Little Flutters

Aesthetics is the study of beauty.

It’s the study of emotional values, sentiment and taste and involves all fields of the arts; music, communication arts, painting, photography.

© Tash Jayasinghe

It involves focusing not just on what the propositional or informational content of a text is, but also how that material is represented or otherwise rendered.

The word is ancient Greek but the modern form of this field was inaugurated by Immanuel Kant in the 18th Century in his studies of critical and aesthetic judgement.

Acts of kindness makes us feel better. It’s the little push from thinking of something sweet and actually doing it: that is a spark of magic.

1. Arrange for a happy hour with people you want to know better. Beer always loosens social constrictions and creates new friends.
2. Send a “thinking of you” card to someone who lives five minutes away.
   Tell them how much you enjoy their company.
3. Take photos of every holiday and important get togethers. It might seem like overkill, but if you dig up the photos in a year, hit Print and send them to the other party, they’d be stoked.It has a longer lasting impression than posting it on facebook.
4. Call that friend you’ve been meaning to catch up with. Make sure it’s someone that you absolutely, genuinely love. There’s no reason to hang onto old relationships just because you’ve known them for so long. Guilt is one of the ways to know you’re keeping in contact for the sake of it.
5. Buy a book that you think will help/cheer someone and gift it to them.
6. Blow up a picture of your Mum and yourself and send it to her with the words “thank you” scrawled in the corner.
   

   Blow up a picture, not your cheeks.

7. Cook extra food for someone who’s been uber busy, deliver it to their house.
8. Go out of your way to recycle. Think of all the lives you’ll be benefiting in the future.
9. Buy flowers for a boy.
10. Write a short thank you email to a journalist that wrote a brilliant article – the good people in media need love right now, they’re being the worst hit of this “economic crisis”.
11. Send a letter of positive affirmations to someone you love that lives far away.
12. Do some research into non-profits and charities around you. Pick one that matters and offer up your skill set or money.
13. Leave a gift where someone least expects it. In the fridge, behind a computer, in a shoe.
14. Create a fairy tale from the adventures you have with your best friend, how you met, the dangers you’ve overcome and the happy “in the end” future.
15. Encourage art. If you know a budding artist, get their work framed, if you know a photographer, create a photo book using the many online tools available.
16. Write sweet little nothings to your lover and leave it on the bathroom mirror or in their jacket. Make sure their Dad doesn’t borrow said jacket (that happened to me last week).
    

    Awh! © Tash Jayasinghe

17. Go to the $2 shop and get a stack of temporary tattoos, find the nearest person under 15 years old and give them huge tattoo sleeves.
18. For someone jobless/down: write inspirational quotes and stick it around their house when they least expect it. Drag them to the gym and get a good work out, the endorphins will do the rest.
19. Buy tickets and ear plugs to a concert for someone who rarely goes to a gig. Dance like an idiot at the edge of the crowds with them.
20. Eat at the most unhealthiest place imaginable. Order the triple beef/cheese/heart attack combo with a large coke and fries. Don’t feel an ounce of guilt.

This is a quick fix for your sweet tooth and if it has fruit, it must be healthy.

• One pineapple, peeled and cored. Or, if you have two seconds, canned, sliced pineapple.
• Pineapple cake mix, or butter cake mix with one teaspoon pineapple flavour
• Whatever eggs etc. the cake mix requires.
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
• 1 cup brown sugar

Method:

1. Preheat the oven according to the cake box directions. Make your cake batter as directed.
2. Put your cake tin over a medium heat and add the butter to the bottom. Once the butter is melted, make sure the whole area is covered and add the brown sugar so it’s evenly covering the tin. It should resemble wet sand, don’t freak out.
3. Lay out the pineapple rings on top of the sugar. If you want to be kitsch, put cherries in the middle of each ring.
4. Gently fold the cake batter into the cake tin and bung it in the oven.
5. In 40 minutes, check the consistency by having a peak through a crack in the door. If it looks like it’s not cooked, close the door gently so the cake doesn’t flop. When it looks done, skewer the middle of the cake with a toothpick. When it comes out clean, take the cake out. Grab a fork. Let the cake cool in the tin for 20 minutes then gently turn it upside down onto your serving dish. If any of the rings stick to the pan, use the fork to take it out put it quickly in place on the cake.

Enjoy!

So says Phillip Toledano, a man that left advertising for photography.

He photographs from the heart. I admire that. You may know him from his site, Days with My Father, in which he documents his last days with his declining Dad, a heart breaking drama in which you already know the end but it’s still emotional. My mother and aunty cried when I sent the site to them. It touched me, even though I couldn’t relate his story to any of my experiences.

© Phillip Toldano

His photography ranges from an inside look at phone sex operators to disturbingly empty office buildings, whatever he’s photographing, you can see what he’s thinking in his images. I like that.

His biography reads: “I believe that everything should start with an idea, whether it be a single idea, or a series. I also believe that a photograph should be an unfinished sentence. There should be space for questions.”

What more is there to say?

This took around two hours to make, including cooling time. I thought that wasn’t too bad, I had plenty of time to run around and do my thing.

First things first, take out three eggs and two sticks of butter (225g) so they get to room temperature by the time you need them.

Ingredients for cake:

• 2 large eggs, at room temp.
• 1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 3/4 cups good cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup buttermilk, shaken
• 1/2 cup vege oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup hot black coffee

Ingredients for buttercream icing:

• 6 ounces (170g) semi-sweet chocolate, either in chips or broken up
• 2 sticks (225g) unsalted butter at room temp
• 1 large yolk, at room temp
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cups sifted icing sugar

1. Butter and flour the inside of your two 8 inch cake tins. Line the bottom with baking paper and preheat the oven to 350 F (175 C).
2. Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, sugar and cocoa into a mixer bowl and mix quickly with a wooden spoon for 30 seconds.
3. In a medium bowl pour the buttermilk, oil, eggs and vanilla.
4. Using a mixer on slow, add the wet ingredients into the dry. Add the coffee and stir just to combine. It’ll have a runny consistency, don’t freak out.
5. Scrape the bottom of the bowl with a spatula and pour the batter evenly into the two cake tins. Bake for 40 mins or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 30 mins then turn it onto a wire rack. Make the frosting during this time.
6. For the frosting: Put the chocolate into a glass bowl and blast it in the microwave for 15 second intervals. Mix thoroughly after each blast, otherwise the chocolate will burn. Once it’s melted, set it aside so it reaches room temp. Boy, we’re loving things at room temperature, aren’t we?
7. Using the mixer, beat the butter on medium speed until it becomes lighter in colour, should take around 3 mins. Add the egg yolk and keep on a-mixing for another 3 mins.
8. Turn the mixer to low and add the sifted icing sugar in four intervals. Scrape down the side of the bowl occasionally. Add the chocolate on the mixer’s lowest speed and when just combined, start spreading it on the cooled cake immediately.

Adapted from a wonderful Ina Garten recipe.

I’ll learn and use anything if it makes me a more efficient person. I’m passionate about things that make me work harder, faster, stronger. Here are my top three things to staying organised and on top of things:

© Tash Jayasinghe

1. Buy a moleskin and carry it everywhere.

Write a to-do list for today and for tomorrow. This way, you’ll feel less overwhelmed than if you wrote down everything you could think of, all for one day. Leo Babatua, author of the Power of Less and Zen Habits suggests having a simple text document on your desktop, but that just didn’t work for me, the infinite writing opportunity plagued me with guilt long after a task was ignored. There is a certain satisfaction in taking a black pen and slashing across a task done well.

You feel more productive when you flick through the book and notice all of your things are done.

Tip: I prefer the soft cover moleskin books, so I can fit them into my back pockets and bend it this way and that.

Remember the Milk.com

2. Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk (RTM) is an online to-do list. It’s great when someone gives you a task when you’re feeling light-headed, you can file it away, set a due date and then forget about it until you get an email an hour before the task is due. You can email Remember the Milk, which is handy when you want to write something but don’t want to get out of bed as you’re dozing off. I use it for tasks I’m going to forget straight away or late night rambles. I also email it when I don’t have my moleskin around.

GCal

3. GCal

I used to lug around a big diary everywhere; it had business cards, birthdays, receipts and jewellery somehow attached itself halfway through the year, without fail. Filofax, I loved it so. But I switched about two years ago and even though I am a luddite, gCal is just so easy.

When my best mate and myself shacked up for six months, she could log into GCal and see when we’d be making the weekly trip between Bathurst and Sydney. When making appointments, I can put it into the calendar and my partner is notified that he has a dentist appoint. next Weds.

Planning a trip? Use TripIt (which I highly recommend) and it can sync to your online calendar of choice. Want it to talk to your mac? I use Spanning Sync.

After reading Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week a year ago, I’ve been obsessed with efficiency. What do you use to stay on top of your world?

A study based in Australia and Britain found that children who have imaginary friends are better communicators, more creative late on in life and can hold a coherent conversation with an adult better than their unimaginative cohorts.

With 65% of kids having an imaginary friend at some point of their childhood, this is great news for the Beatrice Potter in us all.

Having an imaginary person to talk and play with makes you more empathetic later on in life, “They are trying to get into someone else’s role [so] they have a better understanding of someone else’s mindset.” said Dr. Evan Kidd from La Trobe University to the ABC.

An as yet unpublished report claims that these children are more creative and achievement-orientated later on in life. Being a first-born or only child increases your chances of having an imaginary friend, presumably because when you have siblings, you can pull their hair and read their diary instead of creating other similar situations in your head or attributing broken things to the teddy bear.

“”My favourite was a boy with an imaginary wife and an imaginary baby”, he said. “But the wife wasn’t the mother of his child. The mother was a nurse who travelled internationally. When asked where the wife was, the boy replied: ‘I divorced her. She talked too much’.” said Dr. Kidd, the bloke most often quoted for this story, in the U.K Telegraph.

I may be slightly biased in posting these findings, it does work to my advantage. In full disclosure: I was a first born with an imaginary friend, her name was Anika and apparently when we moved from Dubai to Australia, she did not follow.