Being vegan is hard!

Or so people tell me. Many of them probably haven't actually given it a shot. They just say some variation of the above. I also hear nonsense like "being vegan means sacrificing" or "I could never do that" fairly often and it's only been a couple months. Perhaps I'm being unfair when I call the latter "nonsense"--I'm sure they know what they can and can't do better than me. Nonetheless, I am very suspicious of the truth of that statement when I hear it, so when someone says it all I hear is them reinforcing their resolve to continue eating animal products by repeating justifications of their supporting frivolous abuse and slaughter. Or perhaps they're just reminding me of their boundaries out of concern that I'll cross them by saying more about the unsavory aspects of their food sources than they're comfortable hearing.

Writing this in a blog post feels like kind of a passive-aggressive move to me. I probably won't post it on Tumblr to lower the chances of anyone who has said this to me reading this. If that didn't work, hello and nothing personal, this is just how I feel and I try not to hurt your feelings too much by actually talking about this sort of thing around you (or maybe by the time you read this I'll have made an ass of myself in front of you and if I did, sorry.) That's a collective/ambiguous "you", by the way, not you personally. Anyway.

I suppose it could be worse--I haven't run into any outright hostility yet. Most people are supportive as long as I don't show any signs of expecting them to do it, too. I'm not naive enough to expect them all to go vegan just because I am, but I do think they should, and I'm not going to say otherwise (although it is their own choice that they have to make themselves--that doesn't mean I don't have an opinion about what choice they should make. An irrelevant opinion, but it exists nonetheless and it won't change.) I wouldn't care as much if so many people being omnivores didn't limit my food choices in some circumstances because omnivores are the ones being catered to. I'm vegan mainly because I think keeping and slaughtering livestock (especially on an industrial scale) is wrong, but I go out of my way to wash my hands of it for the sake of my own peace of mind--it might make a difference, but one person changing their habits won't make the factory farms disappear.

Anyway. Veganism itself is not hard, at least not in my experience and at least not the dietary aspect of it, which seems to be what most people insist is so hard (you can look through my previous posts if you'd like to see examples of the mental circles I've been running around in because of the wool and leather I bought pre-vegan.) It isn't that there isn't tons of delicious vegan-friendly food out there--it's just that it's neglected in favor of omnivorous recipes. Since omnivores can eat vegan food without violating their principles and the reverse is not true, I find this extremely irritating and profoundly unfair. Not that most people have any reason to care about that--it's just an explanation for how I react to omnivorous eating habits. If it seems like I resent them, it's because I do, even if the people who possess them are lovely. Not saying any of them should go vegan to make me happy--I know that will probably just make them resent me if their hearts aren't in it, and I don't want that. Just venting, I guess.

SUGAR--

Christmas is nearly over as I write this, and I do not have a sore throat or (much of a) headache. Context matters here, I guess (although I'm sure you can guess without me telling you.) My family has this tendency to really load up on sweets over the holidays (even past the amount we can conceivably stuff our faces with over Christmas assuming we don't care about the consequences later.) When there are sweets around, my usual reaction is to eat them until they're gone. Because sweets are delicious in any quantity (actually, no, but I forget this easily XD.) However, when those sweets contain animal products (which most of the baked things do), it suddenly becomes super easy for me to not eat them (although Mom's sugar cookies are slightly tempting--perhaps next year I'll make my own batch.)

Regardless of how much I like a variety of sweets (or think I do), my favorite thing is actually Chex mix (which is easy to make vegan, especially when my parents usually make two batches anyway.) This year, I also started a new tradition--gingerbread bats! The Lady of the Manners posted her recipe, and her professed love of super spicy cookies was enough to convince me to try it out (unfortunately, I do not have a bat-shaped cookie cutter, so I cut them out by hand until I got sick of that and just started making stars. Next year there will be more bats >D.) I substituted a flax egg and Earth Balance buttery sticks for the eggs and butter in the recipe and they were delicious (although not as spicy as I hoped--another thing to work on next year.)

I also started making tangine from a recipe my mom found online, which everyone enjoyed. There was some tension over the meals between me and my mom because she wanted me to cook separate vegan dishes and I wanted her to adapt a couple of her usual recipes, but I've found that since I don't eat much anyway, I'm pretty satisfied with tangine and stuff from the relish tray. (Perhaps I'll make some gravy and biscuits for Thanksgiving next year--we'll see.)

So. Hooray for new traditions and not having a sore throat. Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and happy holidays to everyone else.

Why stories?

Oh hi. It's been how long? I'm still alive. It's only been a month that so wasn't necessary whatever. Anyway. I kind of fell off the blog in the last month or so of my semester, but now I'm on break, so no more excuses. I've kept track of the amount of posts I've missed (I intended to post every Monday and Thursday... *cough*...) and hope to make them up at this point. We'll see. I've got projects planned (but who knows if they'll get done), so there's some post fodder.

This last semester was probably the biggest workload I've ever faced, and I definitely questioned the point of a lot of things that are emphasized in my department--or really I questioned the point of literary analysis. That class was pretty much my pet peeve of the semester even though the professor and the discussions were awesome and the pieces we studied were decently interesting. You see, I'm not really interested in analyzing literature for the sake of analyzing it, and this class really reminded me why. I think it's good to know how to analyze and to what ends people have analyzed things, but unless I have a reason besides getting a grade, I can't help but find my heart isn't in it when I have to pretend to be objective. "The text made me feel x because the author did x" is way more compelling to me than "x thing the author did means x and that's significant because x". Literary impact and interpretation are highly subjective, so why should I bother trying to write objectively about it, or even write about it at all if it doesn't touch me?

That said, most of the stuff we read does touch me to some degree (although the stressful conditions imposed by the schedule we study them by is not very conducive to me putting out quality product regarding said material.) Not a lot, though, just in a "yeah! that makes sense" kind of way. What I like, I like because I recognize and can relate to it. There's the "so what?". If I go any further, I'll just be talking about myself, not the text. I like it because I see myself in it.

That said, I think literature does more than just make us readers feel lonely. It also helps us understand ourselves and our surroundings better because it shapes and reflects the values of the society we live in. If we analyze our reactions and what about a text makes us react that way, it teaches us about ourselves, the people around us, and what factors shape the ways we think and perceive. It's one big mirror/camera that records more than we can ever hold in our hearts and minds at once.

Not that making us feel less lonely isn't important. In doing so, we grow to care about the characters we read about, which I think is also important. In fact, perhaps it wouldn't be inaccurate to think of the ability to give a fuck as a muscle that needs exercising in order to keep functioning--and caring about fictional characters helps exercise that muscle so we're better equipped to use it in real life. At the same time, it can also validate things we see in ourselves but not in other real people because they're too personal. It seems silly, but humans seem to really thrive on validation from other humans. But when everyone is too scared they're the only one that does something or feels some way about something, none of those feelings get validated even if they're common, and we become basket cases who hide ourselves away because we're sure people will think we're weird. Fiction becomes a safe place to talk about these things where they don't implicate real people (or at least, provide said real people with plenty of plausible deniability), but at the same time, we know it comes from people. So it still works as social validation--which makes it easier to care about our own well-being. More flexing of the care-muscle, in short. And that's why fiction is important?

... at any rate. I've got a thing to polish. Maybe I'll have another draft done before the break's up. And maybe one day it will be fit for the general public to view, and someone will read it and obsess over my characters as much as I do and we'll both feel slightly less lonely.