Meat-eaters, I Refer You to This

I am often asked why I am a vegetarian. Well here it is:

It felt more authentic for me to move forward and not look back.

That is a bit cryptic, so let me now give you more than you asked for.

The story of me being a vegetarian is an odd one. From 1998 to 2002, I was not quite all the way there yet. I was a semi-vegetarian or technically, a pesce-pollotarian. I did not eat beef or pork, but I ate poultry and seafood. This run up traces its roots to my father. He had a health problem that required an immediate change in our diet. Considering the fact that what I ate was largely controlled by my mother, when the pork chops and steak stopped showing up, I simply ate what was put in front of me. The real change was that after my father got better, and my whole family went back to its adjusted but regularly scheduled dinner menu, I did not.

I have not particularly settled on a good reason why. It could have been the influence of Rastafarianism - some of my friends had recently converted (the religion comprises vegans and vegetarians). It could have been my burgeoning consciousness of health as a result of what happened and the change it had on the family, albeit temporary. Or maybe simply and superficially it could have been that I just wanted to be different. I cannot rule that out.

Thanksgiving 2002. That was the period. I do not remember the exact day, I just remember the result. I made thanksgiving dinner for friends. Yes, sir. I did. Calm down. It was a feast, but not necessarily a feat. I did bake and baste the turkey, steam the carrots and green beans, but I only opened the cranberry sauce, mixed the breadcrumbs with water, scooped the vanilla ice cream, warmed the apple pie from my grandmother's house in the frozen section and watched the crispy biscuits rise courtesy of America's favorite dough boy. I was told the turkey was good too, but I did not eat it that year. I was done.

Again, there is nothing moral about this story. It was not that I had read seminal works like "The Omnivore's Dilemma" or "The Way We Eat". I had not suddenly developed unconditional love for animals either. It was that I had worked out that I was in limbo - and I did not like it. It was a personal ethics question. I did not like the feel of semi. It felt just like that, very halfhearted. I either wanted to do it or not do it. I knew that it would be harder if I became a full vegetarian than a non vegetarian. In my system, doing the harder thing felt more consistent. I debated it for months, but it sneaked up on me that November and started with a turkey being served not having been tasted by the chef. It ended with me not eating any other bird, or seafood from then on. I suppose it only helped that I had somehow acquired an allergic reaction to shellfish a year earlier (read: no lobster, no crab, no conch - devastating).

Fast forward almost ten years later and I will now tell you I am still a vegetarian mainly for environmental reasons. It took me a while, but I got outside of myself. I did the research. That was how I got from feeling my way to thinking my way there. I will just distill that discussion into one thing: Being a vegetarian is incredibly more resource efficient and has the side effect of being generally healthier. As a flag waving supporter of the union between practicality and reason, that was all I needed to hear.

I miss meat on occasion. I admit it. Bacon still smells good to me in the morning (or any time of day really). I do not mind the smoke from an afternoon barbecue. I will not eat it though, at least not willingly. Sometimes surprisingly, I will have a nightmare about that scenario - someone slipping some bacon bits in my soup and telling me afterwards or feeding me a veggie burger that turns out to really be too good to be true. I would wake up either really angry or in a cold sweat. Then I would laugh at myself. I do not mind having to eat a salad or order a vegetable plate at a non friendly restaurant. I do mind the jokes from meat eaters who also happen to be jackasses, but I surprise them with a few snide remarks of my own. Until recently these were the biggest "challenges" I had being a vegetarian, but I found them breezy in comparison to the discipline of the years. That was until I ran into a futurist and China.

The futurist made me think about a world in which meat could be manufactured to be environmentally efficient - a theoretical exercise in what would I do then. I wrote a thirty page paper on it. Being in Asia made me confront a world in which there was no word for the word vegetarian - a real life exercise in what was I going to do right now. The intersection of these exercises was familiar, but they were in an altogether different dimension. I changed in the face of it. If one day science allows us to consume meat without consuming the planet then I am open to the possibility of changing my behavior. And last December, in Beijing, I did change my behavior. While there I eventually had to ask myself how much of the culture was I missing by not eating the food. I figured it to be a lot. And so I ate, not full meals but I sampled. It was delicious, but afterwards I went back to my steady state.

So things are a little more complicated for me than pure vegetarian ideals, but there it is. That is the whole story. Forgive me if I referred you to this post. I was not trying to be dismissive. I, like most people, just think better when I write than when I talk in real life.

Take Off With Me

I used to fly planes.

That is the saddest thing I ever wrote.

At any given moment there are something like 5,000 airplanes in the sky across the fifty states, but I grew to know one of those very intimately. Every Sunday, for several months, I sat behind the wheel of a single engine 1972 Cessna and defied gravity for one or two hours. The morning would start something like this. I would wake up, walk to the garage, drive my car, and get on a plane. Walk. Drive. Fly. If I speed up that sequence in the context of humanity, I can't help but think about a slick production short.

I took lessons because ever since I was little I wish I could fly. I used to run around the house in red gear and a blue bathroom towel twice my size. I would only be airborne for less than the second it took to jump from one sofa to the other, but it felt good - really good. I actually preferred Peter Parker as a super hero, but I often pretended to be Superman. Not because he was superhuman or from another planet, but simply because pretending to fly was so much more elegant and appealing than trying to climb walls. Or so I thought.

Staring out the window on a flight looking down gave me perspective. It really helped that we did most of our cruising over a lake. It only takes to close my eyes and I can see everything painted on the inside of my eyelids. Imagine the water glistening.  Imagine trees enclosing. See the miniature houses off in the distance. Imagine white boats. See the long, white conical wakes. Imagine random patterns of people in color. And imagine circling above all that. Picture that. These are my flashbacks of flying. Then think of it as much an emotional feeling as it is this visual sketch.

Flying feels like freedom. Freedom from the physical limits of our limbs tied to the ground by gravity. It makes you feel weightless - in your mind. Flying feels like it shouldn't be possible, but it is real. It's like looking up at the stars and fully realizing what it means to be alive and not just to exist - embracing the improbability of it. You feel small and yet you feel important. It feels like breathing, deep, long breaths. The kind that give you the energy to keep going after you think you've reached your aerobic limit. "No, you can go further". What's next?

Most of us take it for granted - the physics of  fluid dynamics, thrust and drag, lift and weight, Bernoulli's  principle - but every time I get off a plane from one coast to the next or one continent to another I can't believe what just happened. It still amazes me how we can switch cultures and time frames and temperatures in a few naps, a few movies on a small screen, a good book, and some bad food. I don't think I'll ever get over it.

Someday I'll get back to flying planes. And then I can redeem myself from having written that first sentence.

On My Reading

I used to hate reading. A huge part of that I had nothing to do with. I blame my father. His mother called him Deek. Let's also do so. As a child my father would make us write book reports. When other kids were playing in the streets riding bikes and pushing off skateboards, I had a task to complete. I had to read from targeted selections, transcribe, and present. I'm not talking about Huckleberry or Hardy. I'm talking about books on attitude and skills. Deek built an extra curricular activity steeped in learning networking and salesmanship and motivation. Imagine this not now, but as a 10 year old. Reading as a result was never a joy for me, it was a chore. And I liked to do chores in my own time, not his, but I didn't have that luxury. I did what I was told. I only discovered decades later that everyone one of those books were business and self help classics, and for that, plus the advanced reading and comprehension skills I am forever in debt. 

These days I go into withdrawal if I don't read something found wherever my free will takes me. Reading is such a rare opportunity to trick myself into escaping reality, and often I need that break. The past two years getting a master's has thus been tough. It's one of the ironies of academics that every time I go into a hallowed place of learning my reading gets thrown into crisis. I find it so difficult to deal with the high wire tension of picking up a book and feeling like it should fall on the side of studying. If I dive off the other and read like I want to, I find reading turns into this reckless activity - I can't do anything else until I finish, and then I start again. Because the payoff is so immediate, that connection from author to story to reader so fulfilling, all other books pale in comparison.

I hear words when I read. Often one of the first things I'll ask someone before we traverse into a land of characters and themes is what type of reader they are - then I pass judgment. I am insanely jealous of visual readers - the ones who look at words on a page and consume them without being trapped at the speed of sound. My sister is one those people. I am disappointed that I have not been able to adapt. I can do it for certain pieces, but it has to be something very casual and relatively short. This is of course excluding those times when I get my hands on a gorgeous stretch of prose where I absorb every letter and let my mind wonder. At those moments, time stops and I can feel the words floating in my mind. It's not unlike the sensation of being adrift in a sparkling pool on a sweltering day. 

As I read, in the background I focus on composition, style, language and message: What is the writer trying to convey. What are the overlapping themes. What is the motivation. What am I feeling that I can walk away with and relate to myself and others. How is the book proportioned. What words does the writer frequent. How are the sentences structured - are they simple or complex, filled with metaphors, or plain and declarative. How long is the novel, could it have been shorter or longer and still have had the same impact. Do the sentences and paragraphs flow. Did the author create people instead of characters. Could these people exist. Do I know people like this. Do I see myself reflected in any of these situations. These are some of the things I look for. They make the difference between a great story and a magnificent piece of literature for me. Classic writing has all of these elements, and if I can have it all then I'll always say, "Yes, please."

I am amazed every time I finish something like that. No one will ever again write those exact words in that exact sequence, yet the possibility of a brilliant piece still exists every time a pen touches a page. It’s that magic of an endless number of combinations from a finite set of words. It’s that concrete example of creativity. Writing is the embodiment of self-expression and individualism. And I just love reading it.