2025-10-05
--
Christina's 5 questions for October 2025[1]

Or rather, my answers to them.

I really looked forward to doing this. The first of the month hit and I
found myself on Christina's page, refreshing to get these questions.

1. What's your favourite item to cook?

   Okonomiyaki hits the major wins of cooking: it's generally easy, but
   it can get more complex and have a bit more art to it. It's cheap AF:
   it's mostly cabbage, and in the latter half-century it's been a
   working person's food, drawing on an earlier rep as a wartime
   standard. And being such, if you weren't going for specific or fancy,
   it's a vehicle for leftovers. And to crown it, it plates lovely with
   its criss-crossed condiments.

2. What films have you watched over and over again?

   *EDIT:* because I just read Solderpunk's answers[2], and I feel *so*
   remiss for not mentioning "Sneakers". Same here: it's my top pick of
   the hacker genre, and I did watch it over and over. It's also the
   only hacker movie that was received favorably by significant others.
   Pour out some Club Mate for a great one. I need to watch it again,
   maybe in a binge with "WarGames" and "Brazil", also in the multiple
   repeat list.
   
   *original answer:* Wow, it's been a long time since I've rewatched
   anything that wasn't a skateboarding video, and lately that's been
   reduced to specific parts. But I can put "Thrashin'" on this list, a
   movie I've watched from tape, disc and file, including from my phone
   on a plane.

   Growing up, I rewatched "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" a lot.[3] I
   wasn't aware of many other movies that had a star-studded cast like
   that, and I loved it. In my 20s, in my second skate house, I watched
   "Friday," "Harold and Kumar" and "Dude Where's My Car" a lot --
   partly because we had these on VHS, partly because it was a theme
   most roommates vibed with.


3. What film did you most enjoy watching this year?

   Sinners! I regret not getting to it in IMAX.

4. How comfortable are you with uncertainty?

   More so than with certainty. With certainty I'm probably going to
   think about what is the edge case that won't make it so.

5. What's one of your hobbies?

   Lockpicking. Not quite "lock sport", I don't even get competitive
   with myself or the locks. And I've only done it 'in the wild' a few
   times, always by request or with permission. Once it was for a
   coworker who lteft her desk key at home and needed papers within it.
   Besides popping the drawer, I unlocked the much-discussed emotional
   rollercoaster as her face turned from surprise, joy and appreciation
   to suspicion and conjecture, about my access capabilities.

ADDENDUM (2025-10-09):

I'm adding extra answers. I actually caught an early iteration of the
questions list, and a few in my answers above didn't make the final
version.

Q1: What's you're favorite item to cook in October?

Okonomiyaki is a great October meal, still works. But I will say, this
Fall harvest Buddha bowl[4] SLAPS. Roasted butternut squash and apples,
a cashew-apple vinaigrette and crispy kale. So tasty and looks awesome.
I've been doing this for a few autumns in a row for guests, always a
winner.

Q3: Have you ever meditated for spiritual purposes? If yes, describe
your experience.

Not trying to be cagey, but "spiritual" is a bit slippery -- feeling
good and peaceful, absolutely yes. Is that vaguely spiritual? Yeah, OK,
works for me. In my 20s I tried a very narrow version of qigong -- based
around sexual activity -- and it felt amazing. I'd even go so far as to
say it brought elevated sprituality. (funny aside, shortly after getting
into it, I lived in Thailand where this master had a retreat, and my
friend would joke about how I would rave about this practive but in the
end was afraid to go to the "orgy camp" for it.)

Today I do yoga nidra and NSDR. To me it blurs a line between body
awareness and consciousness, and borders on spirutality. But also isn't.

Q4: What objects from your childhood have you saved? Explain why.

I have a lot of things from my teens -- mementos and objects from
skateboarding, punk/hardcore, zines. But from before that, I have only
one object, and I struggle to explain why. It's a roughly 10cm-tall
ceramic replica of a Philippine Standard-brand toilet. It's missing the
cover to the tank, so for as long as I've had it, it's had two small,
separate storage areas. It has held keys, coins, arcade tokens,
skee-ball tickets, marbles, paperclips, enamel pins from my more
metalhead days, like a Randy Rhoads guitar, and then later plain round
punk buttons. It's stil there, at my parents' house.

Q5: When you feel sad, what do you do to find comfort?  If I can't find
energy, a little self-hypnosis session works to get me back on track. If
I can summon a li'l vim, I go skateboarding. Then I have a few different
routes to comfort -- peaceful cruising, carving S shapes down the
street; finessing a trick, to concentrate on movement, slowing time and
cutting loose from thoughts holding me down; aggression, where a
movement is accomplished by brute force and can be a redirection of
energy; or eating shit, because half of skating is falling, and when you
feel shit, it's amazingly cathartic. Extension of this, too, is that
with so much falling, a lot of skateboarding is about getting back up,
and is a meta lesson and motivator for everything, including sadness.


[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~christina/2025-10-5Q.txt
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/christinas-five-questions-october-2025.txt
[3] In hindsight, this was also partly because the local networks aired
it relatively often, though in the days of early cable, it couldn't have
been *that* often. But it was multiple, and I guess memorable. 
[4] https://karalydon.com/recipes/fall-harvest-buddha-bowl-with-creamy-cashew-apple-cider-dressing/