Vegans Rejoice!

Boca's chick'n patties and nuggets are vegan again!

Here's a link to their website's FAQ on vegan products.

Things to do with chick'n patties (they come out best when oven baked):

• Vegan Chicken Parmesana: Put cooked patty on top of pasta and cover with marinara sauce. Sprinkle with Parmesano Sprinkles from Uncheese Cookbook.
  
• Vegan Crispy Chicken Burger: Stick in a bun with tomato, lettuce, sprouts and Veganaise.
  
• Slice and put on an asian style salad with mandarin oranges, crispy noodles and a ginger dressing.
• Slap patty on a plate, nuke and cut up for kids to eat with ketchup.
  

The downside is that they are far from being all natural, and the company probably has some nasty record of human rights violations or environmental destruction.

But if you're in need of the fast meal, these can bail you out in a pinch.

Don't You Dare Step Out of Your Prescribed Gender Role

This is crap. There's a male student in Indiana who wears women's clothing - not just for prom as a prank, but all year long.

Excerpt:
Logan said he had spent years defining and exploring his sexuality. This year, he took a major step by dressing as a female every day, wearing makeup, a hair weave, nails and girls' fitted jeans to school.

And they wouldn't let him into the prom because he wore a dress.

What the fuck? If you don't conform to society's idea of what you're supposed to wear, you can't participate in public activities? What a crock of shit.

The only silver lining is that the student's mom seems very cool.

Excerpt:
His mother, Donnetta Logan, said she was not surprised by what she called the ignorance of school administrators.

"I tell Kevin that in society there will be those who accept him and those who won't."

Good on you Donetta Logan. If it was my son, I may have had a few less polite words. Something like "You ignorant fuckheads. You're just jealous that my son looks cuter in a fuschia empire waist gown than your daughter does. Get your heads out of your asses and join us in the new millennium."

Credo

Gary runs a great blog over at Animal Writings. His posts are always good and you can just feel how much compassion he has for the suffering of the helpless. He wrote a particularly good post called Credo. You know when you read something and you wish you'd written it? It was like that.

Link to the post called "Credo."

It's Not Enough to be a Vegetarian

There's an article over on Alternet that is interesting. It's a review of Peter Singer's book The Way We Eat, Why Our Food Choices Matter.

You might want to check out the article on your own. The comments are mostly intelligent too.

Excerpts:
How we eat can influence the very health of the planet even more than switching to hybrid cars or solar heating. The hidden costs of even the most prudent food choices -- costs in terms of social injustice, poverty, waste and pollution, as well as animal cruelty make us all collaborators in environmental destruction

In "The Way We Eat," Singer carefully addresses the issue of making enlightened food choices, of buying and consuming only those animal products whose provenance is well-known and well-documented, for example Niman Ranch products. Even in these cases, Singer warns that we cannot know exactly how far the concepts of "free range" or "humanely slaughtered" might be stretched.

So far, so good, I'm thinking. We're seeing the environmental destruction, the bullshit that is "free range" marketing.

She goes on to talk about Singer's arguements, the environmental costs of local versus remotely grown food. All fine.

Then she goes in for the omnivore whining.

Still, I can't help feeling that he is asking us to be better than we actually can be. Given the facts -- and he certainly supplies them -- we are called upon to avoid eating seafood, eggs, meat, milk -- any animal products -- period.

And later...

And no more patience! How much should we agonize over the ethical price tag of free-range chicken, for chrissakes? Where do we stop the calculation of suffering? With pigs? Or scallops? What about the bugs I crush walking through my own organic garden? Numbed into ethical exhaustion, I came away from Singer's message, bloodied but unbowed. Living a moral life is arduous. The hidden price of the vegan lifestyle is, for me, too high in time and anxiety. So I will continue to eat seasonal, organic produce, cage-free eggs, free-range chicken and wild salmon.


I am so dang sick of hearing these same dumb arguements. Not all of them are hit upon in this article, but they go like this:


Being vegan means changing.
Changing is hard.
Therefore being vegan is hard.

No, it's not hard. You spend a few months collecting 4 or 5 cookbooks and trying new recipes. Then you have about 10-12 you really like, and you rotate those, adding new recipes in for fun now and again. It's just like being 15 again, when all you know how to make are 2 recipes. You're a higher primate. Learn.



Thinking about suffering bums me out and makes me sad.
Being vegan means thinking about suffering.
Therefore, being vegan means constantly worrying about causing suffering.

Nope. In fact, it means you pretty much are assured that you are doing the most you can to avoid causing suffering. It's not some complex equation you run in your head for every decision. If it hurts an animal, you don't eat it. Period.



Being vegan means living cruelty-free.
But vegans kill bugs.
If I kill bugs, I'm not living cruelty-free.
If I can't be perfect, I will do nothing.

No one is perfect, not even those monks who wear masks and sweep the ground so they don't step on bugs. Welcome to the real world where things aren't all good or all evil. Do your best, just like you do in every other area of your life.


Giving up products that cause suffering is too hard.
I will buy "free range" to assuage my guilt. I should get extra humanitarian points for this. It proves my moral superiority over regular people.

Sorry. It's a step, but the practices at those farms are still sickening. If you support those farms, you bear responsibility for the suffering. Pulling out the "free range" card to demonstrate your enlightenment is crap. We all cause suffering. We just get to choose how much.



Hearing about animal cruelty makes me feel guilty.
Vegans are often the people telling me about animal cruelty, thus making me feel bad.
They make people uncomfortable. I'd never want to be one of them.

Shooting the messenger much? Sorry you feel bad about hurting things. This is called having a conscience. Welcome to the world of the psychologically mature.

Poor Kitty

My poor kitty got injured this weekend and we got to go to the urgent care vet. Somehow, he got a pretty deep cut on his chest, and we wanted to have it looked at. He didn't seem like he was in pain, and we wouldn't have even known about it, except our neighbor saw him laying on his back and saw the cut.

They shaved him, cleaned the wound and stitched him up, and he'll be fine. He'll have some antibiotics all week, and we have to take him back in 10-14 days to have the stitches removed. I wonder what he got into. It was a clean-looking cut, but deep, so I think it looks like he got caught on something metal, but I'm no expert.

I'm very grateful he's ok, but dang. Emergency vet clinic visits are expensive, and if your cat is a crazed hissing monster with 5 pointy ends when he gets scared, and requires extra sedation, it gets even more expensive. The whole thing cost $322, and we had just caught up financially and had exactly $29 for groceries this week. Sigh.

I mean, I certainly don't regret taking care of him. Part of having a cat is giving him medical care (we had a couple of years when we spent $2000 on medical care for him). He's part of our family, and there's no two ways about it. But it's bad timing.

Of course, on the way home, our right front brake started making a scary grinding noise. We only have one car and it's six years old, so I'm scared it's going to start falling apart.

hold-together-hold-together-hold-together

But the important things are fine. All humans and animals are healthy. Plus, another friend went veg recently, so that pleases me too. More animals spared, more happy white light spreading all over the blue green pearl of the earth.

Oh, and I have a secret project I'm working on. So that's good too.

Death and the Four Year Old

I posted recently about my son asking about where baby souls come from. Up until that point, we had not dealt with the idea of death much. We saw a dead squirrel, and I told him that it's spirit was in heaven. We saw dead lizards, but I don't think he remembered.

Yesterday, I drank a medium chai. I usually only drink white tea, which is low in caffeine. Well, apparently chai is high in caffeine. I am very sensitive to it, so I ended up shaky and nauseated for the afternoon and part of the evening. That'll teach me.

In the car, I said I was sick to my stomach, and my kids said they were sick too (they weren't, but I guess they thought it was cool.)

"We all have the plague and are going to die," said my husband.
"People don't really die. It's just pretend." my son said.
My husband and I paused, (think fast, think fast...)
"Well, everyone dies, but we'll all be really really old," I told him.

He wasn't happy with this answer, and even when we explained that we'll all be like 100 years old and that everything dies, birds, plants, animals, he still was unhappy. He was getting more and more upset (trembling lip, head down, shoulders slumping) so I said that the person's spirit still lives and though no one knows for sure, many people say we go to heaven.

He couldn't handle it, and broke down crying, saying that he wanted to live in his house and he needed a hug. His little face was all red and he reached out his arms crying, "I need a hug!"

I started tearing up, because a four-year-old who is terrified at the prospect of his own death is terrible. Especially if you love said four year old.

I pulled out the only thing I could think of - more heaven stuff. I told him there was vegan mac and cheese every night in heaven. He wanted our house again, so I told him that we'd all live together in heaven, and maybe we'd have a house. He said our house shouldn't be in heaven, and I said maybe we'd have a different house. Or no house. And I told him that my grandparents and Daddy's grandparents were all dead, and that they were all in heaven. I also told him about the possibility of reincarnation.

He calmed down a little, and then asked us why we have spirits in our bodies. We told him that was a Big Question, and that no one really knows, but there are lots of ideas.

We told him again how we're all going to live a long time. We said that when we're old there may be people living on the moon and flying cars and how we might get robot arms and legs. This did not appeal to him at all. He started getting weepy again, so we told him that he didn't have to have robot parts if he didn't want to.

Poor kid. I'm not keen on the idea of being a cyborg either, though my husband can't wait.

Then my husband, who believes that a soul is not an intact thing but a thing that can disperse, like all other energy, kind of gently teased me about the heaven thing (I think he called it my "alternative Jesus thing." And believe me, that's pretty odd for me). I told him that I didn't care if we didn't know it was true. We didn't know anything for sure, and our son is four. Let him handle the possibility of soul-annihilation or never seeing his parents again after they die when he's older.

"Is you being ok now?" asked his 2 year old sister, who had spent the conversation playing with a toy and watching her brother cry.

"Yeah."

And he pretty much was. We went to my sister-in-law's house, and my son was scared of the masks on the walls. The older kids watched The Man in the Iron Mask, which scared him too, so he hung out with the adults. Then on the way home, my brother-in-law (who was visiting for one day from Oklahoma, and who was the reason for the Tuesday night family reunion) saw us driving home and we stopped to say hi. I was going to have to stay home with sleeping kids while my husband went to hang out with his siblings.

I guess my brother-in-law popped around the corner of the car too fast, because my son sort of crumpled up and started to cry after a few moments of his uncle talking to him. "I want a hug!" he screamed to me and his dad. So my brother-in-law said goodbye and we hugged our son and took him home.

I guess you get a little edgy being four and having an existential crisis on the way home from preschool.

Today after dinner, he asked us if it was time to die, and why wasn't it time to die. He thought it had been a long time. We explained again how we'll be very old. My husband even used a diagram and physical examples to try to help him understand that death was a long way away.

Death - from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics

"-I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them."

Death, talking about herself, in Dream Country.

Brokeback Mountain

As you may know, I live under a rock. I don't watch TV, unless I'm traveling.

Side note: While on my recent business travels, I had the dubious pleasure of watching Tiara Girls and Date My Mom. I also got to see how Fox, CNN and NBC all edited a video of Rumsfeld being heckled. Fascinating stuff. (Faux news made him look good by only showing a tiny bit, NBC made him look medium by showing more, and CNN played the most video, showing him completely speechless over his statements about WMDs.)

So I'm going to talk about Brokeback Mountain, which we rented last week.

Spoiler Alert! I am going to give away plot points, so quit reading now if you don't want the story spoiled.

With that taken care of... I didn't know the movie had a sad ending. For some reason, I thought it would end happily. We watched it over the course of two nights. The first night, we watched the first hour or so, then we finished the next night. So I spend a whole day looking forward to seeing the pretty cowboys live happily ever after.

So then when the guy gets beaten to death for being gay, well, it put me in a funk. The movie ended in the 80's, and they totally could have run off to San Francisco and lived happily ever after. The whole thing with the remaining guy keeping the dead guy's shirt at the end made me cry too. I was bummed out for a whole day afterward. It just wasn't fair!

I guess if the movie had a happy ending, it wouldn't be pithy and realistic. And it wouldn't have won awards and all.

I think it's funny how the movie has become a new cultural touchpoint. I heard jokes about it. Mostly stuff like men saying "it wasn't like Brokeback Mountain" in that way straight men have of speaking when they want to make it clear that they aren't gay. Not even a little. (psst, it's ok to think the cowboys are pretty. But if you don't that's ok too.)

And then of course there's the whole religious thing, where people get all up in arms about how it's "unChristian," because it makes gay men seem just like the rest of us. The whole Christian condemation of gays is a load of hooey in my opinion. But hey, if you're eating shellfish and having sex with women on their period, I guess you have to pick one thing to keep as an "abomination." And it should be something you don't do yourself, so you don't have to change.

Now I want to see my dreamy crush Jake Gyllenhaal in a movie in which he doesn't die tragically. The only other thing I've seen him in is Donnie Darko, which is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Speaking of cultural touchpoints and gay men, I ran across an article on Slate about a beloved childhood cartoon, He-Man. Now, personally, I was much more of a Thundercats girl. But this article was a gem.

Excerpt:
The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show's hilarious accidental homo-eroticism—an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader. In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!"


You must click this link and watch this movie, especially if you've seen Brokeback Mountain.

Are Humans Herbivores - Cartoon

A cute cartoon from the creator of the Bizarro comics:

http://www.bizarro.com/videos/mov/VeganVideoWeb.mov

Things I Have Seen

As I mentioned, I have been traveling to Boulder and San Francisco on business. I have seen some things, and I will share them now.

The Rocky Mountains look like they have been sprinkled with powdered sugar when you view them from above. They are so beautiful that they don't seem real.

In Denver, when the sun hits the city right and you're in the air, there are lots of little lakes that look like pools of liquid gold. Yeah, I know it's cliche, but they did.

I did a sociological experiment on every flight. I put Even if You Like Meat pamphlets in the seat pockets. Only once did somoene take them out when I was present. There were two college kids (I feel like an old woman when I wonder to myself how 12 year olds can go to college). One sat and read the whole thing. The other one kept saying "Dude, it's propaganda," but wouldn't read it himself. The first one just grunted and read through that whole pamphlet. I doubt he'll change his eating habits, but maybe it's a drop in the bucket. Apparently someone they both know is "into that kind of thing" because she's a "treehugger." I debated whether to talk about it or just listen, and I opted for the latter. The reader said, "Dude! Look at that chicken's eye!" and then "Now look at her after they saved her. That's amazing." He was engrossed, and I sat smiling inside like a Mona Lisa cat.

I stayed in a haunted hotel called the Boulderado. I saw no ghosts, but the heater makes an oddly human "aaah" noise when it turns on and off. Between that and the wind moaning around the eves, my overactive imagination kept me up a lot.

I was in the heart of San Francisco, walking distance from Millenium, near vegan curry, sushi, chinese and all kinds of restaurants. And I ate nothing. I laid sick with a fever in my room for three days. A tragic waste of a city full of vegan food.

Even though I'm 31, I still always ask for a window seat and I lean my head against the window and marvel at the beauty of the world when it's small below me. I get to see something that few humans in the course of history have ever seen, and that tickles me. Sometimes I can't quit grinning like an idiot because it's so gorgeous.

The San Francisco Bay changes colors. When I flew over, it was grey-green. I was sad that I couldn't smell it.

I got to dine in a restaurant on the 46th floor. The sun went down, the buildings turned goldish grey, the lights of the city came up, it got darker. I could see from downtown San Francisco all the way across the bay to Oakland. The Bay Bridge sparkled with lights like Christmas. I enjoyed it, but then, as my 16 business companions feasted on greasy animal bits on white tablecloths, with expensive glasses of wine littering the table, the wheels in my head turned. Whenever I'm in those situations I can't help but think of the hungry people of the world who we could feed for months on what we paid for one dinner. And the homeless far below us who scrounged through trash cans who would have loved to eat my hardly-touched polenta triangles with sauteed vegetables. And the animals. Always the animals. One of my coworkers was pulling the wiggly skin off of a chicken breast. The meat beneath was slick and wet with fat and my stomach turned. He ate two bites and threw the rest away. Everyone threw meat away. They suffered for nothing.

This was our view.

Leaving the hotel, I had to take a sleek black towncar to the airport (the taxis were full and this is what us business people are supposed to do, so the hotel guy told me just to get in). I sat in the front seat so I could see out the non-tinted windows and somehow not be such a ride-in-the-back-of-a-black car person. I thought of how I'm expected to take this car, because I rank at a certain point in the human heirarchy because of where I work. The young guy next to me has to wear a suit so he looks dressed up enough to administer this luxury ride to those who qualify. The grimy man on the corner must walk. The wealthy baby boomer drives his BMW, and we all go about our day. I had specifically asked to take a shuttle van to the airport because I'm not comfortable taking the "limo" (towncar) but this time I just took the towncar. And as always, when I get to sample this world on the company dime, I kind of enjoyed the novelty. But there's always a little Jimminy Cricket on my shoulder reminding me that there are so many in need, while we have frescoes on the hotel ceilings and brass trim in the elevators.

Gas is $3.69 for the cheap stuff in San Francisco.

One of my favorite things in the world is going into my children's rooms at night and kissing them when they're sleeping and kid-smellling in their beds. I like how they wake up a little and mumble and squirm back to sleep. After a few days away, kissing them like that is pure heaven.

Traveling

Sorry I've been gone again. This time I was off to San Francisco for business. I'll try to post again soon, but I've had a fever for 3 days, and I'd rather just lay still for awhile

The 400 preschoolers at a Thomas the Tank Engine event infected me with the plague.