January 2005 Archives
...cooking the only three things that you know how to make that happen to be vegetarian, so that your daughter will have something to eat in the house for once.
Lloyd asks:
How much of yourself do you think you have revealed in your weblog, over the years? And is it an accurate (as opposed to idealized) version of yourself that your reading audience sees? Finally, do you feel that you can continue sharing your life in this way, for the foreseeable future, and what consequences might you face down the line, if you continue to do so?
As seldom as I post, it should be fairly obvious that there's a lot that I don't write about in this weblog. It was a conscious decision, truthfully. I had an anonymous journal that I kept for a couple of years before I started this one, that covers a pretty difficult part of my life. And while it was therapeutic for me to record my journey through (and out of) depression and transition, it wasn't the sort of thing I cared to share with people I interacted with on a day-to-day basis.
This journal? It's PR, in a sense, I guess. I created it so that people could read it to keep up with me and what I'm up to. I never publish my full name here, but it could be found by someone looking for me fairly easily -- coworkers, exes, family -- so I write stuff that I don't mind them knowing.
A lot of what I filter isn't because of any sense of perceived self-censorship -- it's more because it isn't anything that I think people would care about. My job isn't the sort that would be particularly compromised by my writing about it (within reason), but I don't. It's none of your business really (and probably not of much interest to you anyway), where I work or what I work on, but within the context of my working environment, it can be political and fraught with conflict, so I don't generally even bring it up here. I don't write a lot about people who haven't agreed to let me write about them, because I think they deserve some privacy. (That's not to say I won't occassionally post a picture, though.)
And realistically? My life lately is pretty quiet. Claudia has been in Romania (did I ever write about that? Who knows...) since May and won't be back until August. I work a lot, play a lot, and take lots of pictures. And for now? I'm happy with that. If I were committed to posting daily, as Lloyd does, I'd probably delve into the minutiae of my day-to-day life, but for now, I'll just write when I have something to say.
New Years Day marked the first anniversary of my more intensive foray into vegetarianism. It isn't entirely accurate to call me a vegetarian. I play don't-ask-don't-tell with certain foods, especially in restaurants, with regards to ingredients like chicken broth and gelatin, and I eat fish sometimes, when my other options look bleak. I call this my compromise with the rest of the world. I try very hard not to be a judgmental veg*n, not to try to push my vegetable-based agenda, and not to make myself an impossible dinner guest. But despite that, despite my compromises and my sometimes half-assed attempts, it can be awfully difficult to maintain my diet of choice.
The new year felt like the time to come to a new decision about vegetarianism. Truthfully, being a vegetarian isn't necessarily an inherently healthy diet. True, I haven't eaten red meat in, what, two and a half years, maybe? but in a pinch, fries and a Frosty from Wendy's constitutes a vegetarian meal, and it isn't a healthy one by any standards. Meat has to be replaced with something, and while I very much like tofu, I'm not always willing to make the effort to cook it. So I found myself at a crossroads, and I made the decision to try to integrate the occasional chicken and fish back into my diet, to try to make it healthier.
It took about three days for me to decide that the digestive distress I felt every time I ate chicken wasn't just a coincidence, but as I was deciding whether I wanted to try to continue, I came across this article about animal cruelty at a chicken factory, and that, as they say, was the end of that.
Well, sort of. I'm still eating sushi at Uchi with CY tonight, because this is what Dr. Y and I do when she's in town.
This whole process of examination and reexamination of vegetarianism has made me sort of hyperaware of the issue. When I'm by myself, it is neither quick nor convenient to eat a decent healthy meal, and heaven forbid I'm at someone else's mercy for making meals.
This weekend, for instance, we started the massage practicals late, so the company that I contract for ordered us "a variety" of sandwiches through the hotel for lunch, so we wouldn't have to try to find food during our shortened lunch. This, naturally, gave me a forboding sense of dread, so I wasn't altogether surprised when "a variety" translated to "ham or turkey".
It's a bit interesting how vegetarians flock together in such circumstances. One showed me how she bummed bread, peanut butter, and jam from the hotel staff to make pb&j out of desperation for our poor lunch selection. Practical, sure, but a bit demeaning.
This afternoon, I went to deposit some money that C had sent me into her account, and I caught the end of a conversation between bank tellers. One male teller was saying something about a dish that he'd found in a vegetarian cookbook.
"Vegetarians eat tuna?" asked the other teller, a female, and the first one nodded in the affirmative. I kind of snickered aloud, but I have no room to talk when it comes to vegetarians eating fish.
"Well, I prefer to make tacos with beef," answered the female teller (prompting me to wonder what sort of strange bastardized tacos made of tuna that the male teller found in a vegetarian cookbook, but that's neither here nor there).
"I can't make tacos from beef," answered the male teller. "We never use beef in my house -- only turkey."
"Oh, because your girlfriend is a vegetarian, right?" asked the female teller.
I couldn't even snicker at that.
What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?
I believe that human beings are ultimately inherently good, despite their sometimes disgraceful display of ignorance and hatred.
I believe that there are senses other than the ones to which humans are attuned, true physical ways of passing sensory information. Call it a "sixth sense" if you will -- there's more to the universe than what we're aware of.
I believe that for every beauty I see, whether I capture it or don't, there is a beauty that surpasses it. This belief, honestly, is what keeps me believing in God.
I spent part of my winter break entertaining my three little cousins while my mom and uncle worked on installing a door. It was... well, I'd call it an extended process, really, so there was a full day or so of cousin-entertaining. We took Sophie down to the bay (where the little girls played in the tide and got their pants wet), then went for ice cream at Marble Slab ("Rachel, how many things can we have mixed in with our ice cream?" I settled upon two. It was an arbitrary number, but then, the four of us wound up spending $19 on ice cream.)
After that, it was back to the house. In the car, the girls turned on the radio, then turned the knob so the music boomed from the open windows in the warm afternoon. When we arrived at the house, I set up one cousin to play on my laptop (my work laptop, incidentally) while the other two played on my mom's computer. I forget what I was doing -- probably meditating in a corner or something, enjoying the brief respite from screaming little girls -- but my cousin Hayley came to tell me she'd left me a very special message on my laptop.
The minute I got my laptop back to work and set it up, the hard drive started making ugly grinding noises that have me fairly alarmed. I'm in the process of backing up the gigs and gigs of pictures I've stored upon it, but I want to store Hayley's note for perpetuity, as well. It's pretty funny. Hayley, for reference, is ten years old. The note is reproduced exactly and in its entirety below. It's supposed to be written by me.
hayley is the bestalex and emily are second best
i am so nice to them. i give them one milliion dollars per second i love them so much. hayley is the princess,so is alex and emily i am the duchesses i help them always. i let alex blast music. jim,there dad is cool . i laugh at all his jokes,even if they are not funny. i let emily break everything in my house. hayley gets to tell me what to do and i have too do it. the whole family is so cool. my cousins kristin and cory are really awsome!!!!! my uncles and aunts and other cousins are neat and fun too. i am really thankful for all of them also my really cool, awsome,and neat and fun. i am cool. my grandma is funny and great. my dog and cats are fun to play with. the only cat that is not nice is zoey. she is grumpy and has a B.A.(bad aditude) i let everybody use my lap top.all the pets i know are cute. i am fun to be with and have a good sense of humor. my mom is cool because she collects eggs i will give her a 22 carat gold bracelet with real amber stones i will never quit my job so that whenever alex hayley and emily come over they can play on it. i promise too live up to all i have said here.
NOTE FROM AUTHOR
rachel was interviewed and said all of there exact words.she then paid me* 500000000 times more than my real salary of $6700000000890000005644444777.50* unknown author
