91 - Soylent Lasagne 🧃
Hey there, !
It’s a weird time, deserving of a weird post. Melbourne is in lockdown once more, and I’ve joined the ISO BIRTHDAY CLUB - a fun day of work consisting of incredible amounts of food and love <3 Thank you to everyone who reached out and made it very special :D
I looked back at Brainstorming IV and this scene popped into my head…so, welcome to a bit of speculative fiction. I might do more of these - it’s a bit of fun that breaks me out of the informative/more formal pieces :D
Soylent Lasagne
“You…eat food?” Vesna stares at me strangely from the other side of the desk.
“Uh…yeah?” I sigh internally. Here we go again - the classic first-day-on-the-job conversation that destroys my reputation for the next few months.
“Why?”
“Why? Because it’s more fun to actually chew something than drink it?”
“But it takes so much time…” she said plaintively.
“Are you really in that much of a rush?”
“Well, no, I guess not. But work gets busy, and I can drink my…I don’t know…lasagne wherever I go, without needing to go to some dirty place to sit down and breathe in the germs from literally everyone else,” she recoils slightly at the thought.
“They aren’t that dirty…”
“What, in an enclosed location, sitting with a bunch of people and their toxins? Are you crazy?”
“Okay fine, yes it’s a risk but it’s worth it. We haven’t had anything that crazy since the 20’s“
“Seriously. Potential DEATH is worth eating some lousy piece of lasagne?”
“Have you ever had a real lasagne?”
“Well, no…but who cares? The drink’s the same, right?”
I look at her incredulously, “How would you know?! You’ve never tried it! A lasagne can be so tasty in real life - the gentle give of some perfectly cooked al dente pasta, the satisfying chew on your teeth, the juicy sauce and delectable cheese that melds perfectly in your mouth - maaaan you’re missing out!”
“Yeah…but like, I get those same feels in the drink. Isn’t that what the soylent’s for? It’s just lasagne…powder.”
“Sure, but you’ll never know ‘til you try it, right?”
“I guess…”
I take a deep breath, “It’s this relentless…pursuit of being efficient in everything we do that I absolutely hate. Speeding up movies, speeding up travel, speeding up the experience just so they can say they’ve got through more of them. What’s the point?”
“Well, you get to experience more, right? I get to focus on the things that matter rather than just like…food.”
“Sure, but how do you know what things matter? Are you actually experiencing it in the first place? You haven’t even tried a lasagne - I mean, how do you know it’s actually lasagne??”
She looks at me blankly, “Is it not…?”
“Well, okay…I mean, it is…”
“So…then…”
”..but the act of chewing, and tasting, and savouring…it’s just something that can’t be replicated with a sludge that slides down your throat. If you never try it, you’ll just…never know, right? How can you really say that you’re being more efficient, and focused on what matters, if you’ve never tried it?”
A short pause as we both digest the conversation.
I glance over at her desk, “I’d ask you to come try it, but it looks like you have yumcha in a box today, hey?”
She looks down and laughs a little, “Yeah I guess so.” She pauses for a brief moment.
“Does it…taste the same?”
“What, the dumplings?”
“Yeah - have you ever been to an actual yumcha?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Takes a while, the waiters shout at you in random languages sometimes, and you have to sit in a space with toxins dancing around you, but it’s worth it. Wanna try it out?”
She sits for a moment, and hesitatingly, “…sure!”
She grabs her mask and we set out into the smoggy afternoon, experiencing the world anew.
Chat soon :)
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✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Perfect Strangers - an Italian film that I got on SBS On Demand - one of those films that gets buoyed by dialogue, the situation, and the one-room nature of the movie. 7 friends get together one night and decide to share every message / call that comes through that night. Dynamite ensues as things are uncovered throughout the night. A great talk-y film :) It’s got a Guinness World Record for being the most adapted screenplay as well - being adapted for over 19 different languages!
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Spotify Stations - it’s a bit of a weirder recommendation, and I really thought I wouldn’t like it, but it’s something new from Spotify. It’s exactly the same radio that you can get in normal Spotify, but just has a specific app. You can mix artists and genres into your own custom Station - an easier way to make a playlist for lazy people like me. Furthermore from a tech aspect I enjoy that it probably uses the different stations that people are creating to uncover weird / new combinations to help recommend things to other people. PHEW tech can be so cool :D
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Speed matters - on one hand…
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.
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Efficiency is the enemy - on the other…
Slack also allows us to handle the inevitable shocks and surprises of life. If every hour in our schedules is accounted for, we can’t slow down to recover from a minor cold, shift a bit of focus to learning a new skill for a while, or absorb a couple of hours of technical difficulties.
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What’s a quote that permanently changed the way you look at things - thanks reddit for providing content for my newsletter :D
“The axe forgets; the tree remembers.” —Zimbabwean proverb.