the next blog post, IF its successful.

  Next week, for the new recipe, I'm going to try and make a different kind of meatballs, something smaller, that's right it's Swedish meatballs! Hopefully, that one would cook better now that I've known that 1.2kg of ground beef is too much beef. As for the baking, maybe cupcakes? Muffins? I'll see what leftover baking supplies I have left after the chocolate chip.

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  There's this one thing which I'm super excited to share but there isn't anyone here who I can really share it with so I'm just going to post it here :p

  There are some nights where I just spent the entire evening listening to music. I basically pick a song I really like from my Discover Weekly, and then just song hop from there, finding related artists and what not. That's it, I spend almost 2 hours doing that, just listening to new stuff. So this week, 2 band just released their new album: Kinokoteikoku (Mushroom Kingdom) and Metric. I was introduced to Metric by Scott Pilgrim, while one of Kinokoteikoku's song appeared on my Discover Weekly once upon a time. Let's start with Metric first because boy do I have a story to tell about Kinoko.

  Metric's new album, the Art of Doubt was actually released just yesterday, I spent the entire morning listening to it. That morning I didn't cycle to school because I wanted the longer journey so I could listen to it longer. After listening to it, I can definitely say that, yeap, this is Metric. They didn't change, maybe a little bit, but better, but it's still Metric in essence. I really liked some of the songs, while some it's more of "yeah this is nice, but I don't think I could handle repeated hearing of this song". So I saved some of their songs into my playlist. One of my favourites was "Underline the Black".



  Now, Kinoko... the song that appeared on my Discover Weekly was this pretty upbeat rocky song. Listening to it kinda puts you into a good mood. Oh yeah, Kinoko's a J-rock band by the way so I don't understand what they're singing about but it sounds nice! So one of the evenings (this is pre-Metric by the way), I went: "Hey, I wonder how they're like live?" I looked up some of their live footage where they performed in Toronto. They spoke some broken English, and they started off by playing a cover of a song by The Radio Dept., a Swedish rock band from the 2000s (It seems that they're still active now but reading their Wikipedia page, it's more like they were kinda "revived"). Anyway, their live performance kicked so much ass that I decided to look up the rest of their songs and lo and behold, they just released a new album on September the 12th! Decided to check it out then, click the most popular song right now on Spotify.

Figure 44.1: Just clickin' around

  Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. I have absolutely no idea what they're singing but the song (the first one), listening to it almost made me cry. Like... oh man... what's going on?! I have heard similiar sounding songs like Sugar by MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS(which I really liked), but this song by Kinoko, it just went straight to my heart. So I kept on listening to it. I listened to it on repeat, again and again and again. Before I sleep, during my cycle to school, walking in between classes, it's just so good, until one of the days, I couldn't take it anymore, I need to know what the hell they are singing about. Went back home and googled it and use google translate, sentence by sentence, word for word (because Google translate gets a bit iffy, especially when it's a foreign language that doesn't follow English grammar).

  I ended up getting really emotional. I was kind of like, cry-laughing? Well, I wasn't full blown crying, but there were tears, my eyes were watery for sure. It's one of those "haha, sob sob" kind of feeling. It's... it was an extremely emotional moment.

  Decided to listen to the rest of the album. Loved it, absolutely loved it. Some songs not so much, but overall a very nice experience, especially the last track of the album, I gotta look up the lyrics for that! But still, even after hearing the rest of the album, that song, that one song, every time I hear it, every time when it played when I put my playlist/the album on shuffle, it still makes me extremely emotional. Give 金木犀の夜(Night of the osmanthus) by Kinoko a try, and maybe you'll experience what I experienced.

 

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  This is more of an extra thought. So my housemate is in a long distance relationship with this girl. The girlfriend lives around a 2 hours drive away from St. John's (where we're at), so they only get to see each other one weekend a month, but they are almost on video call every night at like, around before bedtime? (~9:30pm-11pm) Every time I walk by her room and hear their voices, I kinda feel like, warm? Like a smile would appear on my face, then I thought... "Wait a minute? Why didn't I do that? Why didn't I just video call my partner before my bedtime? (because pre-bedtime, that's when I'm super free)" I constantly spend my pre-bedtime watching some shows, practicing my German and Swedish, and generally just walking around the house killing some time (yeah... I'm that guy). Then I remembered, time zones. Man, time zones were really annoying eh. Just one of those random thoughts in my everyday life.

  My Duolingo German and Swedish is going well I think. Prepositions was tough but I got through it.

Figure 44.2: A day in St John's