In Which The Meat-Eater Goes Vegetarian For A Weekend
So when my pal Nayad came to visit me in Cleveland for the weekend, she told me she’d been thinking about going vegan. I, having recently been told I have to change my eating habits or die, was in the mood for a challenge. So I said, “Why don’t we try to eat vegetarian for the whole weekend? Like, find all of Cleveland’s vegetarian restaurants and try to see how many days we go before we eat meat?”
For as any vegetarian knows, the challenge is not in finding something to eat. You can have that bowl of lettuce with vinegar on it. The trick is finding a multiplicity of meals that you would like to have.
Fortunately, Cleveland is actually home to many, many fine restaurants. Clevelanders dine out more than just about any other major city, and so a lot of New York chefs have said, “Why should I pay New York rents when I can pay Cleveland rents and get the same number of enthusiastic, knowledgeable clients?” So while it’s a constant surprise to outsiders, Cleveland has some of the best and most varied dining I’ve had the pleasure to experience.
And it was a nice challenge. I had to do a lot of research to find places with good vegan options, so Nayad could sample the vegan lifestyle for a bit, but it gave us some lovely conversations as we debated options and weighed approaches, and then I got to try several new restaurants I hadn’t been to before.
The trick in vegetarian dining, I’ve found, is that the substitute route doesn’t work that well. Yes, I could technically go vegetarian by substituting “chick’n strips” for chicken, which can be masked with surprising skill, but in the end it’s not really chicken and it’s probably not all that healthy. All I’m doing is swapping a fat-laden meal for a processed chemical meal. (Or abandoning all hope and doing as bad vegetarians do, trying to convince the world that tofu tastes anything like chicken.)
No, what you need to do is to create a whole new meal that is vegetarian. One of the most satisfying dishes I had was a vegan ravioli, where they didn’t avoid the vegan-ness of it (aside from faking the egg for the pasta), but instead embraced it. Meaty mushroom for the filling, a thick and sweet thai chili paste for the sauce. Very savory and complex, with lots of veggies in it.
Much, much better than a BBQ patty with tempeh. A good vegan dish forces you to appreciate the beauty of vegetation, not to hide it.
The other thing is that vegetarian meals don’t prevent you from pudginess. This I knew from my friend Jim, an animal rights lover who was addicted to vegetarian corn dogs, but having not one but two vegetarian cupcakes was probably a bit much. And the smoothies, though full of all the nutrition and healthiness of fruit, also gave me a shock-sugar rush that set my hands to trembling. I gained two pounds over the weekend, and that was with a lot of walking and aerobic exercise baked in.
Still, if you’re interested, the clear winner in the Cleveland Vegetarian Restaurant Challenge is The Flaming Ice Cube, a lovely little hippiesque diner that is very concerned about getting all the details right. It had the tastiest smoothies, the best meals, and a wide menu with so many options that we wanted to go back twice (and couldn’t, since they were closed that Sunday).
Second place was Pura Vida, an upscale restaurant that’s a little pricey for everyday dining but has perhaps the most awesome African peanut stew you’ll ever try (kale and sweet potatoes round it out deliciously), and had the ravioli I discussed. They have monthly vegan get-togethers, which I may well go back to, though I was amused at how panicked I got when the waiter asked, “Are you a vegan?” and Nayad answered “yes” for me and I was like, “No! I’m not! I’m just pretending to be one of you for the weekend, I love meat, please don’t hurt me!”
Disappointments were, as always, Tommy’s – which is decent, don’t get me wrong, but it’s got that Taco Bell trick of presenting eight ingredients cut up a thousand different ways so that you think it’s an expansive menu and really it’s a few core selections – and The Root Cafe, which we were told had vegan bagels but didn’t, and had but one paltry vegan option for breakfast.
Still. I’d do it again. It’s a fun way to expand your taste profiles, even if I’ve gotta ease up on these vegan cupcakes. And if anyone reading knows of any other good (read: tasty) options in the Clevelandish area, let me know!
Behind On Everything, So Forgive Me
As I lurch back into real life, my job has once again taken a large precedence – and since basically, we changed our entire web architecture while I was asleep, catching up has been a bit of a nightmare.
Which means that I’m behind on a lot. I still need to write thank-you notes for many of the lovely sentiments and gifts received during my surgery. And my suicide post attracted a lot of well thought-out, very personal responses that don’t deserve to lie fallow. But I have a Nayad coming in this weekend to visit, and work presses today, and so I shan’t for a bit.
But I wanted to let you know that I feel very very guilty about it. And responses are coming.
Your Genitals Will Dissatisfy Someone: A Rant
(NOTE: I generally don’t back-post my essays on FetLife over to my “main” journal, usually because they’re a little too graphic for what I consider my public face these days. But this one took off on Fet, generating over 1,400 loves and 275 comments – and not a negative one in the bunch. And since body positive one is, I think, an important topic, I’m doing the unusual and taking a graphic essay on sex and posting it riiiiight here.)
FetLife’s writings are ablaze with women coming to terms with the fact that their vaginas possess natural odors, and that these scents are not in fact disgusting but outright alluring to many. That is awesome.
What FetLife is not ablaze with, but private sessions are, are men who are secretly worried that their cock is funny-shaped, or too small, or not up to snuff in some way. They’re not gonna volunteer this, because cocks get made fun of enough of on FetLife for being crude avatars, and they’re trying to attract a crowd of women who, as porn has taught us, only want Moby Dick. But I guarantee you: a lot of guys are just as worried.
Sadly, we can extend this terror to every part of the body: My tits aren’t symmetrical. My teeth are weird. My laugh is funny. My skin is the wrong shade. My asshole is too dark. So let’s cover our mouths when we laugh, slather ourselves in makeup, buy bras with special padding, douche maniacally, and buy p3n1S pills from these oh-so-reliable Nigerian doctors.
What many of these sad origin stories have in common is usually one person going, “Guh. That part of your body? I really don’t like that.” And then, because we’re all sensitive to criticism, we extrapolate and go, “Well, person X didn’t like it, so everyone must be disgusted by it.” Sprinkle a little societal terror in brought on by companies who profit richly off your body shame, and pretty soon it feels like everyone in the world vomits at the thought of your squishy bits.
You know what?
Fuck them.
Or, rather, don’t fuck them.
Look, if someone doesn’t like your nethers? That’s just one opinion. It may be a hurtful opinion, if it comes from someone you want to impress… but don’t extrapolate it to the whole world. It’s a big fucking universe, and out there is someone who is mad for exactly what you possess.
Seriously. I know a lot of women who prefer average to smaller cocks because they can fuck for longer without getting it sore and they can take it all the way own their throats. Personally, I love chubby women with strong scent. I’ll admit to imperfections in Little Elvis that I’m not thrilled with, but some have personally adored.
If you look around on FetLife, you’ll see people who do not just tolerate your particular body style, but actively crave it. It’s a big world. You are not unattractive to everyone. You’re deeply attractive to someone.
Now find ’em.
Keep in mind that there are a ton of businesses out there who make money by yelling, “OH, GOD, YOU’RE HORRIBLE!” and then saying, “…but we have this bunch of chemicals that can help you hide this shame, for only $6 a bottle!” These people are not your friends. They are not society, either. They are carpetbaggers hoping to make a buck off of your insecurities, and you should not listen to them.
Life is too short to spend with people who are revulsed by your bits, man. What you have? It’s awesome for someone. It’s a turnon. And I’m not saying your partner is obligated to love every bit of you… but I am saying that you should not read that single person’s preference writ global, and you should not read that preference as a lack of love or attraction for you, either.
Hey, my wife loves Viggo Mortenson and other men with strong chins and calm blue eyes, and yet she fell for Googly-Eyed Mister Potatohead here. Somehow all of my other features add up to sexy for her. I am more than the sum of my parts; it is the whole of me that is sexy, and goddammit on my better days I’ll own that.
That’s cool. What I have is awesome. What you have is awesome, and shame is not a turn-on. Stop spending time trying to hide this natural part of you and let it fucking fly.
"Ya Look Good": A Flurry Of Reactions To A Changed Body
So I’ve lost thirty pounds, and when people see me they’re kind of startled. “Whoah!” they say. “You look good!”
At which point I have several contradictory reactions going off like fireworks in my head.
First is, how feeble am I supposed to be? Because, yeah, big ol’ heart operation two months ago, I was very frail, and here I am feeling half-decent again and now someone’s reminded me that I’m convalescent. Which isn’t their fault. I’m often the first youngish person they’ve known to have a bypass surgery, and so their expectations are low, and to see me popped up and walking about again is a pleasant surprise for them. Still, I wonder what I looked like in their mind. Maybe in a wheelchair, with an oxygen mask, clutching a cane in trembling hands.
Then: I don’t want to look good. All this increased health? The result of near-terminal illness. I stand straighter, because my chest hurts when I slouch – a habit that makes me look taller, thinner, and also makes me feel stiff and Frankensteinish. My weight is because a) I’m eating much better, b) exercising more, and c) have zero appetite because when they cut your fucking chest open like a crab, it takes a few months to feel hungry again. I eat out of obligation for about four out of five meals, and will often forget if Gini doesn’t mention it.
So I’m not really looking better. It’s just that my injuries take on societally-acceptable forms.
Then: this is bullshit. Fucking weight-obsessed society revomiting. Because when people say “You look good,” nine times out of ten that means “You’ve lost weight,” as nobody ever compliments someone on gaining a few pounds in strategic locations. Maybe it’s the new hat, or the snazzy mustache, but I can’t help but think if “You look good” wasn’t such a synonym for “You looked bloated and pudgy before, but now your whale-like figure is approaching a societally-acceptable shape,” then everyone would be a lot happier. And I hate, hate, buying into that idea that “good” is “skinnier.”
Then I go, “Oh, really?” and go into the bathroom and preen, as my new mustache looks good on my slimmer face, and my clothes fit better, and with this newer, more in-shape body, aren’t I just dapper. How nice.
It’s nice looking good, it really is, once you force past the wave of revulsion.
Let's Talk About Suicide
When I was a teenager, I fantasized about suicide in the way one might consider a good night’s sleep. My life thrummed to a constant backbeat of “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I wasn’t around.” I’d think about ways to do it, decided all of them involved too much pain or messiness, and I really couldn’t do that to Mom and Dad and Tommy anyway, and I’d set it back on the shelf like a favorite DVD, to be replayed later. Suicide was my copy of Princess Bride, a luxuriation of thoughts of nothingness and coffins to sink into when I was stressed out.
It took me a long time to understand how rare and bizarre those fantasies were.
LiveJournal woke me up; I did some poll on suicidal thoughts, and I discovered that the idea of self-harm hadn’t even occurred to most of the people on my friends’ list. And my friends’ list was filled with freaks like me. So I did some checking, and sure enough, the vast majority of people, even when faced with massive stress, never think about offing themselves. The idea never presents itself as an option.
How weird.
Yet here I am, a supposedly healthy adult, and about once a week when something wrong happens, I go, “Oh, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” The idea is like a pretty garden, walled off with barbed wire and high taxes; the cost of getting there is ridiculously painful, but sort of sweet in its own way.
When I talk to other suicidal people, though, they often feel the same way. Their lovers have betrayed them, their job is full of stress and uncertainty, they can’t pay the bills, and their health is fluctuating. And so they seek suicide, and some of them get it.
Here’s the problem, though. What many of them don’t want is suicide.
They want a vacation.
For me, these thoughts of suicide often arise because I’ve got so much stress in my life that I can’t possibly stop the hits from coming. If I’m in the middle of a huge emotional fight with my girlfriend and work is filled with deadlines, I can’t take a day off – and even if I could, I’d be filled with so much worry about oh my God what’s going to happen with Doreen, what does it mean that she’s so mad can we work this out oh God she’s calling now please let us not fight that the day off would be useless. There would be literally nowhere I could go to get away from my worries; I’d carry them with me. The only thing I could do would be to try to sleep (which I couldn’t) or maybe take some pills or alcohol to try to blot it out.
And I think: If I was dead, none of this would matter.
That blankness seems so glorious.
But I don’t go down that barbed path, because while suicide does technically stop all those troubles, it also ensures that I would never get to hit the unpause button and find new lovers, work through my unhappiness, and find joy again. Which I have done, time and time again. Life seems so overwhelming and futile, yet if I buckle down and work at it, I usually find a way to get somewhere better.
It’s not a promise, of course; nothing is. But I can think of several times I was like oh my God I can’t handle this where if I’d hit the perma-kill button, I never would have seen the other side. Me, as an awkward lonely teenager, convinced I would never find a girl willing to hold me. Me, as a twentysomething crazy person, convinced I’d never get it together. Me, at the helm of a failing division at Borders, convinced I would get fired and never have a career again. Me, in the first year of my crumbling marriage with Gini, convinced we’d never work this out.
That’s an awful lot of nevers in my life that proved to be totally untrue.
And you know, I’ve known a lot of suicidal folks. A lot of them wind up happy later on. It can happen. Does more often than you’d think, really. Those nevers actually often turn out to be merely formidable problems – not the impassable barrier of a never, but a wall that can be chipped away, one fleck at a time, until you break a hole in it big enough to slither through.
And no. You don’t get to rest while you’re working on that wall, and it’s exhausting and frustrating and hurtful, oh so hurtful. But that work, more often than not, is rewarded in my experience – not just my personal experience, but watching other people go through it time and time again. You want to just lie down and fucking rest and not have people ask you any questions, and no, you can’t have that now.
But there is some peace waiting on the other side. More importantly, there’s more joy to be mined out of this life, more beauty, more chances to try again than you’d ever believe in this moment of despair.
So what I’m saying to you right now if you feel overwhelmed is, don’t confuse your need for a vacation for an actual life-ending. Hey, if I could give you a magic box to put yourself in where you could just pause the world and read books and breathe for a week, I totally would. That would probably make things a lot easier for you, because right now you feel like a boxer, with blow after blow hitting you and that goddamned referee refusing to ring the bell and give you a break.
Sometimes suicide looks like that break. But the problem with suicide is that you never get to hit that unpause button, and more often than not that’s a tragedy that affects everyone around you and you.
So think about your vacation. Revel in it. But be realistic about what that very permanent step would actually mean. Okay?