Paper Fruit

OK, so maybe I’ve been a little negative about veganism as of late. It’s hard sometimes to stay positive when the most vocal organization that represents one’s movement of choice seems to be entirely run by shit-smeared assholes, and the world at large is such a hostile place for creatures who simply cannot advocate for themselves, but there I go again.

BUT! There are plenty of people out there making the world a better place. I hope one day I can do as much as these awesome folks, but until I get more settled, that’s only a dream (but one day, I swear, I will open my vegan public house, and the beer and spirits will flow as people chow down on sandwiches and other cruelty-free fare). Therefore, instead of focusing on the bad stuff, here’s some of the good. Many thanks to these folks and everything they do.

First, I have to give big ups to the Post Punk Kitchen, the forums, and the recipe archive, and the brilliant founders, Isa and Terry. These forums helped me go vegan more than anything else on the internet, and without the support there, I might not have made it. While other vegan message boards frightened me with intense, angry debates over seeing eye dogs and whether one should boycott the Lord of the Rings movies because they used real horses instead of CGI ones, as well as making me feel daunted by the “sacrifice” of veganism (newsflash: it’s totally easy to be vegan, actually) the folks over at the PPK were teaching me how to make tofu scramble that cured me of my deep-rooted love of eggs and supporting me when I published my first-ever published article (about vegetarianism in children’s books) in Herbivore.

Next up it’s Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe. The owners Ken and Leigh are super-nice and every Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthday, and other sort of event I order people chocolates and soap and all sorts of goodies from them. They also carry Teese, the holy grail of vegan cheese, esp. the nacho sauce.

Herbivore Clothing Company is run by the wonderful Josh and Michelle, and I really want both the Save a Horse, Ride a Vegan shirt and the brand new super-cute Compassion is Invincible tee, two sentiments I heartily agree with.

In terms of people who do work every day to directly benefit animals in need, Farm Sanctuary has received my praise (and my donations) for many a year. Our very first vegan Thanksgiving John and I adopted a turkey from them to symbolize our new commitment and I am kind of sad that I haven’t yet told them where I live now so they will send me address labels and also tons of color leaflets detailing all the adorable piglets and lambs that need my dollars RIGHT NOW. Actually those are really heartbreaking so maybe that’s for the best. Anyway, they rule. Check out the Rescue and Adoption stories if you want to cry a lot. Although I don’t know as much about Peaceful Prairie but they seem wonderful, as well. I am intending to visit them soon and also attend the benefit for them catered by Chef Matt over at Sun Deli and Liquor (not a hardship, since Chef Matt is my current culinary hero).

That’s about all I have time for today, but I will do more of this in the future. Next up I plan to do a roundup of cookbooks that every vegan, or everyone who wants to do the earth and the animals a favor by cooking vegan once in a while, should own!

Yesterday I wasted a lot of my time writing an incomprehensibly rambling screed on why PeTA pissed me off recently (the whole debacle over PeTA’s really stupid “Save the Whales” campaign, and their later non-apology for it). It regarded PeTA’s claim that going “vegetarian” would automatically cause you to lose weight and how that was simply bad science. But, to be fair, it also regarded how members of the fat-positive movement (many members of which blogged and protested the billboard, some directly to Ingrid Newkirk herself) were also cherry-picking the studies they liked in order to justify their own claims about health and weight, and how that was not OK either. I concluded with some more rambling about how body-positive doesn’t equal fat-positive necessarily, and how I wasn’t a jerk for calling out the fat-positive movement. Awesome!

N-E-WAYZ I think I’ll just post to Vegans Against PeTA, a great blog that should really make some stickers I could put on my bike.

File this post under Lessons Not Learned and Coming Late to the Game, but oh well. I’ll eschew language such as “misogynistic butthole” this time, and keep my critiques at least somewhat serious from the get-go.

NOTE: see the original post here.

NOTE II: If you plan on reading John C. Wright’s Chronicles of Chaos trilogy, this post contains spoilers, as the kids say.

It seems that internet-savvy fantasy fans were understandably concerned by author John C. Wright’s, ah, troubling LiveJournal post of 7/29/09 (the author claims 800 comments were made on his LJ during the fervor, but they were deleted before the actual post itself was deleted). Given everything with my move to Boulder, and my general ignorance of the modern age (authors have blogs, you say? How fascinating!) I just yesterday found out about the whole hullaballoo via my friend Jesse, who alerted me to the controversy by saying something along the lines of “hey, check this out– isn’t this the guy who wrote that YA book with the spanking that you thought was pretty alright?” So yeah.

I am somewhat ambivalent about commenting on Mr. Wright’s post at all, given that the entire internet has already, and the blog entry in question smells strongly of attention-seeking (as well as some other, stronger scents), and also he has kind of maybe apologized maybe? But though I am potentially doing nothing but giving Mr. Wright exactly what he wants, I am going to take some time to say a few things on the subject of his rant about the SciFi channel’s decision to be more inclusive in their representation of human sexuality. I know that if Mr. Wright has Google Alerts set up for himself (and chooses to read this), he wouldn’t mind me commenting on his work. Given that I bought and I read Mr. Wright’s uneven Chronicles of Chaos trilogy and, since that Mr. Wright once referred to Atlas Shrugged as “really good,” and “a story written for readers who think as well as feel,” and infused the entire Chronicles of Chaos trilogy with Objectivist sentiment, I assume that, as a paying consumer, he would feel that I have a right to engage with my purchase on a critical level. Now, given his 2008 conversion to Catholicism, whether or not Mr. Wright is still an Objectivist is not clear to me, but that’s not really where I want to go with this post anyway. Everyone who knows me knows that if I get on the subject of Objectivism. . . well never mind. Better to stop here.

Moving right along, let’s get started with a sample of the rhetoric from Mr. Wright’s free-speech-protected-but-voluntarily-removed post:

“The head of Sci-Fi channel has contritely promised to include more homosex in future shows, and to do it nonchalantly, just as if this abomination is normal and natural and worthy of no comment.”

and:

“I’d like someone, anyone, to explain to me how my culture reached a position where a public entertainment company can be criticized for failing to contribute to the moral decay of the land, and that the criticism would be taken seriously, and the company would cringe and promise to do better.”

and finally, my fave:

“Why are you willing to tolerate sexual perversion but not racism? In a world with no standards, what makes a malfunction of love higher on your standard than a malfunction of hate? Is an irrational lust and longing to mimic the mating act with a sex with which one cannot mate, at its root, any more or less disconnected to reality than an irrational fear and hatred of a Negro? How do we know race-hate is not genetic? Look at how scorned and put-upon racists are! Can we spare them no cheap Leftist pity? Why don’t we simply call racism an alternate anti-ethnic orientation, similar to hetero-toleration, but different?”

Obviously, all of these statements are simply moral grandstanding and inflammatory polemic, more annoying than offensive and pointless to get mad about. And, to be fair, he did back down from some of that sort of language. That said, even bothering to type things like “moral decay”, “malfunction of love” and “abomination” are not the sorts of things people say when they are seeking to debate rationally with the “other side” (though Malfunction of Love would be a truly great album title if it isn’t already– the album art should have a robot sitting dejectedly in a henhouse, in my opinion).

My point in listing all of these things is not to talk about whether or not Mr. Wright is homophobic, or whether his alleged olive-branch-extending in subsequent posts makes all those statements okay (in fact, I do not think it does, given that, in his own words, after seeking to be more “temperate” in his language toward the gay community, Mr. Wright had this to say: “homosexuality is a sexual perversion, like incest, like any other disordered intemperate appetite– but a person afflicted with this (the man, not the sin) temptation leads a hard life, and it is not my place to make his life harder by using hard words against him.” How sweet.) Rather, my point is to address the fact that the language of his original post is, rather, the kind of stuff people say for one of two reasons. The first is when they are trying to goad people into anger. The second–as I suspect is the case here–is to allow people to gain credibility among their own after being an “outsider” as Mr. Wright was until so very recently. All this aside, here is the heart of what struck me as fascinating in Mr. Wright’s post:

“I am hoping, of course, that future shows will also portray sadomasochism and bondage in a positive light — we are all looking forward to FLASH GORDON’S TRIP TO GOR, I hope. Love affairs with corpses, small children, and farm animals will also be on display in a natural nonchalant fashion in the new raft of progressive shows, titles such as I DREAM OF STINKY, PEDERASTY JUNCTION, and OLD MACDONALD HAD A SHEEP — but no Mormons, whose moral standing we all abhor. The only good thing about Mormons, as we all know, is their polygamy. That we can approve of. Anything that offends the Patriarchy, we like. Evil is our good.”

Backing well away from the end of that paragraph, I instead seek to bring all eyes to the first clause of the first sentence: “I am hoping, of course, that future shows will also portray sadomasochism and bondage in a positive light.”

This statement wouldn’t be unusual in most rants of this sort, except for the fact that Mr. Wright has himself penned a novel that portrays aspects of BDSM “in a positive light.” Or a least in a pretty hot light (perhaps it was written during a time when Mr. Wright considered himself to be a “card-carrying sexual libertarian,” a traumatizing image given most of the libertarians I’ve known). For those of you not familiar with the Chaos series, they are based on the (genuinely) neat premise of a war among the Greek gods after Zeus dies, since the Aegis-Bearer leaves no clear heir. They are, in my opinion of the classic “great idea, poor execution” syndrome, but that’s okay. During the novels five kids– four Titan-born, one human– are caught in the balance of powers that be, held hostage in perpetual, amnesiac childhood at a British prep school run by minor deities and other figures from Greek mythology. And in the first one, at least, Mr. Wright deliberately addresses the fact that teenagers– especially cooped-up teenagers– often have to deal with strong sexual feelings, something that other such books (I’m looking at you, Ms. Rowling) fail to realistically discuss.

Now, Mr. Wright has said several times that most of his books were written before his conversion to Catholicism in order to, I suspect, excuse the sexual content of them in light of his new moral views. See, the first book in his Chaos trilogy, Orphans of Chaos (which I thought was a decent read–the second two, not so much), incorporates several BDSM-friendly scenes into what is, by all accounts, a young adult novel.

I came to Orphans not expecting BDSM-tinged writing. I came to Orphans after seeing the cover of the third in the series– a levitating girl in a plaid skirt and an aviator cap, yes please– and the knowledge that it was deeply steeped in Greek myths and legends which are, ah, vaguely of interest to me. Reading Orphans, however, I was surprised by a few things, but most of all by two scenes that jumped out as being different, interesting, and probably exciting and potentially normalizing for BDSM-inclined teens and adults. In the first, the female main character is convinced by her friend to hike up her school-girl’s skirt and provocatively arrange her blouse in order to serve a group of males, and finds the experience of servitude to be uncomfortable, but still appealing. Afterwards, she is bound by an aggressive boy who secures her with a miniature reproduction of the Gordian knot, and sexually menaced until another character comes along and diffuses the situation. Later in the book, the same character is disciplined by her headmaster with a spanking, in which she is not only, if I recall correctly, placed OTK (look it up) and repeatedly smacked on the bottom by an older male, but she is also forced to count the spanks out loud.

Yeah, it was pretty alright.

I want to attempt to bring together this whole post with a digression. Sometimes (not all the time, of course), when vegetarians or vegans abandon their dietary ethics and return to the omnivorous fold, so to speak, they overcompensate. They make youtube videos fetishizing ham, or write magazine articles about experiencing the raptures of eating dog meat, or post opinion pieces in their local paper about the benefits of ethical omnivorism, claiming vague things like “as a vegan, I just felt sick all the time” or “my doctor said I needed to eat fish protein to be healthy” or whatever (these are all things I’ve seen on the internet, by the way, I’m just too lazy to find the links). Anywho, they turn their move away from vegetarianism into some kind of public service, loudly proclaiming to the world that they know now that they were wrong, wrong, wrong, and please forgive them for their errant ways. They’ll rhapsodize about all kinds of meats– they’re just so tasty!–all so that they can once again be accepted by their peers and not looked at askance for once being part of something fringe, because they’re all better now. The tables have been turned, and they’ve been cured by bacon. They have to make sure everyone understands that they’re no longer “weird” and have, you know, grown out of all of that stuff.

I see this same posturing in Mr. Wright’s post about the oh-so-terrible notion that the Sci Fi channel might, sometime, somehow portray bondage in a positive light– whether or not he was, you know, totally kidding, or not. During the scenes I noted above, Orphans reads as just as much an “insider” text as Anne Rice’s Beauty trilogy (though I suspect Mr. Wright Topped during any spanky-panky that he might have engaged in during the before time, in the long long ago), but now that he can comment from a position of moral correctness, he has to turn a full 180 degrees and declare any and all such acts to be Too Too Terrible and Oh So Wrong– on par with “homosex” even! I wonder if he considers consensual BDSM play as the actions of “persons with serious sexual-psychological malfunctions?” Because it’s pretty easy to spot writing intended to be genuinely erotic when it’s penned by people without at least a healthy interest in the practices they describe, and Orphans. . . well, it seemed pretty honest to me, and I read a good deal of smut. Mr. Wright did indeed write of himself in a more-recent, still-available blog post, that “[his] own humiliating experience with fighting temptation warns [him] that human beings are not made of stern stuff” so maybe it’s just that he’s a switch now?

Even if we disregard the disturbing nastiness toward the gay community, the BDSM comment makes it very much seem like Mr. Wright needed to prove something when he wrote that post. In order to gain acceptance where he now desires it so much, he just had to get in the jab at all those terrible people with their paddles and ropes and collars and restraints (buy yours cruelty-free from Vegan Erotica!) and their private goings-on. Why? Because he’s certainly not one of them. He knows better. And thus, he can tell us all just how degenerate such things are, and, you know, Wrong.

Nah. It seems that, if I may hazard a guess, it’s still too painful for Mr. Wright to consider anything so BDSM-friendly as turning the other cheek. . .

But hey, let’s talk about something more important. Sci Fi Channel? If you guys wanted to change your name back from the utterly loathsome “SyFy” handle you just rolled out, and also make Flash Gordon’s Trip to Gor, you’d have at least one viewer. Actually, if you could make it Barbarella’s Trip to Gor, it would probably be even better. Maybe you could get Rose McGowan after she finishes filming Red Sonja? Make it, but don’t send an advance copy to Mr. Wright. I think it might bother him. I heard he hasn’t skied in ages.

So I’m totally living in Boulder now, and it’s pretty awesome. I haven’t felt much like blogging as of late, just because it’s been crazy and stressful getting my house together and getting myself back on a schedule, but I think once things settle down this will be a really awesome place to spend at least a few years. On the most basic level there is an epic amount of vegan food here– some really delicious, some good, some kind of okay, but the sheer volume of restaurants is pretty neat. There is also incredible shopping here, but that’s not always a good thing, unless it’s cheap organic basil at the farmer’s market.

I’ve done more physical activity here in the past weeks and a half than I have in, uh, maybe the last year in Tallahasse. Walking and biking is infinitely more convenient than driving here, at least to do the stuff I like to do, and so days here have ended in some of the best sleep I’ve had in years. I don’t like comparing Boulder to Tallahassee- both towns have their merits– but there is just so much to do here. Days here (at least the ones not entirely devoted to unpacking or other apartment-related things) have consisted of things like walking or biking to a local coffee shop to write, then going to the farmer’s market to get incredible organic vegetables to make stuff for dinner, or cruising up to Rocky Mountain National Park to see elk and glaciers, or biking to an all-vegan fast food joint for “chicken” ranch sandwiches and chili cheese fries, or driving 18 miles to a local small town with fewer lights and a higher elevation to watch a 1 AM meteor shower. Jesus.

So yeah. It hasn’t all been super-awesome-funtime– in fact, I feel somewhat weird and lost and adrift in this town, but I think that is perhaps partially it being August and I’m not getting planners and notebooks to start another semester of school. I’ve actually decided to write full-time at least until World Fantasy Con, and that feels stranger than strange to me. But I want to at least try this for a while– I am working on a book, after all, whether or not it makes sense is yet to be established. We shall see. Eep! OK. So that’s what’s what.

I am feeling really weird and uncomfortable today. Since our new apartments are so much smaller, we are giving away a ton of our furniture, all of which I really liked. And our washing machine and dryer. I know this is a good thing, but I feel a little bit like I’m being forced into a weird new shape without really being ready or OK with it. We are keeping lots of nice things, like our tea chest, and the coffee table my parents mosaic-ed back in the 1970s, and the dresser I bought with one of my first paychecks from my first real job. . . but I just watched our nice TV stand, our coffee table, an end table the cats loved, and some other things drive away. John and I built that household aesthetic together, and. . . I dunno. That is definitely done now. None of the stuff we’re getting rid of are antiques but I liked them, and so I feel a little strange. I know they will be loved in their new homes, and that is good, but the part of me that likes stability and comfort and being around the same stuff is confused and feeling really unhappy right now. OK, I’m done whining now.

I know I’ve been blogging a lot about vegan things as of late, but many things in the news and in my life have inspired me to revisit why I am vegan, rather than just linger, statically, in that state. In Boulder, once we move there, I hope to join up with a few vegan organizations to do more outreach, and a news article I saw today sums up why it is so important to me to do so.

This article was posted on the PPK this morning. Basically, a woman bought a five-legged puppy for $4,000 to save it from being sent to a freak show. This story is heartwarming, but it is also disturbing on a number of levels. One, it is completely insane to me that animal freak-shows still exist, that the freak-show operator was going to spend $3,000 for the privilege of exhibiting and exploiting this animal, and that the cost of rescuing this animal was so high. I think this woman did a great deed in rescuing Lilly (the puppy in question), but frankly, I think stories like this are ultimately problematic.

This dog deserves a good life, but so do all dogs. As much as we might “aww” over this tale of love this is only one dog, and there are so, so many other animals, perfectly healthy animals, languishing in shelters, with adoption fees of far less than $4,000. It makes me wonder about human nature, why humans are so good in a crisis, but so terrible with invisible problems that can be safely ignored and tucked away.

The woman who adopted the puppy had this to say about her reasons for spending so much money: “I felt like I needed to be an advocate for her because she can’t speak.”

Well, that is an awesome quote, and even though this woman might not be vegan (I don’t know), this sentiment is the core philosophy behind being vegan, at least to me. I truly believe veganism is living one’s desire to be an advocate on behalf of the voiceless. Veganism is about pushing aside your “bacon fever,” or desire for constant convenience, or your personal taste, or cognitive dissonance regarding factory farms, or perhaps just blindness toward the fact that animals have feelings, desires, hopes, societies, morals, and hearts just like us, and extending compassion toward the oppressed group of the entire animal kingdom. It is about realizing no one is too busy to be vegan, or that there is nothing stopping someone who works on behalf of the rights of human animals to extend that compassion outward toward all animals. It is about really thinking about how the dogs that are cooped up in shelters, hopefully triggering our sympathy to adopt them, are leading infinitely better lives than the pigs (who are of comparable, if not greater intelligence) who are  are slaughtered every day.

I know humans are capable of great and inspiring compassion, and love, and selflessness. I just wish more humans would be open to exploring that compassion, love, and selflessness with animals other than kitty cats and puppy dogs and other creatures considered “pets” instead of “dinner.”

Yesterday I found out that two of my favorite professors have gone vegan. This happy piece of news inspired me to post about some of my thoughts that came up last week regarding going vegan versus staying vegan.

I recently had a conversation with my homedogg Shawn over at Romantic Scribbles about dealing with the “difficult issues” of belief systems, and how while dealing with such things is occasionally painful, annoying, or disturbing, it is an essential step to meaningful, lasting change. Shawn is dealing with these challenges in his work as a youth minister at a church that puts a high value on relevancy, and was saying that some churches that cater to the come-as-you-are, modern crowd occasionally are reluctant to talk about harder questions of faith. In his opinion, shying away from the more uncomfortable topics leaves people in a place of doubt and frustration when they are inevitably confronted with those questions, and how if people never learn to deal with those issues they might think that their faith/belief system is simply incapable of making sense of the world. Shawn was, at the time, speaking specifically of the question of homosexuality in Christian thought, since it is a hot-button topic these days, and there is obviously immense (and not unwarranted)  tension between the gay community and the Christian community. This in turn made me think about dealing with the difficult issues in veganism.

I suppose I should post a disclaimer before progressing: the organizations I am about to critique have gotten more people to go vegan than I ever will. I am aware that they have both done more good in the world than I could ever hope to do, and I appreciate (sometimes– more on that later) their hard work and dedication. But I think no one is beyond critique, and I also think that though these organizations are doing a lot of good they are also doing a lot of harm, as well.

I find that in the vegan community there is also a great deal of anxiety over how to talk to people about complicated questions regarding abstaining from animal-based products. I don’t personally think there is a philosophically on-point organization out there in terms of confronting the realities of vegan life, either going vegan or staying vegan, or dealing with diplomatic, reasonable, and effective vegan outreach. Today I will (thrillingly) address the two largest organizations, and what I see as their shortcomings in vegan philosophy.

First of all, there is PeTA, which is an organization that I feel has done more to harm the vegan cause than any group of people ought to do, but that’s another post. PeTA, especially PeTA2, is actually really great at getting people to go vegan (especially that coveted ‘tween’ age group). They have awesome merchandise: t-shirts, stickers, and other stuff, all with their brand of catchy sloganeering (the “I am not a nugget!” campaign is especially attractive), and their website is flashy and cool and looks like every advertisement at Hot Topic or wherever. PeTA may have good “action alerts” for those who don’t realize that McDonald’s is bad for animals, or that Versace uses fur or something, but PeTA is really terrible at keeping people vegan. Why? Because PeTA is (1) problematic in that it focuses its energy in truly bizarre places, (2) easy to ridicule, especially by people who realize it’s perhaps a bad idea to pretend that it helps animals to resort to lowest-common-denominator advertising that makes women into the meat we’re supposed to be avoiding (as well as having a rotten track record for sensitivity to women’s issues in general), or is just outrageously offensive and in poor taste, and (3) doesn’t deal with the tough issues.

One of the things that I find that PeTA does wrong is take the “it’s so easy to be vegan!” tack. Now, I’m not saying it’s hard to be vegan– in fact, I think it is remarkably easy given how hostile to veganism the world sometimes seems to be– but it’s not always easy, and PeTA doesn’t do a lot to address that. Being vegan is remarkably easy when you’re surrounded by vegans. Being vegan is not so easy when your family doesn’t support you (especially as a child, tween, or teen without money to buy your own groceries or advocate for the restaurants your family goes to), or when your friends are assholes about it, or when it’s Thanksgiving and you realize for the first time you don’t get to eat mom’s turkey or Aunt Josephine’s homemade mac-n-cheese and everyone really wants you to join in. Times like that it’s easy to think things like “well, it’s already been paid for” or “once won’t hurt” or some such. While that’s probably true in an objective sense, to eat something “just once” is dishonest to one’s self and one’s belief system that absolutely can address those kinds of problems in very real and very compelling manners, and is the result of a lack of a thorough exploration of the ideology behind veganism that is rooted in the terrible suffering of animals to bring us such treats as Thanksgiving dinner or birthday cake. Images, even the most terrible images, fade, but reason sticks with you.

What PeTA does right is that it gets people to go vegan. Hell, they got me to go vegan: once in college for about half a day, and then for real in ’06 when I really made the choice for life. PeTA, if it stuck to its really effective campaigns (slaughterhouse pictures, fact sheets about eggs, undercover lab-testing exposes, cold hard numbers behind the breed/adopt debate) might do some real good. But for now it seems like it takes other organizations or social groups to keep people vegan. The support found at places like the Post Punk Kitchen or the friendly atmosphere at retailers such Herbivore or Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe are much more effective in terms of making the right choice a long-term choice.

The other vegan organization out there that shies away from the tough issues is the milder, more outwardly reasonable Vegan Outreach. That said, I have recently requested to be taken off the VO mailing list due to an email alert in my inbox the other day. Here is the text of the letter that so infuriated me. In it, the author, Matt Bell, dances around the topic of vegans eating honey, or asking if veggie burgers are cooked on the same surface as meat burgers at restaurants, and other such things that should be dealt with more intelligently than throwing up one’s hands and claiming, and I quote “of course, we could all “do no harm” by committing suicide and letting our bodies decompose in a forest. But short of this, the best path is to take a step back and consider why we really care whether something is vegan.”

Bell’s subtle jabs at the idea of “ahimsa” aside, I personally have taken that “step back,” and I have come to the realization that yes, it is important to care about whether something is vegan. To fret over things like the outward appearance to non-vegans of using vegan soap and avoiding honey is a non-engagement with issues that deserve our attention. It seems easy to me. Using vegan soap supports vegan companies, often small and independent and worthy of business, and I really can’t see a downside to that at all. Additionally, honey is maybe the most avoidable of animal products, and is the easiest animal product to substitute in baking, tea, and Molly’s Patented Cure-All (recipe at the end of this ridiculously long blog post). In fact, it is a superior product given that it dissolves easily in cold as well as hot liquids, making it ideal for iced tea, a place where honey epically fails.

I can’t see how compassion toward insects as well as fluffy animals does anything more than reinforce for non-vegans that veganism is ethically consistent. I don’t find the avoidable/unavoidable idea of veganism “arbitrary,” as Mr. Bell seems to. Indeed, I think his numbers– that 10 billion animals are killed yearly for food purposes– leads rational vegans to a place of wanting to do more, and thus avoiding things like whey, stearates, leather goods, wool, and other so-called by-products of that terrible, terrible industry. To do so is the logical extension of compassion, and when represented reasonably and cheerfully to non-vegans does not make one seem insane or overly pious or whatever he seems to think. To be frank, most non-vegans think vegans are crazy just for avoiding cheese, or chicken, or perhaps most of all (given the conversations I have, but maybe it’s just a southern thing) bacon, so I doubt jaws really drop any lower at the mention of honey. It is ethically disingenuous to go halfway, ending the discussion with statements like “the issue for thoughtful, compassionate people isn’t, “Is this vegan?” Rather, the important question is: “Which choice leads to less suffering?” Our guide shouldn’t be an endless list of ingredients, but rather doing our absolute best to stop cruelty to animals.” This sort of false binary only allows lazy people to justify eating honey. Vegans really can make a conscientious effort to avoid animal ingredients and do our best to stop cruelty to animals!

It is so, so easy to avoid by-products, and it is so, so easy to deal rationally with issues such as by-products, honey, and the notion of cross-contamination. No, honey is not a vegan product, regardless of whether your car kills bugs when you drive. No, it isn’t unreasonable to buy vegan soap even if your tires are made with stearates. No, it isn’t bad for the vegan image if you politely ask a server if vegan options are prepared in a way that they might be cross-contaminated by meat. His bland polemic “the animals don’t need us to be right, they need us to be effective” is a rallying cry for slitherer-outers who simply don’t want to think hard about inconvenient issues. And, in my opinion, to ignore or justify those sorts of minutiae only leads to a case of unnecessary justification to omnivores asking why it’s OK to exploit insects with a complex society and culture but not to eat less-self-aware creatures such as oysters.

I think it’s better to be honest to one’s self and to the animals, and just take the time to sort out one’s own thoughts so one can communicate effectively when needed. There are obviously more than two groups of people who ask about veganism, but two of the biggest are those who are genuinely interested and who will appreciate rational discussion, honest answers, and ethical consistency, and those who ask about veganism only to sneer and chide and won’t think veganism is possible regardless of ambivalence to honey-eating. Why limit our compassion just to reach those people? Dishonesty to a movement for the sake of making a fairly complicated life-decision seem easy is just silly.

In my opinion, being as consistent as possible does more to help the animals, and I genuinely care about bees, meat in my food, and not washing myself with animal fat. I am also fairly confident in my ability to represent that compassion to others without seeming insane, and if I of all people can do that, more cool-headed individuals must be able to with ease. Really, to say anything different would be dishonest.

Veganism isn’t always easy, but it is a moral choice, and those are never always easy. To represent veganism as anything less than a complicated, but compassionate decision that helps the animals and the earth is just setting up people for hard times later when they do have to wrangle with those questions without help from organizations such as Vegan Outreach or PeTA, and I hope one day they see that. And with that, here’s my recipe for my honey-free, go-to cure-all whenever I’m feeling a cold coming on, or have a sore throat, or am just feeling like I need a little pep in my step.

Molly’s Cure-All

The juice of half a lemon

2-3  tbs. agave nectar

1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper

two slices fresh ginger

1/2 fresh garlic clove

Smash the garlic and the ginger, and drop in a mug. Cover with lemon, agave, and cayenne. Top off with boiling water, stir, let sit until cool enough to drink, and enjoy! Yes you will smell like garlic but it’s good for what ails you!

Yesterday I was in Borders trying to find Lirael, the sequel to Garth Nix’s faboo Sabriel that I devoured at the end of last semester instead of spending my time more productively translating Plato’s Apology. Sabriel was awesome, pretty much everything I could want in a novel– in brief, a teenaged necromancer with a pale skin and black hair and a glowing, rune-covered sword battles the forces of evil with a bandolier of silver bells that send the dead back to where the dead should be. And a talking cat. YES! Despite falling victim to what I consider to be the most overused of fantasy tropes (which I will not discuss here due to the fact that to talk about it would be a Serious Spoiler for future readers) I found it extremely pleasing to my sensibilities and I am anticipating hearing Nix speak at World Fantasy Con this October.

This post, however, is not about Sabriel, nor is it about my disappointment that Borders didn’t have Lirael. Instead, it is about book marketing and something strange in Borders.

The subject of this post might be something quite old in the world of book marketing but it is news to me because I usually don’t shop at Borders. I usually order everything online, mostly because I purchase research materials that are rare or out of print and Abe Books and Amazon’s independent sellers tend to do better for me. But after hearing from an author friend that it’s better to buy books from places like Borders (or, of course, independent booksellers if you have one) so they’ll be sure to carry author’s next works, I decided to go.

Thinking that Sabriel would be considered Young Adult fiction, I walked in the general direction of the children’s area only to find that instead of finding Young Adult, I found a section called Independent Readers. It contained some famous youth-oriented fantasy books (Harry Potter, etc.) marked with an indicator of age level. Despite the problematic nature of ranking books according to age due to some mythical idea of when books are appropriate for young readers (which is a whole ‘nother post), I figured this was NewSpeak for Young Adult and commenced looking around only to be baffled by an absence of Nix. I found J.K. Rowling, I found Philip  Pullman, I found C. S. Lewis. No Nix. So, thinking perhaps that Sabriel was in with the grown-up fantasy, I trekked across the store. I found Gaiman, I found Maguire, I found Pullman (same books, fancier, more adult-oriented covers), but still Nix was nowhere to be seen.

Frustrated at that point, I addressed one of the employees. The young man in question gave me the “are you daft?” look that disaffected bookstore employees and baristas everywhere give to customers who ask them questions (from my porch I shake my cane at the world, disturbing many a cat), and led me to a different section of the bookstore, the Young Adult  section proper.

There I did find Nix (though not the Nix I desired) and a host of other books, including Gaiman’s Stardust, an entire ocean of the Twilight series in hardcover, and Libba Bray’s corseted Gemma Doyle novels. For the life of me I could not figure out why these merited their own section apart from Rowling and Pullman, since the literary stylings of Stephenie Meyer’s novels are, shall we say, less complicated than, for example, The Amber Spyglass, and her subject matter is, perhaps, less profound (“Did the cute boy come to school today?” versus “What is the nature of the soul? What is death? What makes children different than adults?”). The same for A Great and Terrible Beauty, which is also less emotionally and syntactically complicated than Pullman (but which I genuinely enjoyed after purchasing it solely on the basis of its cover).

Then it struck me: the thing that Stardust, Sabriel, Twilight, and the Gemma Doyle books all have in common is that they all have sex in them. Though the sex scene in Sabriel is mild, it is still present and accounted for much moreso than the mention of sexuality in His Dark Materials (though they perhaps get points for mentioning genital mutilation and being children’s novels) or in any of the Narnia books. Due to grad school I have been severely behind on all fiction reading, and most notably my YA reading (which is sad, because YA fantasy novels are generally my favorite), so few of the other titles were familiar to me, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. And the less it made sense, given that I know that as a kid (or as kids seem to be called these days, “independent readers”) I would have been a heck of a lot more disturbed by the death and violence in the Harry Potter books and the Pullman novels than any of the makeout-sexy-time in the YA novels in Borders. Except for Twilight, but this is neither the time nor the place to discuss that particular grab-bag of oddness.

Anyways, I wonder if my hunch is correct, and that sexuality is the signifier of Young Adult Fiction these days. If I am right, and sex has become that line in the sand, it seems really weird. I don’t know if it’s my own preference for sex over violence (call me crazy) but it seems weird to me, and really arbitrary. I wonder if Borders got a lot of letters from parents complaining that the makeouts in some Young Adult books were just too adult for their tween? I know that as a kid who grew up before the era of the nebulous “Independent Reader” section at Borders, I really appreciated YA fiction that included both sexuality and violence because those are things that are a part of life, and deserve inclusion in literature for thinking people of various ages. I think the stakes are even higher for YA/Independent Readers, since (dealing with sexuality specifically, since most kids won’t ever need to worry about taking up their father or mother’s sword to battle evil) books aimed at that age group will model for kids what sexuality could look like in the future, and thus I think the best books for are ones that deal with that subject intelligently.

I just turned in my final grades for the last class I will ever teach at FSU, and I have three more plays/reading responses due before I finish my last DIS. The only academic work I plan on doing afterwards directly relates to my new writing project that I am super-excited about, but that is still super-secret. 

The handmaiden of such changes has been a mild existential crisis wherein I have realized that most of my skill set is completely useless outside of graduate school. I know I will use my research skills (which are, after three years, pretty boss) and ancient Greek (which is OK considering) for personal writing projects, but in terms of the auxiliary personal goals I’m working towards I am the proverbial babe in the woods.

Thus I am embarking on a project of trying to learn how to “do stuff.” Mechanical things, like taking care of a bike or fixing shit that breaks, or just work better with my hands. Right now I tally my practical skills, as they stand, at:

1. Making Food: I am an awesome cook no doubt. I can pretty much cook or bake anything I set my mind do. I can cook traditional vegan fare and I can veganize omni dishes like a champ. I can cook under a variety of conditions, from crappy, ill-equipped kitchens to kitchens with gadgets, fancy pans, and doodads, to cooking pancakes or stew or whatever on a grill over a coal pit in the middle of the fucking woods. 

2. Knitting: I am a reasonably OK knitter. I can do hats and scarves and mittens and I could probably make a sweater I just get bored by big projects or anything with tiny needles. I have provided warm garments for a number of people I love and plan to keep doing so. 

3. Taking Care of Cats: I have amassed a body of knowledge on this subject, from geriatrics to the tiniest of kittens.

4. Making Kombucha: I gave my mother to a dear friend because I didn’t know if she’d make it out Colorado but once we get up there I plan to get brewing again. 

5. Identifying Birds: In the Southeast I am pretty good at knowing what kind of bird I am looking at.

6. Making Fire: I can do that on camping trips or in fireplaces.

7. Taking Care of Cast Iron: Currently as I am typing this I am re-seasoning my cast iron. The serious kind of re-seasoning, where you scrape it down with steel wool and then coat it in vegetable shortening and bake the fuck out of it. Right now my house smells like pancakes.

8. Make Art Or Possibly Craft Depending on Who You Ask: I’m not sure if this counts but I can do printmaking and painting and I can draw stuff OK. I can also do stuff like re-cover seat cushions and hot glue stuff and sew minor things like Halloween costumes.

As far as I can tell that’s it. So the reason I’m thinking about this is that today I took my bike to my friend’s house (same friend to whom I gave the kombucha) to see if there was anything wrong with it. Basically five years ago I bought a bike so I could bike to campus, and then after I graduated I’ve not used it. Now we’re moving to Boulder, so I know I will want to bike, so I figured I would start biking around Tally to get back into it. My friend, who bikes a ton and worked in a bike shop and is probably opening a bike shop, went over my whole bike, checked everything out, and declared it sound after fiddling with things and putting air in the tires. 

Then came the moment of truth, when he told me to put the front wheel back on my bike. I froze. He showed me how to do it but my fingers fumbled on it and I couldn’t get it to work. I was completely embarrassed because this is a skill I should have, but my friend was very patient, laughed at me for thinking I should be good at everything, and walked me through it enough times so that I could do it. Then he showed me a few little things I could do to take care of the bike myself, with the promise of more lessons later.

So my Greek teacher would accuse me again of the sin of pride– that I think I “should” be able to do things perfectly because I’m smart and competent– and I would accuse me of the sin of being a pampered little girl who needs to be more independent from the men in my life and the world as a whole. I want to be able to work with my hands, to be more self-sufficient.

We’ll see how that goes. Right now I am just excited that today I “fixed” my bike after my friend messed it up on purpose to teach me, and my house smells like hot shortening because I’m re-seasoning a piece of cast iron that got all rusty after it wasn’t cleaned properly after a camping trip.

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.”  Charles de Gaulle

On the day that New Hampshire legalized gay marriage, I also read this article over at The Huffington Post. It is getting increasingly harder and harder for me to maintain my faith in humanity. Perhaps describing things as inhuman, such as radio hosts advocating psychological and physical violence toward transgender children, is the wrong way to think about it. Besides the fact that the pejorative “inhuman”  is an inherently speciesist term, especially given that apparently animals have moral codes, more and more I think perhaps kindness, sympathy, understanding, and acceptance are the “inhuman” traits.

Sometimes I think all the goodness in people comes from our animal ancestry, and whatever changed when we got opposable thumbs and developed frontal lobes and walking on two legs or whatever the heck else makes us different from our ancestors– that’s what’s wrong with us. There are just so many people doing awful things that I can’t help but feel that goodness is the aberration, and cruelty, hate, and violence are the norm for our species. Factory farming, callous environmental destruction, animal breeding for pleasure, terrorizing women and the people who help them, denying rights to those different than us, being assholes to kids (one host advocated beating a gay male child with high heeled shoes), shutting down state parks, an eight-year administration in this country based on fear, torture, and worldwide cowboy-swagger bullshit and the backlash against any sort of change to that, it is all so overwhelming.

It is hard to remember sometimes that there are green places in this world. It is hard sometimes to take a step back to think about the expression on a cat’s face when she rolls around in the sunshine, or remember that there are people who do have more love than hate inside them, that there are hopefully many more people who think those radio hosts are despicable rather than amusing. 

But then also there is the truth that even if you come home at night to a person who loves you, or people who love you, that you have something special and unique and you are lucky. No matter how many hugs you might get there is suffering out there of intense, unknowable magnitude–human and animal alike. And it seems like trying to make a difference is so abstract, so impossible, as to be laughable.

But it is not laughable, not if one person’s, or one animal’s, life is improved by kindness and love. Despair is unhealthy. It takes us to a place where we cannot act. But sometimes it is hard to fight, when you know there are people in the world who “look forward to when [transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy.” 

I need to be better about doing my part to make the world not suck quite so much.

*Update: over at the Post Punk Kitchen the thread on this topic generated this letter by one of my favorite posters:

Dear every right-wing goon in the country:

Love,
Everybody else