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Monday
11 October 99
Columbus Day
1 54 am 3 10 am 12 16 pm 2 22 pm 3 01 pm 9 46 pm
1 54 am edt
I made a little page about my
veganism. I do get asked about it often. My favorite
quote, which I believe I have mentioned before involved me telling someone
for the first time that I was vegan, and them replying, "What episode of
Star Trek are you from?"
I really love being vegan, and I only hope that I won't encounter any
health problems as a result. I certainly think it was a wonderful
and healthy decision for me. I did once hear of a woman who began
losing her hair after being vegetarian for a decade, and I sometimes worry
that will happen to me...
3 10 am edt
My brother and I used to get cinnamon
bread at a place called Gary's Market in Woodland Hills. I don't
know why that thought just popped into my head. Memories float to
the surface without warning so late at night.
I could eat half a loaf of that cinnamon bread. It had a super
sweet white frosting on the crust and it was always so soft and moist.
My brother and I wouldn't really fight over it, but it was always
very satisfying to get the last slices.
Growing up with two different houses meant two entirely different
outlooks on food. My dad is very
much a meat an potatoes kind of a guy. Actually, it was usually
meat, pasta, and broccoli. There was always broccoli, which to this
day remains my favorite vegetable. My
mother, on the other hand, was into exotic and gourmet foods.
Sometimes dinner would be two salads, on fruit and one green, but she also
made salmon and shrimp for my brother and all sorts of other yummies.
My mother loves taste tests (as do I), so I have sampled various
wines, waters, bananas, olive oils, and myriad other tasties that
currently escape my memory. I like to have taste tests with Matthew and he always indulges me, despite
finding me to be so very silly.
12 16 pm edt
Matthew slipped back into my life so
easily. He could move here tomorrow and my lifestyle would require
no adjustment. I told him that I had forgotten how perfect we were
together. When he laughed I thought that he was going to say that I
was being silly, but instead he said that he felt the same way. The
idea of going to live with him in Berkeley for a month appeals to me more and more every day.
2 22 pm edt
Today is Columbus Day, which people actually celebrate here in New York.
In Berkeley we didn't get school
off, and all of the festivals were for "Indigenus People's Day". I
like Berkeley's radiacal reputation, and I never minded it being so
politically correct. I guess I prefer too much pc-ness to none at
all. I suppose one could acuse me of being overly politically
correct, but that is what I believe, and what I have always believed, and
I can't really help that, especially since I believe it is a good and
moral way to be.
3 01 pm edt
It actually tended to amaze me how enlightened certain Peace and Conflict Studies
and other liberal arts
majors with a historical element felt in Berkeley classes.
Going to a private high school, I learned the [supposedly] real history of
what a bad guy Columbus was from 7th grade on. Berkeley didn't have
any idealism to teach me, no myths to shatter. I always get grouchy
when people say i am vegetarian because I went to Berekeley. I was
vegetarian long before. And people used to say that I was
vegetarian because of the high school I went to. But I was the one
who co-founded that animal rights club there. I hope that it is
still there, and alive and well. I would someday live to make a
shelf of the school library dedicated to animal rights. Another
item on my list of things to do.
9 46 pm edt
I went to see American
Beauty and found it to be a powerful and profoud film. And
I realized in the middle of it how scared I am. I wished from the
depths of my soul that I had gone to the film alone, so that I didn't have
to talk when it was over -- so that I didn't have to pretend I was ok.
I am terrified. I am completely terrified. Not every day,
not even most days, but enough. Too much.
I was defending my decision to not to watch, read or listed to the
news, today on one of my mailing
lists, and I had to explain that I am scared of being attacked -- in
fact, I can't even name what i am scared of -- and the news stories about
the frequency of rapes and murders makes that fear worse. My heart
is racing now just to type about it.
Why am I crying? Why can't I name my fear? Why has it
eluded me for so long? How can I live like this?
I am not religious. I do not believe in an afterlife nor
reincarnation. I always told others that I was not afraid of death,
only of dying. I have always believed that I could handle the
knowledge that I would someday not exist, I was only scared of a painful
death -- something slow and horrible like drowning or suffocating or
burning to death. I am afraid of torture. I am afraid of
ruining my body -- of irreperable damage. I am scared of being
hurt.
I can't be like this. I can't be this person, even if only she
only surfaces one day out of the year, I can't go on.
I can't keep watching myself die inside me head. I can't keep
attending my loved ones' funerals inside my mind. What is wrong
with me? When did I become this thing? Why do I have to be
her when I don't want to?
I don't want to be scared anymore. I need to have some
self-defence lessons, or something. I need to be different.
I need to change. I have never been so low, but I have also never
looked my terror in the face.
Perhaps it is time I started doing so. Perhaps I need to fix
this nonsense while I still can. I need help.