Chew on This

I generally tend to think that the people at PETA are a bunch of wackos, and I'm always mildly irritated that people tend to think that my veganism means I'm a member of PETA. But the following video is really powerful. Really well done. If it's more than you can handle, I copied and pasted the text from the video below. But if it's more than you can handle, maybe you should re-think the way you eat. ;)

I should probably preface this stuff by saying that I love my non-vegan friends and family. I don't browbeat them with the veganism message. I don't think they're horrible people, but I disagree with eating meat. Doesn't mean I love them any less.

I also removed from the text some of the more offensive points (and many of the points involving environmentalism) that were made, or the ones that make me shake my head and want to run as far as possible away from PETA. Feel free to watch the video, though. It's all there. I just didn't see much point in putting up something that, in not such a nice way, says, "Eating meat makes you overweight". That's not necessarily true. Obviously. And it just seemed mean.

So let's try to keep the hate comments to a minimum.




CHEW ON THIS
GO VEGETARIAN

1.) Because heart disease begins in childhood.
Meat has no fiber but is laden with fat and cholesterol, which is why the late Dr. Benjamin Spock, in the final edition of his book Baby & Child Care, recommended against feeding children any kind of meat.

2.) Because a vegan diet reverses heart disease.
On the American Heart Association (AHA) diet, which includes meat, patients’ arteries continue to clog, while Dr. Dean Ornish’s vegan diet unclogs arteries. In one study, AHA dieters experienced a 28 percent average worsening of clogged arteries, while dieters on Ornish’s program experienced an 8 percent improvement in their arteries.

4.) Because you shouldn’t have to lie to your kids about the food you eat.
Children would be horrified to learn about the cruelty and violence involved in turning chickens, pigs, and other animals into nuggets and other “foods.”

5.) Because in every package of chicken, there’s a little poop.
A USDA study found that 98 percent of broiler chicken carcasses had detectable levels of E. coli, indicating fecal contamination.

6.) Because meat is filthy and bloody.
There are more than 50 million cases of meat-related foodborne illness every year in the United States, thousands of which lead to death. Animals accumulate dangerous chemicals in their flesh and fat (which meat-eaters consume), including dioxins, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, and even the most toxic form of arsenic.

7. ) Because it isn’t fair.
Killing other animals is an act of exploitation and violence, and we do it only because we have the power to.

8.) Because no living creature wants to see her family slaughtered.
Cows love their calves, sows love their piglets, and chickens love their chicks. Farmed animals love their families and mourn their loss.

10.) Because you wouldn’t eat your dog.
Most people are horrified that some cultures eat dogs or whales, but these animals suffer no more than animals commonly consumed in the U.S. The difference is only cultural, not moral.

11.) Because mad cow disease is in the U.S.
Any animal with a brain could contract a version of mad cow disease, yet millions of pigs and chickens are still being fed the remains of diseased animals—in violation of World Health Organization recommendations and the laws of Japan and Europe.

12.) Because it’s violence that you can stop.
We may feel powerless to stop war or other forms of violence, but we can choose not to support slaughterhouses by rejecting flesh foods.

13.) Because no one should have to kill for a living.
Slaughterhouse workers have among the highest rates of injury and illness in the country, and working in a slaughterhouse would dull anyone’s sense of compassion.

14.) Because it takes a small person to beat a defenseless animal ... and an even smaller person to eat one.
If you’re eating meat, you are paying others to commit acts so cruel that if committed against dogs or cats, they would warrant felony cruelty charges in most U.S. states.

15.) Because no animal deserves to die for your taste buds.
A human being’s desire for a momentary taste of flesh is not as important as another animal’s desire not to be tortured and violently killed.

18.) Because you can’t eat meat and call yourself an environmentalist.
Funneling crops and water through animals rather than using those resources directly is our country’s top way of wasting water and polluting. Factory farms demand more water than all other users combined and produce 130 times as much waste as the entire human population of the United States. Farming animals also requires more than one-third of all greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels used in the U.S. and has destroyed three-fourths of our topsoil, a permanent environmental catastrophe that can’t be corrected.

19.) Because they’re defenseless.
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer called speciesism the “most extreme” form of racism because animals are the least able to defend themselves and the easiest to victimize.

20.) Because when animals feel pain, they scream, too.
If you burn them, they feel it. If you give them electric shocks, they feel it. Animals feel pain in the same way and to the same degree that we humans do.

21.) Because they don’t want to die.
Animals value their lives as much as humans do.

22.) Because they feel fear.
Their hair stands on end, they urinate on themselves, and they shake, just as we do when frightened out of our minds with the prospect of being hurt or killed.

23.) Because no matter how you slice it, it’s still flesh.
Other animals are made of flesh, bone, and blood, just as we are, so “meat” is just a euphemism for a decomposing corpse used as food.

24.) Because commerce is no excuse for murder.
The chicken, pork, and other animal mass-murdering industries are huge, but it’s time for them to go the way of the slave trade (which also had strong economic incentives).

25.) Because even prisons aren’t this crowded.
Animals on factory farms are crammed into so little space that many of them are unable to do anything natural to them for their entire lives.

26.) Because this is not what wings are for.
Chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals never get to breathe fresh air, feel the sun on their backs, build a nest, nuzzle their young, or do anything at all that they were born to do.

27.) Because everyone wants to be free.
We know that it’s true of birds let out of a cage and of dogs taken to the park, and it’s equally true of farmed animals: They desire freedom, just as humans do.

28.) Because eating fish doesn’t make you a vegetarian.
Fish have the same ability to respond to pain that birds and mammals have and are also interesting individuals in their own right. According to a review of the science published in Fish and Fisheries, fish are “highly intelligent”—they have long-term memories and learn from one another, use tools, form social hierarchies, and “can even be favourably compared to nonhuman primates.” Explains marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle, fish are “so good-natured, so curious. You know, fish are sensitive, they have personalities, they hurt when they’re wounded.”

29.) Because might doesn’t make right.
In our moral development as a species, we’ve reached the point where it’s time to recognize that other species deserve consideration, just as we finally recognized that slavery was wrong, that women deserved the vote, and that children should not be abused as a method of child rearing.

30.) BECAUSE YOU KNOW THIS IS WRONG
Common sense tells us, and we know in our hearts, that our fellow animals have the same kind of feelings and desires that we do and that we should not kill and hurt others in order to eat them.

For more information and for a free vegetarian
starter kit, visit GoVeg.com or call 1-888-VEG-FOOD.

For more information on all these
issues, please visit GoVeg.com.

I'm feeling ranty.

(This whole Wordless Wednesday thing is really not working out for me. I always seem to have a lot I've been thinking about come Wednesday morning.)

I haven't posted a self-righteous rant in a while. I think it's time.

I happened upon the NY Times article entitled "Is the 'Mom Job' Really Necessary?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/fashion/04skin.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&incamp=article_popular&oref=slogin&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1192031322-8EoA8/E2+Pcn1BYZ3bF32g) through my internet adventures the other day. If you don't want to/can't read the article, basically it's about a new plastic surgery craze often called the Mommy Makeover. It usually includes lipo, tummy tuck, and a breast lift (with or without implants).

The article does a pretty good job of showing both sides of this, but the whole idea of a Mommy Body Makeover just pisses me off. Let me say this: women are free to do whatever the hell they want to their bodies. Plastic surgery is a personal choice. I have my own feelings about it, about how this whole plastic surgery thing is going to damage our daughters when they grow up because we, their mothers, are perpetuating the myth of a perfect body. But whatever. Do whatever you want, really, and I'll try to just ignore your choices.

Anyway. Off-track much?

So, plastic surgery is a personal choice. However, I find it absolutely maddening that these plastic surgeons are marketing unneeded surgery to mothers to erase what carrying a child and giving birth to that child has done. They are implying that a body that's carried a baby is flawed due to its changes. If women want plastic surgery, that's fine. But am I the only one who is pissed that a bunch of middle-aged men in pristine white coats are the ones coming up with unnecessary surgery that mimics a spa package?!?!

There are times when I cannot stand what I see in the mirror. Absolutely. But I'm not going to get my boobs done or my thighs lipo'ed to make a very rich person $15,000 richer.

It just makes me so sad that we (mothers) put our bodies through hell to carry and deliver a child, and then the entire world tells us that we are not okay afterward, that now we have to be fixed. Guess what? I'm not built like Jessica Biel. I never was, and I won't get surgery to turn me into that. Because that is not me.

And I refuse to participate in a ritual that is turning women into a bunch of Fembots, completely warping my daughter's perception of what is real and beautiful. How would I ever expect her to believe in her own beauty as a woman one day if I can't accept myself just the way I am?

How they found me

I have this nifty little device that will tell me the keywords people put into search engines to bring up my blog. And I thought I'd share some of the more interesting ones.

- fake tan routine ruins life (yes, yes it does)

- vegan elitist
- vegan skinny
- vegans and pale
(I'm all of the above... except for skinny.)

- pale white wives photos
- really pale women photos
(This is probably a fetish... right up there with Catholic schoolgirl costumes and small boobs and androgyny. Sorry I don't have any extraordinarily pale photos of myself for you searchers.)

- stare at her boobs
(I don't know about this one.)

Ah, good times.

Not So Wordless Wednesday

So.

I got pregnant my senior year of high school. And if that's not enough, when I was seven months pregnant, barely graduated, the guy I cared about, the father of my child, accused me of getting pregnant on purpose and/or lying about the paternity of my child. It rocked my world. I cried so hard that night I can't believe I didn't throw up. I think I knew that I wasn't going to hear from him again. And I didn't. Not when I had her, not her first Christmas. No birthday or holiday after that.

When I realized, fully, for the first time, without naivete, that he wasn't coming back, that we weren't going to raise our daughter together, it was soul-crushing. To this day, it's still one of the most heart-rending experiences of my life. I still feel it like it was yesterday. Unless you've experienced it, you have no idea how worthless it makes you feel to know that even doing the most important thing you'll ever do, nourishing a life that someone else helped you create, that that is not enough to make that person take your phone call.

A little over seven years passed (seven years and two and-a-half months, to be exact) since the last conversation I had with Bean's biological father when I was pregnant to when he called me at work a couple of weeks ago. It was a conversation I'd long given up having, and I was totally unprepared. All of the little mock diatribes I'd worked over in my head over the years just would.not.come to me, and I cried. I cried so hard that afterward, I was embarrassed for being so outwardly emotional at my office.

And since then, this is pretty much all I think about when I'm quiet. Whenever I'm done thinking about the things I have to think about, when there's a moment's peace and quiet, this creeps in. Seven years ago creeps in. This recent conversation creeps in. And with it comes all of the times I ever thought "what if" about my life.

I feel guilty thinking "what if", but I guess it's natural. I am happy where I am now, but I can't help but wonder what if I hadn't had to go through all that. What if I didn't have to explain to Bean what a biological father is? What if I hadn't had to shell out nearly $200 a month for health care for her? What if I never had to worry about explaining to her one day the details of why her biological father never saw her?

Luckily I have a husband who loves me because of, not in spite of, my neuroses that has come from all of this. All my insecurities, my neediness, my rotten self-esteem, he takes it all in stride.

All of these paragraphs above, however, are probably not helping things. I've been making this whole situation too much about me. How does hearing from him make me feel? It hurts me to re-live all this crap I've pushed down and tucked away for seven years. Me, me, me. Even though it is, to some degree, about me, it's more about my daughter. It's about trying to guess about what she'll want in the future. It's about trying to find the path that will cause the least resentment and pain for her down the road.

Anyway. Even though he was supposed to call me back, I have a sneaking suspicion I won't hear from him again. And that makes me so sad for Bean. I wanted to be able to give her the information she needs when she decides one day that she wants to talk to him, that she has questions. I hate thinking that now I'll have to explain to her one day why he wasn't around and that he didn't keep in touch with me so that she could contact him when the time was right.

But you can't force someone, right?

I wish you could. I wish I would've had the know-how and the tools to make him accountable the first time around. I wish I would've been smarter, tried harder. Not a holiday or birthday has gone by that I haven't wondered where he is and if he ever thought about her, and I hate that I'll keep on wondering that now. (Wow, me me me again.)

They both missed out on so much. And it's not fair.

Another group to which I do not belong.

I really thought I was over the whole inferiority complex thing, but apparently, I am not.

Most mornings, I'm taking my last sip of coffee, counting the cats to make sure that they haven't escaped, telling Bean, "I asked you to get your lunchbox three times already", and trying to lock the door while holding my coat, my purse, my lunch, Bean's lunchbox and/or homework folder, and (nine times out of ten) also my shoes.

I'm lucky that I've brushed my teeth and put on make-up, truthfully. It's a toss-up whether or not I've remembered socks for myself. My hair is never done. Ever. But I remember my deodorant.

I'm flying to school, and I get her there justintime most days. I kiss her and practically throw her in the direction of her classroom, but I always remember to yell, "I love you!" and wait for the eye roll.

It's only when I've left her, and I'm making my way off of school grounds that I realize how little I fit in with these other women.

There's one. She's on the PTO. Maybe one of the grandmasters of the PTO. And she's British. I'm pretty sure, British. And she is always perfectly coordinated in very hip, stylish, young, but not too young to look like a respectable mom clothes. Make-up, perfect. Hair, perfectly styled. Nails, manicured. And she smells good.

PTO Mom stands around in a group of other perfectly coordinated moms with designer handbags (which, by the way, is so odd to me since we live in a community that is mostly populated with enlisted military folk) and highlights and nails and perfectly clean little toddlers who are dressed better than me.

Then there are the sporty moms. The moms who look like they've just come from a run with their perfect ponytails and matching UnderArmor workout clothes, and their nice, clean, white sneakers. You know what? I wear ratty black pants with a hole in the rear, a Wonder Woman wifebeater, and sneakers from my sophomore year of high school. But I work out at home, so I guess that's okay?

Anyway.

I try to talk to the stay-at-home-moms who always seem to have their act together, but I get this paralyzing anxiety, and I lose any ability I have to talk like a normal person. The only person I can even mildly relate to is Bean's Brownie troop leader. And even then. I can't really relate. My child doesn't have a learning disability, I don't hate 1/3 of the teachers at the school, and I don't think the Renaissance program is a stupid idea (probably because my kid always gets academic recognition at these things). I haven't breastfed three children, my boobs are actually the same size (don't ask), and I don't deal with the same things that she deals with on a regular basis as a stay-at-home-mom.

I should learn to give myself more credit. But until I do, I will just keep doing what I do and try not to trip over the untied laces of my All Stars (of course I don't have time to tie them, pffft) when I walk past the Moms.