“geography is destiny”?

I recently saw a bad independent film that was loosely based on the idea that “geography is destiny.”  Why is this mind-blowing?  Am I missing something important?  If you live in Minneapolis, you’re not going to have every day contact with people in Tacoma, which makes it less likely you’re going to fulfill your destiny with a Washingtonian.  Besides, if you believe in destiny, isn’t where you live already determined?

I have two distinct aspects of my personality that seem to co-exist, if not always successfully: the romantic part that throws passion into the idea of true love, the purity of nature, the existence of magic, soul mates, and uniqueness (hence my college fascination with Romantic literature) – and the other, realistic part, that knows living things suffer and die alone in nature every day, relationships involve work and compromise, and existence is a crapshoot that you have to learn to digest well enough to keep going.  The clincher here is that the realistic part of myself is not pessimistic; it still finds the fact of existence fascinating, even if it’s not possible to flick your fingers and start a fire with the force of your mind.

That’s what comic books are for.

On a different note, I  have bypassed my defunct video card, with the result that I missed out on the majority of my 2-week free trial of “City of Heroes,” but I can now look at my monitor long enough to update with some pictures.

So here it is… my victually obsessed mid-January Seattle rundown.

We begin at Central Market.  I didn’t intend to buy anything, but their produce section blows my mind with its bountiful-ness.

Fields of green

Rows of tubers

100,000 bowls of guacamole

Mmm cabbage

Ginger

The coolest little melons I’ve ever seen

As we leave our produce odyssey, we improve our situation greatly by gorging on Ethiopian food at Enat.

Spicy red lentils, yellow lentils, salad, potatoes and carrots, spinach, cabbage, and vinegary yummy salad

The next evening, after a bit of necessary fasting, we hit up Cedar’s in the U-District, making a full circle from my first meal in Seattle.

I am full of baigan bartha, tikka masala, tandoori chicken, royal biryani, aloo gobi, navratan korma, and garlic naan with cilantro and tamarind chutney.  Oh, and chai of course.

That weekend, I was compelled to indulge in a raspberry-glazed old-fashioned doughnut and black coffee at my post-yoga haunt, Top Pot in Wedgwood.

I’ll now endeavor to take pictures of things that don’t have to do with food.  It will be difficult.

On yet another note, I was wandering at The Happiness Project today, and read this quote which I stole to present to you:

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
–Simone Weil

Another reason to let my realistic bent trump my romantic one – better returns.