A Mystery: Why Can’t We Walk Straight? from NPR on Vimeo.

I have thought a lot about intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation lately, and his conclusion in this TED-talk seems very much like my own thoughts. I am wondering how to create more intrinsic motivation for the things I need to study now in the new year, so I am going on a wikipedia-binge starting now to see if I can find a way to rise intrinsic motivation, apart from the obvious of making what you are doing fun.

Sometimes I really do not get what I was thinking. The poor guy’s wings are too small for him to fly, even. Maybe he can just be one of those cute balls of feathers to nozzle up to and keep your hands warm instead of a coffee cup.

Above; My attempt to make a stir-fry with noodles and vegetables. I can not cook. This is an understatement. I can burn water. I get nervous if there is more than one pot boiling or sizzling at the same time, and my repertoire of recipes (or lack thereof), at best, consists of spaghetti with tomatoes, spaghetti with pesto, spaghetti with x ingredients. The only thing I think I am pretty decent at throwing together would be raw foods like salads, and making sushi by hand. Living where I am living at the moment, making sushi by hand makes no sense when there is cheap and good sushi on every other street corner. I want to get better at cooking so the people around me will not die from boredom and spaghetti, so if you have some amazingly simple recipes you think I would be able to toss together, I would love to hear about them.

This is obviously not my food. Yesterday we went out to a Spanish tapas-restaurant, and this blog seems to involuntarily turn into a food-documenting blog. I swear, that is not my intention. We had mussels in a clear white broth.

And mushrooms and ham.

Asparagus and ham. I love asparagus, but since I have to steam them to eat them – my fear of cooking puts a small downer on my love.

Shrimp, fished up from a little fish-tank by the entrance of the restaurant.

And cheese. A pretty mediocre cheese plate, compared to the cheese at the standing wine-bar we were at just the other day.

I always get happy when the menus have pictures, so I don’t spend 35 minutes trying to decipher the menu.

And this guy was right outside the entrance to the restaurant. The Spanish place was ok, but the portions were pretty small and the cheese plate was mediocre, so we went across the street to…

The standing wine-bar! It is such a cute little place. It doubles as a liquor shop, and the standing wine-bar is at the back of the liquor shop.

I am shooting like a paparazzi from the hip, only to realize that I shot the beer section in their fridge and not the wine-section.

We actually bought a bottle of Cava to take home. I generally do not like Cava that much, but this one was pretty decent.

Funny story. Quite a few months ago, when we were living in another apartment, these Japanese cartoon-porn magazines were dumped in our mailbox. At first we thought someone just put them in the mailbox for fun, until we realized that it was actually written by hand on the yellow one especially for me. I was wondering if it was the neighbors or someone close by who had seen me or thought I was making noise at the apartment, but it turned out it was two Japanese friends of us that had biked by our apartment and dropped the magazines in the mailbox as a joke. We just found them when we did a clean out here today. If anyone would like me to ship some nasty Japanese cartoon-porn to them in the mail, let me know asap. Haha.

Today was a quiet day. We went shopping in Shinjuku after dark.

And ate the most delicious butter chicken curry.

And went for coffee, where I ordered a Mocca “grande” and it was much bigger and much chocolatier than I expected ♥

I’ve had a quiet weekend. My mom got home safe, I have been neglecting my Japanese studies and cuddled up with the mac and the internet. I have not seen snow for quite some time now, but I am always freezing, even if the temperature is well above zero.

I was looking through some pictures from Christmas three years ago, and I came across some small birdhouses I had made, resting on top of a beautiful hand-written letter from Hanne. She would always write the most beautiful letters, intricate swirls with black ink pens, on top of old sheet music paper and with images of trees and the sky to accompany it all. I am not sure why I made birdhouses and what I used the birdhouses for in retrospect, they were too small for birds and too big for jewelry. Maybe I have become too practical now – I do not keep much unless it is useful. I used to collect small rocks and shiny objects just because, and I used to make useless birdhouses just because it made me happy.

Do you still write letters by hand? Do you keep or collect things you do not need?

… and the sushi chef’s name was Jan. I have no idea where he went. When I lived in Norway, he would sometimes show up and work for a couple of months at my favorite sushi restaurant, make all kinds of delicious foods, and then he would disappear. And suddenly, he would be back again, maybe a year later, and I took some pictures of his food creations one afternoon. If you are ever in Norway – or somewhere else in the world (I think he travels around a bit), and meet a Norwegian sushi chef called Jan – please do go and eat his food, tell him to make you whatever he wants, and you will not be disappointed.

Have you ever looked at older pictures of yourself – and thought that you looked better back then? I think for me, it goes a little up and down from year to year, and when I found these pictures from 2008, I thought my face looked clearer back then. 2010 was not a good year for looking good, and I am curious about how 2011 will be.

I already posted the intro to Smultronstället, here are some pictures I took when the movie was shown on an airplane I was on to Japan in 2008. I love his Swedish voice combined with the English subtitles.

“Brene Brown studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk at TEDxHouston, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.”

I love TED-talks, and watch several of them per week. This one hits close to home.