She's got Skies of the Bluest Eyes.
I'll say right off that I'm not in a good mood.
I've been trying for the last three hours to enjoy a nice, restful, rehabilitative nap and been thwarted on almost every front. The largest betrayal, of course, is the 90-120 second nap I might have gotten in the car after dropping off the SD. Following that, there was dog wrangling, more dog wrangling, followed by "Honey sit with the dogs so they don't whine", followed my Sascha trampling her filthy paws all over the pillow I was going to use, followed by Masala continuing to believe that my nutsack is somehow the warm center of the universe which must either be punched, crushed, pinioned between various limbs, or otherwise rested upon. I attempted to rest in my nice clean bed, but then Boomer & Masala began whining. I returned to the library to find that it was immediately and irrevocably colonized by dogs. Okay, fine, try to contort myself on the stuffed chair. Uncomfortable. Twist, wiggle, writhe, kick, fold, spindle, etc. No use. Might as well be going jumping jacks as attempting to rest.
And Mel wonders why I'm such a piss bucket. Last night was the first night of uninterrupted sleep I've had in weeks. I am fully ready to offload dogs any damn time now.
Augh. This is not a good week. Tuesday was awful. Hardly five hours of sleep, great oceans of dog stink in the morning. Battling with trash. Battling with Mel. Battling with traffic. Negotiating the municipal courts building to try to get two of my citations dismissed. Getting some bullshit parking ticket for not paying the lot, even though I did (a five dollar bill in the slot, #28). Admittedly, I nearly forgot until someone driving out reminded me. Then, more crap at office. Wednesday, return to courts building after maybe four hours sleep, stand in line. Realize that this line is going a LOT slower than the 1.5 hrs of change I put in the meter, so I keep looking out the window to see if they are going to tow my car. Luckily they don't, but I do have a nice $20.00 ticket to go with the $155.00 ticket I've already got. I didn't make it through the line in time to make the morning session, so I had to come back on my lunch break to the court. Not much to tell there, just took a probationary period (which I hope ie not busted by the ticket I got earlier that day). Then, back to work to try to piss on fires sufficient to diminish them. The rest of the week was a wash, I couldn't shovel up any motivation if I'd used a backhoe.
Okay, back from a long break. Ugh, what else?
Well, the continuing cold war remains in effect with Mel. Over the last few weeks, she has really been putting the screws to me on the veganism front. I don't mean to bag on her or vegans in general. But while I've been overarchingly sympathetic and tried to be sensitive to her hardcore veganism, I've never been one to react well to militant tactics or philosophy in that regard. Make your decisions, obtain your proof, live according to your ethical and moral standards, that's fine. But don't feel that you must proselytize or evangelize the issue with those who do not believe or hold the same values as yourself. While I have made a point of minimizing my intake eating red meat for some time, I remain open to eating poultry & fowl, fish & probably some game if I knew where it came from. I eat diary and eggs and such as that (I also eat freaking vegetables, folks). I do not find the fact that I eat meat a moral failing, an ethical lapse. It is, perhaps, inconsistent with other aspects of my moral & ethical background, certain philosophical tenets I likely subscribe to. I can deal with that, because we are all hypocrites in one fashion or another. I recognize that I & humanity in general make dirty little deals for the sake of our comfort and sanity. Whatever.
Anyway, Mel has been hitting me hard in her passive-aggressive fashion in the last few weeks. I can't tell you how often that I've been told that my food "smells like ass", or "Why does it smell like shit in here?", "Did you have to bring some carcass home with you?", "Faugh. You're making me nauseous.", "Maybe you wouldn't have that problem if you didn't eat so much rotten filth". She actually connected my snoring with the fact I eat meat and alluded that I'd perform better sexually if I wasn't eating meat. When I expressed some skepticism about those two factoids, she just challenged me to "read your sources". What sources? How many impartial studies are there? How much is propaganda? I think I've mentioned before that I'm a skeptic about a great many things, and my bullshitometer is flashing orange on this. She told me today that the reason that she doesn't want me bringing any meat products into the house (a request she's only made rarely and never made any real effort to enforce) is because she doesn't want her home - a place of shelter, warmth, and comfort - to be violated by objects of atrocity and suffering.
I'm really starting to disconnect with her, I think.
Mel's also been looking into the Raw Food movement. I don't entirely understand her motivations for the issue. She's a vegan, she doesn't eat that much food which actually requires cooking. I'll admit I made the acerbic comment that I couldn't believe she was trying to make her diet even more prohibitive. She's says that she's trying to improve her compliance with a greater range of veggies and enhance her health - but I'm almost thinking that this is all starting to feed into her old anorexia issues, in a weird, backwards & inside-out kind of way. As if she is being so good about her dietary and nutritional choices that she might not have to eat anymore. But I know we're going to have another tense little episode when we go to try to buy food tomorrow.
You know, this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't the case that I know that Mel is riding a giant moral superiority high on her self-imposed redemptive trail. The vegan, the raw-food, the animal rights things - these would be enough. But I since Mel quit drinking (again, I know - I think she's pretty damn serious now), she's laid a subtle atmosphere around here that she certainly doesn't want me doing it either. Again, I begin to feel guilty that I might want to pick up a pack of beer. And drink it. While watching a movie or something. Then, tonight, while driving back from having dinner at Central Market (yeah, had dinner at a grocery store, I know...), she made some small noise & I asked about it. She told me that she's been surprised at how totally she's mentally divorced herself from bar culture. She's started to feel pity every time she drives by a bar, as if to say, "Oh, it's so sad that people feel like they have to go to those places."
Seriously. She said that.
So, yeah, the crunch is on. Mel will never make it a hard ultimatum, never actually come out & say that she demands that I "change or else". But she'll use the insinuation, coercion, veiled arguments, and weighted factoids. She leveled several factoids on me last night, all designed to "make me think about my choices". One was how cows obtain all their nutrition from vegetable sources & end up being full of protein and massive, muscular animals - so vegans & raw fooders should be able to get all the protein in the world without the need for animal products. Of course, Cows have four stomachs, completely different metabolisms, eat pretty much non-stop for every day of their entire fucking lives. There were a few others, I can't really remember them all.
Man, there are other issues I could blog about, but I just can't make anything work right without my own house in order.
-12th
I've been trying for the last three hours to enjoy a nice, restful, rehabilitative nap and been thwarted on almost every front. The largest betrayal, of course, is the 90-120 second nap I might have gotten in the car after dropping off the SD. Following that, there was dog wrangling, more dog wrangling, followed by "Honey sit with the dogs so they don't whine", followed my Sascha trampling her filthy paws all over the pillow I was going to use, followed by Masala continuing to believe that my nutsack is somehow the warm center of the universe which must either be punched, crushed, pinioned between various limbs, or otherwise rested upon. I attempted to rest in my nice clean bed, but then Boomer & Masala began whining. I returned to the library to find that it was immediately and irrevocably colonized by dogs. Okay, fine, try to contort myself on the stuffed chair. Uncomfortable. Twist, wiggle, writhe, kick, fold, spindle, etc. No use. Might as well be going jumping jacks as attempting to rest.
And Mel wonders why I'm such a piss bucket. Last night was the first night of uninterrupted sleep I've had in weeks. I am fully ready to offload dogs any damn time now.
Augh. This is not a good week. Tuesday was awful. Hardly five hours of sleep, great oceans of dog stink in the morning. Battling with trash. Battling with Mel. Battling with traffic. Negotiating the municipal courts building to try to get two of my citations dismissed. Getting some bullshit parking ticket for not paying the lot, even though I did (a five dollar bill in the slot, #28). Admittedly, I nearly forgot until someone driving out reminded me. Then, more crap at office. Wednesday, return to courts building after maybe four hours sleep, stand in line. Realize that this line is going a LOT slower than the 1.5 hrs of change I put in the meter, so I keep looking out the window to see if they are going to tow my car. Luckily they don't, but I do have a nice $20.00 ticket to go with the $155.00 ticket I've already got. I didn't make it through the line in time to make the morning session, so I had to come back on my lunch break to the court. Not much to tell there, just took a probationary period (which I hope ie not busted by the ticket I got earlier that day). Then, back to work to try to piss on fires sufficient to diminish them. The rest of the week was a wash, I couldn't shovel up any motivation if I'd used a backhoe.
Okay, back from a long break. Ugh, what else?
Well, the continuing cold war remains in effect with Mel. Over the last few weeks, she has really been putting the screws to me on the veganism front. I don't mean to bag on her or vegans in general. But while I've been overarchingly sympathetic and tried to be sensitive to her hardcore veganism, I've never been one to react well to militant tactics or philosophy in that regard. Make your decisions, obtain your proof, live according to your ethical and moral standards, that's fine. But don't feel that you must proselytize or evangelize the issue with those who do not believe or hold the same values as yourself. While I have made a point of minimizing my intake eating red meat for some time, I remain open to eating poultry & fowl, fish & probably some game if I knew where it came from. I eat diary and eggs and such as that (I also eat freaking vegetables, folks). I do not find the fact that I eat meat a moral failing, an ethical lapse. It is, perhaps, inconsistent with other aspects of my moral & ethical background, certain philosophical tenets I likely subscribe to. I can deal with that, because we are all hypocrites in one fashion or another. I recognize that I & humanity in general make dirty little deals for the sake of our comfort and sanity. Whatever.
Anyway, Mel has been hitting me hard in her passive-aggressive fashion in the last few weeks. I can't tell you how often that I've been told that my food "smells like ass", or "Why does it smell like shit in here?", "Did you have to bring some carcass home with you?", "Faugh. You're making me nauseous.", "Maybe you wouldn't have that problem if you didn't eat so much rotten filth". She actually connected my snoring with the fact I eat meat and alluded that I'd perform better sexually if I wasn't eating meat. When I expressed some skepticism about those two factoids, she just challenged me to "read your sources". What sources? How many impartial studies are there? How much is propaganda? I think I've mentioned before that I'm a skeptic about a great many things, and my bullshitometer is flashing orange on this. She told me today that the reason that she doesn't want me bringing any meat products into the house (a request she's only made rarely and never made any real effort to enforce) is because she doesn't want her home - a place of shelter, warmth, and comfort - to be violated by objects of atrocity and suffering.
I'm really starting to disconnect with her, I think.
Mel's also been looking into the Raw Food movement. I don't entirely understand her motivations for the issue. She's a vegan, she doesn't eat that much food which actually requires cooking. I'll admit I made the acerbic comment that I couldn't believe she was trying to make her diet even more prohibitive. She's says that she's trying to improve her compliance with a greater range of veggies and enhance her health - but I'm almost thinking that this is all starting to feed into her old anorexia issues, in a weird, backwards & inside-out kind of way. As if she is being so good about her dietary and nutritional choices that she might not have to eat anymore. But I know we're going to have another tense little episode when we go to try to buy food tomorrow.
You know, this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't the case that I know that Mel is riding a giant moral superiority high on her self-imposed redemptive trail. The vegan, the raw-food, the animal rights things - these would be enough. But I since Mel quit drinking (again, I know - I think she's pretty damn serious now), she's laid a subtle atmosphere around here that she certainly doesn't want me doing it either. Again, I begin to feel guilty that I might want to pick up a pack of beer. And drink it. While watching a movie or something. Then, tonight, while driving back from having dinner at Central Market (yeah, had dinner at a grocery store, I know...), she made some small noise & I asked about it. She told me that she's been surprised at how totally she's mentally divorced herself from bar culture. She's started to feel pity every time she drives by a bar, as if to say, "Oh, it's so sad that people feel like they have to go to those places."
Seriously. She said that.
So, yeah, the crunch is on. Mel will never make it a hard ultimatum, never actually come out & say that she demands that I "change or else". But she'll use the insinuation, coercion, veiled arguments, and weighted factoids. She leveled several factoids on me last night, all designed to "make me think about my choices". One was how cows obtain all their nutrition from vegetable sources & end up being full of protein and massive, muscular animals - so vegans & raw fooders should be able to get all the protein in the world without the need for animal products. Of course, Cows have four stomachs, completely different metabolisms, eat pretty much non-stop for every day of their entire fucking lives. There were a few others, I can't really remember them all.
Man, there are other issues I could blog about, but I just can't make anything work right without my own house in order.
-12th