Moving on up...to the Upper Upper West Side.

I've left behind good 'ole Alabama and started a new life in New York City, so I've begun a new blog at dreamsandmuggers.blogspot.com. I'm sure it will be just as full of self-deprecating misadventures as anything else I've ever written. My criteria for a successful blog post: If I am laughing while writing it, there's a good chance it will make someone else laugh while reading it. At least I know it will make my Mom laugh, which is not that hard to do. A well-placed finger in the nose gets her every time...

Post-Op Ruminations

It's been a little over a week since I had my wisdom teeth out. Thankfully, I no longer look like the drugged up, puffy-faced weirdo in the pic above. Sneaky old Dad took advantage of my delirium while in the recovery room (of which I have no recollection) and snapped a quick post-op memento so I could cherish my fat face for all eternity. I must have been flying high because apparently I felt good enough to give him the old thumbs-up.

The recovery period hasn't been as bad as I expected. Aside from the fact that I can barely slurp, let alone chew, my mouth feels pretty decent. I have discovered that I hate pain meds, so am currently in possession of an almost full bottle of hydrocodone tablets, the generic for what I think is Vicodin. They're supposed to make you relaxed and happy, but they made me feel so woozy and disoriented that I can't understand why anyone would take them for fun. But prescription pain medicine is one of the most highly-abused drugs in the world, so apparently there's a market. Maybe I can sell them. You know, $5 a pop or something like that. I'M KIDDING! I would never aid someone's drug addiction to line my own pockets. Although I've always thought I would make the perfect drug dealer. Nobody would ever suspect me. Better I just flush them down the toilet. Or give them to a squirrel to see what happens. KIDDING AGAIN! Geez, you people need to lighten up. Hey, I've got a little blue pill that can help with that...

Why are they called wisdom teeth if I'm still as big an idiot as before?

I am upset. My mouth has betrayed me. Evolution has betrayed me. Colgate has betrayed me. And don't even get me started on dentists.

Why on earth do our bodies still come with spare parts? As in, things that we can function perfectly well without. Or even better, that serve absolutely no purpose other than taking up space and randomly breaking from time to time, such as appendices, spleens (lucky me, I have a spare...go figure), tonsils, and wisdom teeth? However, we do have them, and they do cause us trouble sometimes, which raises the question of the necessity of preventative medicine. If something may possibly go bad, should we just go ahead and get rid of it? If so, how far should we take it? My appendix may burst someday. Carve it out. My tonsils may make it impossible to swallow my cheeseburger. Snip, snip. My boobies may grow tumors. Chop 'em off. My brain may go postal. One lobotomy, please. Where does the madness stop? In my opinion, it should stop with unnecessary tooth yankage. But the world never works like we want it to, does it?

I have always been a bit cocky about my teeth. After all, they're a terrific set. Especially after wrangling them into a perfect row in high school with lots of metal wires and tiny colorful rubber bands (the glow-in-the-dark ones were the coolest!). And they've never allowed even one tiny sugar bug to wriggle in there anywhere (that's pediatric dentistry-speak for cavities). That's right. I've never had a cavity. Sorry if I sound smug, but that's because I simply recognize how awesome I am. I just have this sixth sense about stuff being stuck in my teeth. I always travel fully armed with both floss and toothpicks. Or rather, floss picks. Best of both worlds. But I digress.

After going about seven years without a visit to the dentist's chair, I became slightly paranoid after having the glue of my permanent retainer pop loose from one tooth. Visions of a tiny piece of cilantro slipping in between the glue and tooth and wreaking havoc on my dentin haunted me for weeks. That cilantro will get you, one way or another. Anyways, I sucked it up and signed on with my work's dental insurance. And then I went to the dentist. Cue the dramatic music.

As some of you know, I worked for a short while a couple of years ago as a dental assistant at Sarrell Regional Dental Center in Bessemer. Didn't work there long enough to get the free dental exam, unfortunately. Although I found the work incredibly interesting and challenging, my time there was cut short by my thumb's encounter with a used hypodermic needle. And also probably by my refusal to stroke ego and kiss ass, which is what the pompous CEO of Sarrell requires of his employees. After a frantic run to the local lab for blood tests, and one morbid week spent convinced I had given myself both AIDS and hepatitis (neither of which turned out to be true, thanks be to the gods of blood-borne illnesses), I had learned a valuable lesson about how NOT to clean a dental tray. Alas, it was no good. I was sent away soon after a visit from several corporate jackasses and a firm "This will be your last day. Leave now." I did, however, take with me a good working knowledge of the interior of the mouth and all the various bad things that can happen to it. And also several pocketsful of toothpaste. I'm KIDDING! The lady jackass watched way too closely for me to take anything along as I left. It's like she was expecting it. The hussy.

Anyways, because of all the rotten mouths I'd stuck my fingers into while at Sarrell, I wasn't really that concerned about my first dentist visit in such a long time. I'm prone to jamming a hand mirror into my mouth and inspecting the state of things from time to time, and I was pretty sure I was still in good shape. A little staining in the grooves, but a quick poke with a straight pin to check for stickiness and my mind was back at ease. Don't judge me for my methods of self-delusion. I'm sure you do some pretty sick stuff to yourself too. So when the dentist said everything looked good, I became smug once again. And then he started in on the wisdom-tooth tirade.

I would just like to say that I was fully expecting this. For some reason, dental professionals have an intense hatred for the humble wisdom tooth and yank them out left and right. It's like an epic feud. Which I think is stupid because mine have never given me even a tiny twinge of trouble. I only have three, two on top and one of the bottom left that never emerged. What became of the other one, I have no idea. Maybe it got stuck in Limbo at my birth and I'll meet up with it again someday on the Other Side. Anyways, my x-rays showed my happy little wisdom teeth living healthily in the back of my mouth and minding their own business. The bottom one that was still in hiding looked healthy too, and at first I didn't even notice the spooky little shadow lurking around the root of the tooth. My dentist was happy to point it out though, and gleefully informed me that it was a cyst and would continue to grow if the tooth wasn't removed. On top of that, he said my other two wisdom teeth on top had small cavities in them. So small that they didn't show up on the x-rays, apparently. "BS!" is what I wanted to shout. Instead, I insisted that my wisdom teeth were just fine and I wanted to keep them because I like them. Bewildered by my dogged refusal to listen to reason, the dentist gave me a referral card for an oral surgeon "just in case" and sent me on my way.

Subsequent research at home (made easier by my bestest best friend, Google) drew up alarming information that cysts around impacted wisdom teeth have been known to eventually crack the jawbone if left to grow unchecked. Well, I don't know about you, but a cracked jawbone sounds unpleasant. I'm not sure how I am with pain, having never really had my threshold tested, but it started to dawn on me that some preventative medicine might actually keep my face from someday becoming horror-movie ready. I saw a preview of a new gory demon flick the other day, and before it dawned on me to cover my eyes like I usually do, I accidentally viewed a possessed girl's jaw dislocating. It was beyond disturbing, and the image of her face sprung immediately to my mind when I read about tooth cysts. I don't ever want my face to look like that. Except if I'm cast in a movie and they pay me the big bucks to be made up to look like that. Otherwise, no thanks.

So I made the appointment to just go ahead and have them all out. Next Friday at 9am I will be settling down into a cold plastic chair at the oral surgeon's office and being shot in the face with lots of drugs. Having never done drugs myself, I'm not sure how this is going to go. My only attempt at becoming a junkie was in a park in Madrid with a tiny hash pipe that wouldn't stay lit. I took it as a sign. But don't worry, faithful readers. I'll be sure to give you a blow-by-blow, or rather a yank-by-yank, so's you can once again enjoy my misfortune. Assuming that I remember anything, of course. Here's hoping for dry socket and full-blown chipmunk cheeks. Maybe I'll even post a picture this time.

I'm clean enough already, thank you.

Dadgum Anne Hathaway and her product endorsements. Ever since her days as Princess of Genovia, I have held her and her gigantic mouth on some sort of mythical pedestal in which she could do no wrong. So, of course, when I was reading an article online about celebrity cleanses (what good is my digestive research if it's not thorough?) and I saw that Ms. H swore by the David Kirsch 48-Hour Super Charged Cleanse to get her ready for awards shows, I thought it might be worth a try.

I had been reading horror stories about how much crap gets caught up in your intestines, and how some people are carrying around up to 30 extra pounds of cement-hard waste. Apparently, the longer the poo sits in your system, the dryer and harder it gets, and it can become stuck to your intestinal walls and sit in there for years. Years! I started having problems in 11th grade. Was it possible that there might be 10 years of crusty poo wedged into my large intestine? Obviously I needed to cleanse myself. And after watching a segment of Jackass in which Johnny Knoxville goes for a colon cleansing (while wearing a Santa suit), I decided that the 48-Hour Super Charged Cleanse would cause me less anxiety and psychological scarring.

Of course, there are homemade cleanses that you can make yourself, which primarily consist of a mixture of water, honey, lemon, and cayenne pepper, but since none of that offers any fiber, you have to chug liters of a saline solution in order to force yourself to poop. It sounded horrifying. So I opted to buy the more expensive pre-made solution with built-in poop inducers.

This particular cleanse (the David Kirsch/Anne Hathaway one) consists of four ounces of a lemonade-like solution mixed with four ounces of water four times a day. You're allowed to supplement the cleanse with as much water or unsweetened decaffinated herbal tea as you want. Everything else is off limits. The website states that if you're chewing, you're cheating. Ok, fine. The bottle of the cleanse solution is 30 bucks, and they recommend you add a 30-day pack of their probiotic supplements to help get your digestive system back on track when you finish the cleanse. I thought, 'What's another 20 bucks in the whole scheme of things?', and added a pack of them to my online shopping bag as well. Please don't judge me.

After a couple of days, my poison arrived via Fed-Ex in a ridiculously oversized cardboard box. I decided to wait until the weekend to do my cleanse. Didn't want to fall out in the middle of Tuesday-night Zumba. Luckily I had the following weekend completely free and so I drank my first glass of watered-down lemonade on Saturday morning. Up until about 8:00pm that night, all was going well, if not a little boring. Then I started to get a headache. My stomach had been growling since breakfast, but it was easy enough to ignore, especially with the Sex and the City box set diverting my attention for hours. But nobody can enjoy television with a headache. And I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take an aspirin. I had read that a headache is a normal part of a cleanse or fast, and I was kinda expecting it. But when it came, I got mad. I felt terrible all over my body, I had been miserably hiding out in my room to keep away from all foody temptations for over 10 hours, and the headache was the last straw. So to get back at David Kirsch, I ate an entire bag of chocolate-covered almonds. And that was that. Cleanse was over. I dumped the rest of the "lemonade" down the drain, threw the plastic bottle into the recycling, started cramming every edible thing in the kitchen down my throat, and eventually found myself back where I started: hours of fun constipation. Thanks a lot, David Kirsch.

Looking back, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't even make it a whole day. Who knows how light and floaty I could have gotten if I'd done all 48 hours correctly? Oh well, it was an expensive lesson learned the hard way: Even respectable young starlets with enormous gobs can unwittingly lead you down a bad road. I don't blame Anne in the least. She probably had no idea that her indirect endorsement of a wackadoodle "miracle" product would lead to my food binge. She remains firmly rooted onto her pedestal. Plus, she probably hires people to stand around her with flyswatters and whack at her fingers when she reaches for the Pringles can. At least, if I had her money, that's what I'd do.

The upside to all this: I started taking the probiotic supplements soon after and quickly realized that my three-times-a-week was turning into three-times-a-day. Since I've had a lifelong pathological fear of pooping, at first this was very distressing. I soon came to realize, however, that a good poop can take a bad digestive day and upgrade it to at least mediocre. And until I grow enough balls to go have a real colonic, mediocre (in the stomach sense) is plenty good enough for me.

When I die, just bury me in a buggy. The grocery kind.

There's nothing like grocery shopping. Seriously, if I were to make a list of all the mundane things I do on a regular basis in order of personal preference, grocery shopping would be in the top five at least. The other top four would probably be vacuuming, dyeing my hair, using the popcorn popper, and having a successful bowel movement, not necessarily in that order. When I saunter into a grocery store with my empty cloth bags (I have about 12 now) and walk the aisles filled with every comestible imaginable, I get so excited about the possibilities that I don't even think about how much money I'm spending as my buggy (grocery cart, to those not of the Southern persuasion) gets fuller and fuller. I always buy more than I mean to. The thought of someday having my own gigantic kitchen to fill as I please gives me the jitteries. The good kind. When I saw a picture of Helpline Heloise's perfectly organized and alphabetized pantry in a recent copy of Good Housekeeping, I nearly jittered it to shreds as I tore it out to save. I keep it in my folder of aspirations. Yes, I have a folder of aspirations. And no, I won't show it to you.

Mom is my health-food ally. Since our freezer at home is usually filled to the brim with frozen deer parts and the pantry is jammed full of canned hot tamales, Little Debbie cakes, and cheese puffs, we really have to work together to find (and keep) good stuff to eat. My dad has some really wack ideas about what constitutes a healthy meal. He can eat a giant bowl of cornbread with milk and gravy poured over it, and a couple fat greasy sausage links, and call it balanced nutrition. Good thing about Dad though is he'll try anything, no matter how weird. And he usually likes it. I'm pretty sure he was the one who invented peas with mayonnaise as a side dish, and unfortunately passed a taste for that mess on to me, but we're still working on him. We just have to try and keep the house full of fresh healthy foods that are both yummy and good for you. Which is easier said than done, considering all the random eaters who pass through the Humber kitchen on a weekly basis.

A couple of weekends ago, I visited the farmers' market on Finley Avenue for the first time. It was like produce wonderland. Everything seemed to be cheaper than the normal supermarket too, though maybe a bit spottier and more roughed up. I think Mom and I went a little crazy, practically throwing our money at the vendors and running away with bags of their brightly-colored offerings. I can't remember everything that we bought, but our massive haul included one of the biggest papayas we'd ever seen, seven almost too-ripe bananas for a dollar, a bottle of tamarind-flavored soda from Mexico, plantains, tangerines, kiwis (the fruit, not the New Zealanders), grapes, grape tomatoes, and even a small bag of radishes. I mean, really? Who likes radishes? But we couldn't help ourselves. We were under the influence of produce. We oohed over the small personal-sized watermelons and ahhed at all the shiny poblano peppers and cactus leaves. On the back side of the market, where we parted with the largest percentage of our money, there were so many brown people selling tropical fruits and veggies that I felt like I was back in some market in Central America. It was smelly and dirty and I loved it. Can't wait to go back!

*digression- This may just be my frustration talking, but if you want to practice your Spanish at the farmers' market, and you are a beige-skinned female-type person like me, your best bet is to visit booths with brown male vendors. You ask a Spanish-speaking woman something in her native language, and she just replies in terrible broken English. I swear, you can't get a word in Spanish out of a brown woman who knows a little English, unless you are willing to make an ass of yourself. I know. I've tried it. Scene: Guatemalan airport, coffee shop, me and cashier. I order in perfect Spanish; she replies in bad English. I persist, acting like I don't speak English. She looks at me really weird and finally tells me my total in Spanish. And then I realize I have to pay in American money. End scene. By far, the best thing to do is just ignore the brown women and flirt with the brown men. The men, especially young ones, follow you around, jabbering away in Spanish, and you may even score a discount. Work it, ladies. -end digression*

Upon becoming a vegetarian and realizing that my local Wal-Mart didn't carry even a 10th of all the healthy, veg options that I had been reading about in my research, I decided I must broaden my grocery-shopping radius. Birmingham isn't a very hippie city (though the hippies that do exist here try damn hard) and while your everyday supermarket may have a couple cartons of soy milk, good luck with anything as exotic as a veggie hot dog. I was frustrated. And hungry. And then I made my first trip to Whole Foods. Too far away, a little bourgeois, and entirely too expensive, it nevertheless has become my mecca of alternative eating. My dad refers to it as "the vegan store." I usually come home with non-dairy cream cheese, soy yogurt, Daiya cheese (made from tapioca, not milk, and it actually melts!), frozen veggie burgers, some new kind of non-dairy milk to try, and Dad's requested bags of yuca and plantain chips. You just can't get that stuff anywhere on my side of town. If I were a rich girl (daidle deedle daidle daidle daidle deedle daidle dum) I'd buy all my groceries at Whole Foods. Alas, I am not (yet) so I must be choosy about which healthy frivolities I splurge on. It usually comes down to whether or not the item in question involves a lot of preparation in order to eat. So it's out of the buggy with the whole grain lasagna noodles and organic extra firm tofu, and into the buggy with the no-sugar-added peanut butter and the still-warm crusty baguette. Heck, half the stuff we buy doesn't even make it all the way home without at least being tasted. But can you blame us? It's a long drive from Mountain Brook to Hayden. And we hongry.

Don't tell me it's exercise or I'll stop doing it.

The first time I saw “Road Trip,” that classic Tom Green teen sex romp, I remember thinking, ‘girls don’t walk around naked in the locker room!’ Well, apparently I was wrong. I’m only in the third month of my YMCA membership and I’ve already seen enough dimply asses to last me a lifetime. Women do walk around naked in the locker room. And bend over. And squat. And just generally show off their jibblies without a hint of modesty or regard for others. It’s gotten to the point where I keep my eyes trained on the floor as I walk to my locker to avoid any full-frontal assault.

Speaking of the YMCA, I have been finding myself there at least three times per week for the last couple of months. They offer a lot of different exercise classes, and I've been taking advantage of pilates, hot yoga, and Zumba classes every week. The thought of spending an hour on a treadmill isn't super appealing, and I've found that I enjoy moving my butt in unnatural directions a lot more when it is in a class setting.

Zumba is by far the funnest class that I take. I was introduced to Zumba back last fall when a class was started in Hayden Elementary School's lunchroom. Me, my mom, my friend Katie, and Katie's fiancee's mom started attending these $5-per-session classes, and I was giddy to discover that dancing around like a crazy person was an actual method of exercise. And we got to wear hip scarves! You know, the coin-encrusted tie-on skirts that belly dancers use to create the jingly-bottom effect? It sounds silly, but it totally takes the class to another level. I was ecstatic to discover that the Y offered Zumba too. A typical Zumba class consists of trying to follow along with the instructor as she does choreographed dances to popular upbeat songs. Most songs have a Latin flair, though each instructor tailors their class to their own interests. My instructor at the Y, Ashita, seems to be of Indian descent (dots, not feathers) so we do a lot of Bollywood-style waving of the arms and bouncing of the feet. Also, a large percentage of the people in the class are African-American so "Proud Mary" shows up from time to time, along with a lot of hip hop. It is sublime. Ashita also uses a lot of newer popular music. Last week, we danced to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way." I think I was the only one singing along while dancing, but I couldn't help myself. I think everyone should try Zumba at least once. And if you're worried that you're not a good dancer or that people will laugh at your pitiful flailing and stumbling, just remember that as long as you are moving and having fun, that's all that matters. Take a girl in my class for example. She shows up early every week to get the very front and center spot in the class, and she must have some amazing self-esteem, because she looks ridiculous when she dances. She is the gangliest, awkwardest, most off-beat dancer I have ever seen. It's a real wonder that she is able to stay upright the whole hour. But she just goes for it. I mean, she seriously GOES FOR IT! I admire her for her courage. I just try to stay out of the way of her elbows.

As for pilates and yoga, the slower pace makes for less opportunity to put an eye out, but they are full of dangers all their own. As you might imagine, twisting yourself into strange new positions, some of them upside-down, causes fluids and gases to move around inside your body as they normally wouldn't. The first couple of times I do a forward fold (just bending down to touch your toes) all the blood rushes to my head and I get a little wobbly. The teacher always says something like, "Feel all the energy rushing to your brain!" and I want to reply that I have so much energy in my brain, I'm about to fall over. That's far from the worst of it though. There is a very distinct reason why they tell you not to eat anything 3 hours prior to practicing yoga or pilates. It's not for your benefit. It's for the benefit of those in your immediate vicinity. The first time it happened to me, I was so mortified I wanted to grab my mat and flee. We were in the middle of doing roll-ups in pilates, and I was having a little trouble with the up part. A roll-up is like a very slow sit up. And since my abs had been in hiding since 1997 and were still in the process of emerging from a deep deep sleep, they weren't being very cooperative. I could roll about halfway up, but then I would get stuck and have to grab my thigh to help me the rest of the way. Everyone else in the room seemed to have been born doing roll-ups (even the non-Heidi Klums), and I was getting mad. I decided that I was really gonna give it my all, and do a freakin' roll-up whether my abs wanted to allow it or not (I'm trying to drag out the suspense, but I'm not going to insult your intelligence. You already know where this is going). On my way up, I squeezed my abs as hard as I could and kinda jerked my head and back forward. The jerk not only propelled me successfully upward, it also propelled a loud fart out from between my clenched buttocks. I'm sure it sounded much louder in my head than in the room because nobody reacted, but it was all I could do to keep from bursting out into panicked psychopathic giggles and running for my life. In retrospect, after having heard numerous other farty emissions from my fellow practitioners, I realize that passing gas is a normal result from the twisting and compressing of the internal organs that comes from pilates and yoga. There's really nothing to be done about it. But now I make sure to pull up my mat next to the old people that sometimes come to class. Not only do they make me look good (no roll-ups there either), I can blame any and all gassy noises on them.

The yoga class I go to is called hot yoga, which means they heat the room up before class and you sweat about 10 times more than normal. It actually feels great. I am in awe of my yoga teacher's flexbilities. I am also a bit scared of her. She is very nice, but I just have the feeling that she is someone who wouldn't hesitate to rip my ass to shreds if for some reason I ever dared to cross her. Not being one to instigate sweaty throwdowns, I meekly obey everything she says to the best of my limited ability and then scamper out of class with a quiet "namaste" at the end. She's very good about reminding us to breathe, which strangely enough is quite easy to forget. She also constantly reminds us to tighten our abdominal muscles by saying "abs engage" at least twice a minute. Either she's telling us to engage our abs and the "d" drops off the end due to her Afro-American accent, or rather, she's commanding our abs to engage themselves, as in "Abs, engage!" I like the second possibility because it takes the responsibility away from me and puts it on my abs. Therefore, if I continue to have weak abs, it's their own fault and I can't be held accountable.

Here's some fun resources for those interested in yoga or pilates. Zumba is trademarked so there are no free classes online at this time. Boo :(

YogaYak (http://yogayak.com/)- I recommend Hatha Yoga Flow 3.

Free Pilates Workout online (http://www.pilatesworkoutonline.com/)- You can build your own workout by adding video clips together.

On Becoming an Herbivore

What is it about a big juicy steak that provokes the drool gland like nothing else? I mean, when you think about what a steak actually is- a chunk of muscle- it’s not very appetizing. What we buy in the store is far removed (both literally and figuratively) from the animal it was once a part of. I bet if we had to kill an animal, slice the skin open, and carve out that section of thigh or butt ourselves, most of us would pass with a “no, thanks, changed my mind.” Of course, there are some rough folks (like several members of my family, for instance) who relish the dissection of a dead, decomposing animal. No telling how many deer parts have become jerky in my dad’s dehydrator. And I use to eat as much of that stuff as anyone. Now that I’ve gone herbivore, my philosophy of food has changed drastically. But it took a long time. The United States is a veritable cesspool when it comes to nutrition, with the Dirty South as the epicenter.

Up until two years ago, having grown up in a very carnivorous home and believing a meal couldn’t be complete without a large slab of meat somewhere on the plate, I had always considered vegetarian-type people as wimpy weirdos. I imagined them frolicking in fields with their little bunny rabbit friends, sharing lettuce and carrots, smoking doobies, and singing songs about loving everyone. Picky eaters have always ticked me off anyways, and vegetarians, in my opinion, were the worst of the pickys.

My first contact with real vegetarians was in Costa Rica in the summer of 2004. My Spanish teacher there gave our class a fun assignment to help us practice the command form of verbs: we were to form groups of four and find a recipe to prepare in front of the class. The fun was immediately sucked out of the project when I found my group to be composed of a vegetarian, a vegan, a girl who was allergic to soy, and me, a person who had always prided herself on the fact that she could and would eat anything. So we went with the only thing that everyone in our group would consume: simple fruit smoothies. Regardless of the fact that during our presentation our borrowed blender from the 1940s blew up and oozed our smoothie mix all over the floor, I will always remember that group project because it cemented my opinion of picky eaters as total wackadoodles.

I remember seeing protestors in front of McDonalds in Madrid, picketing with large glossy posters of cows hanging by their hooves whose throats had been slit and live chickens with almost all their feathers plucked out and their deformed feet grown into the wire floors of their cages. It was enough to put anyone off McNuggets for awhile. Anyone more squeamish than me, of course. I marched past the protestors and promptly purchased the largest cheeseburger that the fast food behemoth offered, and then I sat on the sidewalk and smugly ate it. I can really be a huge prick sometimes.

However, as my previous post described, when, seemingly overnight, I fell into the gastrointestinal hell that food would become for me, I started trying to think a little more out of the box. After making the connection between dairy products and explosive diarrhea, I began researching dairy alternatives. My research snowballed, with me discovering one thing after another about how wrong I had been concerning nutrition. It was very jarring to learn that the USDA didn’t really give a rip about my health, and were basically only concerned with lining their own pockets by helping the big meat and dairy companies sell as much as they could, no matter how many antibiotics, chemicals, and hormones wound up in my fried chicken. It made me friggin mad. And then the world of veganism sort of fell into my lap. I thought, if I was going to cut dairy out of my diet, I might as well go full out, balls to the wall, as they say.

Now I find myself almost two years into a strange sort of modified vegetarianism that has fluctuated and evolved according to my knowledge of nutrition, the funds available on my debit card, and truthfully, the amount that I cared at any given moment. Sometimes it’s easy to be a total vegan, scoffing at any product injected with animal matter and laughing into my cheese- and bacon bit-free salad at the fatties who wobble by with chicken fat still dribbling down their chins. And then sometimes I’m doing good if I’m able to turn down that third plateful of birthday cake and Doritos. It’s a daily battle of wills. The will of my brain versus the will of my mouth. Brain’s been winning more than mouth lately. As long as I stay away from the ice cream freezer in Wal-Mart.

As far as meat goes, I honestly don’t find it all that appetizing anymore. I’ve lost the taste for it. And I’m glad. I’m not really the PETA type of vegetarian, though I am sickened by needless animal cruelty. I would just prefer to keep my body as free of crap as possible and avoid obesity, diabetes, cancer, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, mental illness, and a slew of other unpleasant side effects that are common to hardcore meat eaters. You know, it’s true what they say: you are what you eat. And If I eat crap, then I become crap. I respect myself too much for that.

My current food philosophy is this: Eat what you want to eat and leave me alone to eat what I want to eat. I won’t judge you for the nastiness that you put into your own mouth as long as you return the courtesy. Ok, that’s a lie. I most certainly will judge you. But I’ll try my best not to say anything about it.