Main Dish: A Specialized Object as a Treat

A few months ago I did something I never do, which was forget my phone at the gym. When I realized it, I surprised myself by shrugging and spending the next two days blissfully away from the entertainment rectangle. I used to be the kind of person whose phone was joined to the body, but spending the past few years slowly delegating all tasks previously conducted solely by phone to other objects and analog methods designed specifically for their single functions had finally borne fruit. I didn’t even realize I was without phone until I was halfway home on the train. I was no longer debilitatingly attached to the cursed object. I was free. When gym boss gave me my phone back two days later, it weighed heavy in my hands. 

There was one important function I hadn’t yet divorced from the phone. That was the timer. I used the timer for many things-laundry, steeping tea, measuring out a short lifting session, rolling out muscles. I never liked the user experience of the timer. Setting a timer took me an average of 3-4 taps or flicks and the will to not succumb to a billion notifications and distractions that I had to squint and avert my eyes from like I was looking away from the sun. When I was away from my phone, Siri was unreliable and took too long to accomplish anything. Siri could rarely hear me over the kitchen fan, which was usually on when I was trying to set a timer. I was also a little self-conscious that my neighbors could hear me summon Siri in English through paper thin Japanese apartment walls. Sometimes, Siri would not tell me that the timer started, so in the end I still had to walk to my phone to check if it was working, which defeated the purpose of voice commands. 

The timer app was the last remaining dependency I had on the do-it-all device. Until now!!!

With up to 7 button presses I can set a 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 minute timer on my new Casio LA-11WB-1, freshly imported through my dad, who passed this life-changing object to me on the second day of our China trip. I don’t need to look at the watch to set the timer. The fastest case is a single button press, which is a big improvement over a minimum of 1 face scan, 4 interactions with a complex mobile UI, and 500 points of psychic damage. The watch does not flash me with the 15 messages from yesterday, the 3 podcasts that were just downloaded, and the reply someone I follow on instagram made on the post of someone else I follow on instagram (I need to turn those off, wtf?).

I find the timer is useful for many cases that I never used to bother to set a timer for because the barrier to setting one was so high. Things like:

• reminder to take breaks, stretch, and drink water

• short meditations

• hardboiling eggs

• blanching veggies

• hardboiling eggs and blanching veggies (use the 5 min timer to start the eggs, then use the 3 min timer to add the veggies at the end for the ultimate multitasking boiling session)

• warning alarm when I want to do some quick PT right up until I have to leave for work

• reminder that my toast is in the oven, do not leave the toast unattended, please I beg you we cannot burn the toast again

• transitioning out of an activity (this only sometimes works)

• quick creative session

• unplugging something from its charger

• closing the windows after a quick air change

I may use a timer a bit too much.

Earlier this year I went to a tea house that taught a specific steeping method involving a classic hourglass. My peers found the petite hourglass’s timing very curious, maybe slightly longer than a minute. I had just flipped over my own hourglass, so I offered to time it. I used my watch to track resting periods at the climbing gym so often that three beeps and half a second later the stopwatch was underway. The movement was so practiced I didn’t even have to look down at the face or blink and it was already done. My peers were surprised and intrigued with how instantaneous this feat was. They asked me what watch I had. I rolled back my sleeve and showed them my brother my captain my king, the Casio F-91W with the blue trim, at its familiar post on my left wrist. They called it retro–a dumbwatch, as opposed to the now ubiquitous smartwatch. I call it useful.

After 4 years of continous use at home, in the climbing gym, and out on the rocks, my F-91W has finally retired from duty. The LA-11WB-1 has stepped up as my new humble sidekick, holding my life together with its cheap plastic band, fulfilling all of my temporal needs with a simple button push, and finally releasing me from the do-it-all prison of my smartphone.

Side Dishes

My Personal Canon

TV Show: ATLA

• I rewatch it every few years and it’s good every time. No notes.

Album: The Dear Hunter - Migrant

• I can sing almost all of the songs by heart.

Book: A Memory Called Empire, Fullmetal Alchemist

• I wasn’t sure if a manga fit in the book category, but FMA is so deeply tied to my being. FMA is so formative for me I can trace nearly everything in my personality back to it. I can still recall specific panels from the first three chapters because we had a sample of it in our house that I reread obsessively before I discovered where I could read the rest of the story. Ed leaning back on the church pew reciting the elements that make up the human body is like “once upon a time” for me.

• I first read A Memory Called Empire a few years ago and I still think about it. This says a lot when my memory for fiction (even fiction I love) is maybe one week. I love how it deals with the colonization of the mind and culture shock. All of the action takes place internally, and there is much poetry and linguistic fun. 

Movie: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Kiki’s Delivery Service

• I remember seeing The Girl Who Leapt Through Time for the first time in my AP Chem class after AP tests were over. I then rewatched it (by chance, over the years) maybe six or seven  more times. I used to think the main character was so dumb for being so frivolous with the god power she stumbled upon. Now, I find her endearingly naive for thinking her trivial teen life problems so impossibly large and unbearable that they needed a god power to fix. We’ve all been there.

• Kiki is very comforting to me. The main character believes she lost a piece of herself. In trying to regain that piece, she grows and changes in beautiful ways and realizes she was always whole. I think a lot of life is just repeating this journey in a million different forms.

Video Game: Ace Attorney

• This surprises no one.

Podcast: Triple Click

• This is just three video game besties who I love to hear talking about new games, the games industry, and anything else they decide to bring up as a bonus. I get a lot of banging book recommendations here.

What I would drop as a video game boss

• Casio watch (100%)

• Mini planner (100%. Everything inside it gives you the impression that it was intentionally arranged for the benefit and brain operation of one specific person)

• Journal (90%)

• Fountain pen (90%. Extra ink not included)

• PT bands (40%. Comes in different colors, lengths, and elasticities. Collect them all!)

• Zero-drop sandals (70%. When worn, gives you a bad sandal tan that won’t disappear until next season)

• Bike gloves (70%. You feel like these are actually ski gloves because they’re so thick, but you check again and nope, it says bike gloves)

• Hearing protection (80%, can be seen worn during boss fight because battle is loud)

• E-reader (50%)

• Handheld instrument that plays maximum two octaves (15%. rare!)

How to Overstuff a PB&J

POV: you are a hungry athlete in need of a compact food that travels well and doesn’t spoil quickly. Here’s what you do.

1. Take bread out from freezer to toast. You want to toast both sides, but leave one side soft enough to press and the other side firm and lightly crispy. 

2. Take the jelly and pb out of the fridge. You are using natural pb (the kind that’s only peanuts and salt). It is crunchy, because that gives it a little extra structure to prevent spillage. Keep creamy for everything else. The jelly is whatever jelly you could find at the grocery store. It used to be that raspberry stuff at QFC that you forgot the name of. Now it’s the shachihata jelly that went viral for having an auto-closing lid where you just drop the lid on and it slides down into place with the power of gravity alone. You only discovered this after the third shachihata jelly jar you bought. You unscrew the lid and then drop it on the jelly jar a few times to admire the overengineering of the auto-closing. It delights you.

3. Wait, you’re telling me your PB is not in the fridge?? put that shit in there. It needs to be a little less liquid to achieve the overstuff, especially if you’re working with creamy PB, which is unadvised for an overstuffed sandwich, but you do what you gotta do.

4. Once your bread is toasted (more on one side than the other, remember this) you will lay both pieces crispier side down on your workspace. Open your PB and J and put them on standby.

5. Press the soft side down of one toast with your (clean) hands to make a little lakebed that stops at about 1.5cm from the limits of the bread crust. Don’t press too hard on the toast or it will get dangerously thin. The crispier side will prevent things from going south, but you must learn restraint. Do this for both toasts. This will create a sealed pocket that will help you overstuff a sandwich without exploding it.

6. Wield your chosen spreading knife. Go jelly first. Scoop jelly into the lakebeds of one of the toasts.

7. The jelly is kind of hard to scoop with a knife. It’s unfortunately more jelly than fruit. You sigh and get a spoon. Much better.

8. Once you have your desired jelly amount filling the lake bed, you clean your jelly’d knife to prepare for the pb, because you only have one knife. The spoon can go where dirty dishes go.

9. Now for the real show: the PB. Scoop a healthy amount of PB with your cleaned and dried knife into the second toast lakebed. It looks to be maybe 1.5 tablespoons. Once that’s in the lakebed you realize you need more. You will need the energy. Scoop another healthy amount in there. Stop eyeball-measuring it because it doesn’t matter. Now things look a little dangerous, but that’s how you like it. Spread the PB up to the limits of the lakebed to try to make it flat and less likely to explode. 

10. Clean the knife by wiping both sides on the edge of the crust. You can spread that extra PB on the thin 1.5cm toast rim you left unpressed like the pool deck to your lakebed. It will serve as glue for the sandwich.

11. Now you put the two lake beds together. Pick one toast piece to flip spreading side down onto the other toast that is still laying spreading side up on the table. Match them up as best as you can.

12. Press the edges near the crusts where you put the extra PB for glue together. Do NOT press the center or your sandwich will explode and it will be bad.

13. If you notice PB or J coming out the edges, just wipe it off and eat it. Everything is fine.

14. Sandwich is complete once you feel like the two toasts are bound at the edges. This intuition comes with time. Gingerly put it into a plastic sandwich bag while keeping it level and trying not to put pressure on the engorged center.

15. Keep the sandwich level in storage at the top of your bag and try not to smash it until you eat it (good luck).

16. Eat the sandwich, get fueled, and do sports.

Media and such

• When Life Gives You Tangerines (2025)

• Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? - D. Graham Burnett, The New Yorker

• The Quest to Build a Perfect Protein Bar - Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker

Reading about the optimization of nutrition into a single do-it-all meal bar and the beliefs that led to its creation made me feel like a romantic. I can never imagine optimizing my life by squeezing out all the joys and benefits of real food into a plastic-wrapped brick. What I could imagine was the desire to gain back even ten minutes of your life by optimizing meals. Getting back time was my biggest life problem just a few months ago and it still plagues me today. I now feel a little less judgement for the meal brick. 

Next Month’s Menu

I have returned from my big China trip as of writing and I’m very burnt out and not ready to go back to normal life. My goal is to be kind to myself and slowly transition back while listening to my body. I’m also going to try to play at least one (1) video game because I miss games.

Your watch-loving burnt out smashed cigarette butt, 

Alex