Walking through NYC listening to M.I.A’s Boyz was a great experience this afternoon. It all started with hanging with Brian for a few days, then Jess Lane, Frank, Maggie Murphy and now my mom. I’ve got another 5 or 6 friends to see before the friendcation is over. WISH ME LUCK. I’ve been doing a shitty job with photos but I’ve got some, you’ll see those in the next month.

Two more days before I’m reunited with Mister (he’s been at Mark’s since May 31st and I’m missing him like crazy).

In January and February I was consuming frightening amounts of Pop-Tarts, Edy’s Slow Churn ice cream and those little six packs of Ritz crackers with peanut butter in between them. That shit ain’t good y’all! They all contain high fructose corn syrup, which, I don’t give a flying fuck if science has not proven HFCS to be worse than regular ol’ sugar, has absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever. The sheer fact that the land the corn is grown on to create this HFCS, could be use to grow actual edible produce instead, is enough reason for me to attempt to never consume HFCS again (but oh, there are so many more reasons I will not bore you with, just look up how exactly this shit is made). Of course this will never happen because yes, I will allow myself the occasional (probably celebrational) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup or meal at Taco Bell, but I sure as hell do not buy anything at the supermarket with this ingredient in it. It freaks me out and it should freak you out too. If it doesn’t, fine – I’m not here to talk about that anyway.

I just want to talk a little about Mark Bittman’s book, Food Matters. My dad bought this book a few weeks ago and I’ve been randomly reading it to see what’s up. Books like this really do not apply to me because I’ve been a vegetarian for almost 10 years (TEN FUCKING YEARS!) and I have no plans on going back to my meat eating (aka chicken strips and hot dogs) ways ever again. However, I find myself reading these books and watching similar movies anyway. I guess just to educate myself so if someone ever asks, I might be able to explain to them why I do not consume food the American way. It also serves as a reminder and sometimes I learn something new.

I’m not one to preach about my vegetarian ways, so don’t read this and think “Damn, this asshole vegetarian won’t shut up!” Really, as I was writing this post, this paragraph got longer and longer and now will serve as a history of why I’m a vegetarian: I simply never liked meat. As a kid I’d be at the dinner table with this dry, chewy crap on my plate, and my parents would tell me “Five more bites and you can go watch TV.” I’d smother each tiny cut up piece of chicken in ketchup (by then I really hated ketchup, but there was no other way), hold my nose, and chew as fast as I could to get it out of my face. When I was 11 years old I saw an MTV news report about vegetarians, that was the first time I realized, hey! I don’t have to eat meat! Of course that was impossible when meat was all my parents were feeding me. When I was in 7th grade my science teacher mentioned slaughter houses as part of a lesson. After class I went to him for more information, so he showed me a book with full color pictures, and I was sold on never eating beef ever again. Then when I was 16 I decided to stop eating chicken and all other meat (aka bacon and hot dogs) because I just started to feel bad for the animals. I remember eating a chicken strip while picturing a cute chicken with his white feathers looking all happy just hanging around a farm (come on, we all know that’s not what the chickens Americans consume look/live like, but I didn’t know back then). If I knew then what I know now about how livestock are “grown” (because they sure as hell are not raised), I’d have quit when I was in the womb. The last meat product I ate was a hot dog, six hot dogs to be exact! I was at a church fair, a month into my vegetarian lifestyle, starving because I didn’t eat anything on the way over. The hot dogs were 25 cents each and I just had to have them all BECAUSE THEY ARE DELICIOUS. Hell yeah they were tasty, but nothing in a hot dog (or many other meat products sold in supermarkets and fast food joints) resemble the good meat humans are supposed to eat that come off the animals. It’s all just processed shit. The stomach ache I felt after my hot dog pig-out was worse than any I had experienced before, and so it began (again).

As I’ve aged my reasons for being a vegetarian have expanded to include health and environmental reasons. Some vegetarians like to say stuff like “Oh, if I can consume one less animal per year so that animal can be fed to someone who really needs it, then I feel I’m doing my vegetarian part.” That’s great and all, but do you really think that cow is going to a starving family in Africa who needs it most? Maybe someday the world will work like that but not yet. Mark Bittman does delve into how this can happen someday, but it will take a lot of people doing a lot less meat consuming.

I’m never offended when someone eats meat in front of me. I’ve dated people who eat meat (although eating out at restaurants was really awesome when I was dating a vegetarian), have friends who eat meat, have parents who eat meat. I am really proud of my brother for giving up meat, and I love to rub it in my parents’ faces that they raised two vegetarians (because they love to rub our vegetarian ways in our faces). Actually, that’s not quite fair; as I explained in the beginning my dad has also changed his eating habits. The other day I asked him when the last time he ate meat was and he said he couldn’t remember. I’m proud of him too! For some reason, meat eaters think it’s hilarious to make jokes about vegetarians. The other day a friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook of her breakfast sandwich with “facon” on it (fake bacon, hehe), and one person commented “all that’s missing is the meat!” Okay, so that’s not really offensive, but trust me, if you’re one to always joke on a vegetarian, that vegetarian considers you a fucking asshole. We get it, you feel insecure that you can’t make the decisions we’ve made and have no other way to cope. You big bullies, just eat your meat and shut up.

Anyway, Food Matters, by Mark Bittman. Here’s a few paragraphs that really interested me:

“According to one estimate, a typical steer consumes the equivalent of 135 gallons of gasoline in his lifetime, enough for even some gas guzzlers to drive more than halfway from New York to Los Angeles, or for an energy-efficient car to make the drive back and forth twice. Or try to imagine each cow on the planet consuming almost seven barrels of crude oil.”

“Another way to put it is that eating a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy-wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home.”

“…consider that the beef in one Big Mac is equivalent–in terms of grain produced and consumed–to fives loaves of bread. But instead of feeding the hungry with grain, a lot of it is going to the waistline of people in wealthy countries–often to their detriment.”

WHAAAAT?! Was my exact reaction. Other reactions I’ve had to parts of this book so far (and I really said these out loud):
-God damn this is crazy!
-What the fuck!?
-Fucking Americans.
-Oh man! OH MAN!

I just found it funny that I was saying those things out loud while reading the book. The author is not suggesting the reader stop eating meat all together, I’m sure Mark Bittman eats meat himself. What he wants is for Americans to try to eat LESS meat, perhaps more local meat. I know there are environmentally conscious meat eaters out there, so why are you pigging on fast food all the time? Anyway, read the book, it’s 120 pages of interesting information ranging from the inefficiency of using so much land to grow feed for animals, to the history of how factory farming came to be. Then there are 178 pages of recipes, which I haven’t looked through yet, but I love Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian”, so there are likely to be some good ones in here.

Just thought I should post something else so that story about my armpits isn’t up here for a whole week. Damn that Mister is cute.

Don’t worry, I have plans to de-hair my pits, not yet though. I think I’ll just wait until just before I leave Massachusetts (end of May) and give them a good waxing. Also, if you’ve ever seen my armpits, they are remarkably unhairy. I remember a friend of mine had hairier armpits than I do now when she was 13. As we got older she would shave and yet we could all still see the black stubble below the skin, damn yo. I thank my mom for my good armpit hair genes.

Today I ruined the two artichokes and hollandaise sauce we were going to eat for dinner. I started craving Pad Thai and figured that if I had failed at that first dinner, I should reward myself by making a dinner I know I could never mess up. So I asked my dad if it was cool and he was all “Katie, you had Pad Thai once already this week.” I felt bad for a moment, maybe twice is really too much. Then I remember two summers ago when I ordered Pad Thai from Spice five times in one week. Pssh, twice aint nothin’.

Um, I’m not trying to complain here, in fact I was thinking about what a negative effect people’s negative tweets have on me and I am tired of it! Yet, my latest tweet is: Facebook is such a fucking waste of time, especially when someone joins the group: “Join If You Know A Ugly Girl Who Thinks Shes Hot Sh*t.” I would say that’s negativity coming out of me, so I’m no better. My favorite Twitter accounts are from people who write happy thoughts instead of “Today sucks, it’s raining, everything is stupid.” Also, today does suck and it is raining. I’m not sure if everything is stupid though. The girl who created the Facebook group “Join If You Know A Ugly Girl Who Thinks Shes Hot Sh*t.” sure is stupid – it should be AN bitch, not A, before Ugly. Wait, should it? Are words that start with a U exempt from the an/vowel rule? What about if it’s not the “you” sounding U?

Anyway, there is no point to this post, just how I like my blog posts to be.

At 8am when my alarm went off, I got up to pee, swished around what little saliva was left in my mouth and decided I’d be good for another hour of rest. Instead I slept until 11:30, thirsty as hell. Then when I woke up from that evil sleep (the kind of sleep where you sleep so long now your body feels weak, like you’ll never be able to get out of bed), I checked my email, Twitter and Facebook on my iPhone for another twenty minutes. At 11:50 I got out of bed, walked downstairs, and finally poured myself that glass of water I’d be in need of for hours.

After walking Mister, I went upstairs to get my Macbook from my bedroom so I could write this post (I couldn’t think of a way to fit into a single tweet, so it’s a blog post instead). On my way up I saw my real glass of water on the dresser outside my bedroom, where I had left it when I needed an extra hand to open the bedroom door last night. The glass of water I knocked over with my sweater sleeve was my water from the night before. So that means, all I had to do at 8am was peak outside my bedroom door to see the glass of water and I would have been all good. Instead I was so thirsty, when I was reading my emails on my iPhone in the morning, my eyes were dry, which I linked with the fact that my mouth was so dry. Why am I so lazy that I’m willing to go thirsty for twelve hours straight?