Just Some Things

1. I nabbed a book called The Top 100 Traditional Remedies: 100 Home Remedies for Health and Well-Being from my library last week and spent a little bit of time flipping through it on Saturday. When I first started reading it, I got a bit geeked out, because it goes through vegetables, legumes, spices, fruits, etc. and explains how they are useful as home-remedies, and suggests a recipe along with each item. And as I was flipping through them, I noticed that most of the recipes were vegan, which of course got me excited to recommend the book to you all on this here blog. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that, curses, there were some recipes that called for some non-vegan items. But I thought, Well, hell--most of the folks that read this blog are brilliant vegan converters, so a few silly non-vegan ingredients won't stop them. But then I realized: there's a meat section in the book. A fricking meat section. Bad enough. But what bothered me even more about the meat section was that, you guessed it, it buys into all the bullshit myths about meat being good for your body. For example, under "Beef" it lists it out as a good remedy for anemia. To which I could feel my fingers curling into fists, my hair standing on end, and my urge to shout "OH NO YOU DIDN'T!" rising inside me. So yes. The book was interesting. Until I got to the meat part. And then I just found myself sadly disappointed that what *seemed* to be so holistic and health-oriented was just a farce wrapped in another farce wrapped in a big wad of lamb (which was also in there).



2. I think I've mentioned before that I have a couple of groundhogs which live in my yard (which I find to be particularly charming because I live in the city, and there's two houses on my lot, which means not a lot of green-space). Anyways, I see them every once in a while, and I like to watch them. They scale trees suprisingly well for being so pudge, and I sometimes see leaves wafting down from high up in the tree, and I like to think it's the male groundhog sending little greeneries of love twisting down in the wind for his love to nibble on. Probably not the case, but I like to think it. Well, yesterday, I came to realize that there's another resident on my lot: a nice fat racoon. And not just your average racoon, but one that apparently likes to roam around on my neighbor's roof. Heh heh. Color me a dork, but I had a helluva fun time watching him bumble about up there. (But MAN does the little dude have some serious flea problems--every two steps it was all itch itch itch.) Where I was going with that story, I don't know. Except to say, rock on, animal-life in the city!





3. Apparently, as of late, my food-standards have taken a serious decline. BEFORE YOU START WORRYING THAT THIS MEANS I'VE BEEN INFLICTING HORRIBLE RECIPES ON YOU FOR THE LAST COUPLE WEEKS, what I'm referring to isn't recipes, but moreso food-quality. I've always been a bit neurotic when it comes to food--I won't eat certain things just because they FREAK ME THE HELL OUT even if they *are* perfectly edible (like grapes with weird dark-purple spots on them, or mushy strawberries). But apparently, in my attempts to become more tolerant of perfectly good foods that I really *should* just eat, I've kind of snowballed into the whole, "Well why the hell *not* eat it--what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" vein of eating. I realized this was happening a couple months ago when I was talking to my fella on the phone and mentioned that I was eating leftovers that I had actually left sitting out in my car overnight, and he paused and then said, "Jesus. You're, like, turning into a *GUY*." My five-second rules have become "if you can blow the cat-hair and crumbs off of it, then it's still edible." And then yesterday, if you can believe it (which you probably can, but it's unusual for ME at least), I saw mold on my bagel, AND I ATE IT ANYWAYS. Granted, I trimmed most of it off, but I actually first contemplated eating it as is, calculating whether the heat of my toaster would destroy the mold anyways. But then I pictured myself kind of exploding with mold spores, like if someone bumped into me, I'd stumble, let out a belch and it would be like someone blew on a really large dandelion, and I thought--better do some trimming.