muke-ASS

so i've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the whole becoming vegan thing, and the support is much appreciated! i'm about 2 1/2 weeks or so in (i've had small amounts of dairy 2x...why do i feel a need to confess that?) and the detox process has gotten pretty intense. intensely mucusy that is. holy phelm batgirl! it's more than phelm at this point, it's upper respiratory gunk and it sucks. is this what smokers go through? how do they live with it? i don't feel sick, i just have an intense keep-me-up-at-night cough... a cheesers cough if you will. oh i've been a cheeser for years, i'm tough like that. A blue, creamy, sharp, hard, soft, processed, unpasteurized, cow, sheep, goat, raw, domestic, international, any way i can get it, milk lovin' cheeser! (whew...that nearly became climactic!) yeah, i love cheese. a lot. more than you, i guarantee it. yet, now i don't miss it. this essential building block of my own personal nutritional pyramid, and general life philosophy, is gone and i'm totally ok with it (so far). every time i have thought for a second about putting some cheese on something or in something (ie: my mouth) all i see is a mommy cow who is tied up and being forcibly kept pregnant so she will continue to produce milk, a mommy who as soon as she delivers her babies has them stolen from her. baby girls sent to become dairy cows themselves, and the baby boys have their legs bound so they can't walk and are fattened a bit before being slaughtered for veal. every time. i'm a very visual reader, a whore for the word picture, a victim of my own imagination; sometimes it serves me well and sometimes it kicks me in the ass, this time it's doing both. something clicked in my head and i am no longer able to separate my love for cheese from these torturous acts. but i digress... (that should seriously be the name of my blog:)

back to a more pleasant topic, my mucus. being me means i'm hardwired to ask questions, so my question is where has all of this gelatinous goo been hiding in my body? Because it seems to be excreting from every pore, and it's freakin' gross. has it been lining my lungs, clogging my liver, coagulating in my colon, all this time without me knowing it? my skin is broken out, i'm hacking like a smoker of 35 years, and, well... *ahem* other things are happening too. d-i-sgusting .

what i'm told is that all of this should shake out (jarred by my relentless hacking no doubt) and i will feel like a rockstar in no time. or just a little time at least. in the meantime, i am acquainting myself (and my family) with new foods and recipes. this is the fun part. you will all be happy to know that i have mastered the vegan chocolate peanut butter cup, which leads me to wonder...will i be the only fat vegan on the face of the planet? perhaps i will. time will tell i suppose. i've also met some fabulous new grains, my favorite of which is savory mochi. look into it. one of the perks of veganism is the thoughtfulness with every bite i put into my body. it's a nice way to relate to food, and the world around me. my kids and i (who are still just as enthused about being vegetarians) have been doing a bit of reading about food and it's environmental impact, and i have to say that i had no idea the depth and severity of impact that my dinner was having on the earth. maybe i knew abstractly, but i never really knew, for example, that if every American eliminated just ONE serving of meat from their weekly diet it would be the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road. JUST ONE! while veganism, or even vegetarianism, may not be for you, one meal a week would be pretty doable! that fascinates me.

as my canine children finish up the last of their high priced dry meaty food this week they will become vegetarian too. it seemed weird to me that we would make this change for animal rights and health reasons, and not do the same for our pets...i'll post in the coming weeks about how they are coping/responding to the changes. one last thing for today, and it's a biggie... leather shoes and purses. *deep breath* the shoes are right up there with cheese for me so this is going to be a tough one. i figure i get to keep all of the ones i already have b/c... well the harm has already been done. as far as what comes next, i'm guessing a lot of scenarios that involve me weeping on the sidewalk in front of shoe stores. one thing at a time...

don't do it.

i have some great friends in my life (so blessed!), one particularly wise and awesome friend has a motto that has stuck with me, and i have adopted as my own. "i don't do fucked up" is something she says when toxic people try and gain access to her life. it seems so simple, and yet it can be difficult to discern and enforce. after all, we don't live in a black and white world where lines are clearly drawn and boundaries strictly observed. her point, and i think it's brilliant, is that if you have drama, and you want to project your fucked up shit onto me than you can take your show on the road because i'm not interested.

just think of it, imagine those people in your life that bring the drama with them everywhere they go; and now imagine you said to them, no thanks. not that you would necessarily toss them out of your life, but that you would let them know they needed to check their shit at the door because it's not allowed in big momma's house. easy to say, difficult to follow through on. because of this difficulty we tend to allow these emotional predators into our lives and homes just so we can avoid that awkward, sometimes painful conversation where we shine a light on their behavior.

i will admit that i am widely known as a bitch for saying things out loud that people would rather i didn't, i've been this way since i was so young i don't remember anything else. for me it was a survival mechanism that prevented me from drowning in a sea of passive aggressive brutality. naming what i see in front of me has helped me not completely lose my mind and become one of those people we all see in our downtowns eating their own hair and talking to themselves; so i am thankful for this personality trait. however, every positive has a negative. the negative side of this tell-it-like-it-is coin is that it pisses people off (especially people who are fucked up), and when it pisses these people off they will often come at you with an emotional sucker punch at the first sign of vulnerability. it is these people, that are emotional predators.

i'm guessing all of you have someone in mind right now as you read this, someone in your life that you can conjure without much effort who never shows up at your door without a hefty amount of baggage. maybe it's someone in your family, maybe it's someone you have called friend, regardless it is very difficult to tell these people, as toxic as they may be, to get out. to simply say, "i don't do fucked up". it's a direct, blunt, and somewhat vague sentiment. anyone who has been in your life for a while will want you to elaborate on what you think is "fucked up", and when you do you are walking a slippery tightrope. you know how their behavior makes you feel, and you know how it effects your life, but to define it can be difficult. if you can define it, than you risk feeling isolated in your truth. no one likes to feel lonely, even if it's due to honesty.

so there is your choice, say it out loud and sink into that feeling of being "an island of reality in an ocean of diarrhea" (jason mraz song), or hold it in and allow the fucked up diarrhea to wash over you and find refuge in your home and life. because pretending it's not there has never made it go away.