Bio Excursion

I've come to realise that being a senior means that you have to be in more places more often, learn heaps more in these more places, and you need to have a responsibility about getting there, leaving there, and anything that may happen in between (eg your bus overheats two minutes down the road from your school and you have to wait 45 minutes for a new bus).

Today we had our biology excursion and, although I learnt so much from the park ranger woman who... collected fat in a pretty strange way... I also got to contemplate a lot. I was very contemplative today. I came up with a million and one interesting ideas for food experimentation, some of them including:
- Using that machine that normal people lay with bread and fill with baked beans, press together and cook (not gonna do THAT ever again), I thought you could either use thin chicken breast slabs, or parcooked (steamed and patted dry), massive spinach or kale leaves in a few layers, and fill the inside with pumpkin/starchy veggie mash with either meat or leaves, depending on what you didn't put on the outside, and lay more chicken/leaves on top, press and cook away. Little parcels of fun!
- bacon for paleos, or slices of cheese for primals, laid on the underside of a cupcake tin and baked/roasted (with another cupcake tin pressed on top if needed) until cooked, for little savoury yum cups. Sorta like those cookie cups you may have seen, but BETTER (obviously - I mean, it's bacon, guys).
- do the same thing with tomatoes, but take their insides out and make sure they're nice and squished.
No one steal my ideas please! These are now copyright because I've put a © here. Don't even think about being too lazy to think for ideas. They are mine.

Another quick thought I wanted to write down: I was waiting for the bus with my group of friends, and I was in a tight tshirt and tights while everyone else was in their uniforms, and they were all looking at my tshirt and one of them said to me 'You're so skinny!' in a half abusive, half how-do-you-do-that voice, and my reflex reaction was a saddened 'yeah...' as the rest of the group took in my physique. And before I could realise what I had just said, one of my other friends mockingly repeated my yeah, implying that I wasn't denying that I was skinny like my friends in this group normally would. And then it occurred to me, that calling me skinny was an insult, not a compliment. It was something to be ashamed of, of something I had to fix, of proof that I didn't eat enough to keep stuff on my bones. And yet here I was, not eating the five thousand sandwiches that everyone else seems to be able to eat at lunch time. I found that a little weird how I see being skinny a bad thing. Anyway, moving on from my boring story-rant...

At the excursion today, there were lots of people running and walking and cycling and whatever, but we were walking down the boardwalk and a guy ran the other way barefoot. I'm all for barefoot, in fact, my poor, squished, weakening feet in my knee-killing runners were really jealous of that free man. And his feet were impeccably high arched and spread and free and just naturally beautiful. When he ran past, and as I stared adoringly at his perfect feet (oh... I don't have a foot fetish guys, I swear!), my friends behind me started giggling about him not wearing shoes and how stupid he looked. It was only for a second, but they thought he looked ridiculous.
Let's just say they're lucky they weren't pushed into the mangroves.
I won't go into it too much, but if you're curious about barefootness, the basics are pretty much:
- humans have been walking, skipping, jumping, and avoiding postural and joint problems before shoes came along
- humans have been walking, skipping, jumping and getting back problems after middle age while wearing little canvassy things for the last however long we've had formal shoes for, I'm thinking about the 50s style 'tennis shoes' at the moment
- humans have been asking doctors for help with multiple alignment problems in their 20s while contortionising, weakening and squishing their feet for the last 30 years in health-professionally-approved runners.
- the toes get squished together, the arch gets supported and doesn't allow it to be itself (it's a support for the whole body - a spring) and the whole foot is just made so much smaller

Basically, a caveman would have a foot that makes a V shape, so the toes are really separate, the big toe makes a line straight down to the centre of the heel, and the arch is pretty high. Try this: take whatever form of foot coffin you have on (that's my word for 'shoe') and make a line down your big toe like I said. Does it look like this?

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/07/vibram-five-fingers-shoes/ (scroll down to the first black and white photo)

I think that's it for today! I'll keep you posted; I've got another non traditional recipe coming up sometime this week :)