Thursday, February 16, 2006

Head - Pounding - Grrrr.... (and a just a dash of boy-craziness)

So. I need to work out today. But I've got a headache. Will it go away? Can I make myself go back out to work out, even though I know I'm probably lying to myself if I say that I'll do that? It's rainy. I don't feel good. I don't like any of the food in my house (except for the fudge I bought on the way home yesterday - can you say "backslide"?).

I'm also annoyed with my suitors for their lack of attentiveness. Out of this annoyance, I just rejected a guy because he said he takes part in church activities. I was thinking about this yesterday, and I realized that if I had a choice between a religious guy (who was accepting of my lax ways) and a vegetarian I would rather go out with the religious guy because I would find a vegetarian more irritating on a daily basis. I really need somebody who understands the gloriousness of things like saussage. No, I'm not kidding. So probably I shouldn't have rejected this guy outright on the church-going alone, but whatever. Dr. Crazy is cranky.

7 comments:

Jesse said...

I could handle a vegetarian so long as they never tried to make me a vegetarian.

I could handle a religious person, assuming they didn't try and convert me.

Ideally, I would eat sausage every single day.

Evie P. said...

Um, vegetarians can appreciate the gloriousness of sausage, maybe, they maybe just don't want to eat it.

I promise you, if I was yr personal cook I'd cook vegetarian meals that would be tasty and delicious and plentiful and gourmet and satisfying and pretty to look at and that you'd adore, plus: less fat and cholesterol, more nutrients. It'd be a win/win.

Sausage and bacon and steak would all be available at local restaurants, of course.

Maybe I'm proving your point, but the culture's constant comments that vegetarians are ascetic and deprived and holier-than-thou seem far more irritating than the company of someone charming and well-informed who happens to eschew meat.

I exclude the proselytizing, of whom there are of course some, but the vast majority of vegetarians I know, including me, are the funnest, most caring people you could know and, as they tend to be more informed about the vast array of KINDS of food in the world, they make terrific foodies. And they're far more likely to try to convince you to attend to OTHER political problems than food ones.

When the biosphere collapses and your food can no longer be shipped in from farms thousands of miles away, you all better hope there are some vegetarians around to cook the locally available food into delicious meals for you.

Sorry to pick up on this comment like this, but I get so irked by vegetarian-bashing, as if all vegetarians are evil and poopy.

Dr. Crazy said...

See, I don't think all vegetarians are evil and poopy BUT I do think that they all require accommodation. Let's say I begin dating a guy and we're not going out to dinner but that I'm going to make dinner for the two of us. The reality is that if I want to eat meat, I have to cook two dinners. So, let's say that every time I cook dinner for the two of us that I cook something veggie. (And yes, I'm aware that there are delicious things that are veggie, and I cook veggie on a not irregular basis because I just like those things.) Not a huge compromise, right? Well, let's say that we move in together. Do I only eat meat when I go out to restaurants? Even though I really enjoy eating meat? Is that fair? Is that a compromise I'm willing to make? Or, if it's not, how do we negotiate this really quite major difference?

The bottom line is that it's not a compromise I'm willing to make, and it's also not something that I want to work to negotiate with an as-yet-not-real partner. I'm not willing to order every pizza with half-veggie-only toppings, I'm not willing never to make meatloaf again unless I'm having some sort of a dinner party. I'm not willing not to put meat in my lasagna.

Does this make me an asshole? Maybe. But as I would never expect a vegetarian to accommodate me by putting meat in their food, I think it's entirely fair not to want to accommodate a vegetarian (who is as yet entirely hypothetical) by taking meat out of mine.

(By the way, this sounds meaner than I mean it to sound but I don't have time to soften the tone.)

Shaun Huston said...

I'm writing this without really knowing what I'm going to end up with, but as a vegetarian and loyal reader I feel compelled.

1. To reinforce something ms. p wrote: many vegetarians can, in fact, appreciate things like sausage. Many vegetarians will not, in fact, care if you want to eat sausage. Many vegetarians will, in fact, not judge you for eating sausage.

2. My wife and I have both been vegetarians for close to 15 years. Does the fact that both of us are vegetarians make life easier? Sure it does. But in many cases we are a minority in a crowd and find ourselves at parties, official functions, even family gatherings, where the centerpiece of a meal is some kind of meat. We make do. We don't complain, and if we do, we do it amongst ourselves and not so much in public. I think you'll find that many vegetarians will hardly bat an eye in situations where meat is served. They just won't eat it. Indeed, we have become sort of the official hosts of Thanksgiving for our families, and, yes, turkey is served.

3. I love food, and meals are, or should be, social events as well as fuel. So, I understand if the prospect of not sharing a particular meal with someone you're dating or in love with seems like a drag. But on the whole, I think the issues you raise about veg/non-veg couples need only be as big as you, or they, want to make them.

My point isn't so much to offer dating advice, if vegetarianism is a block for you, fine, but it is hard to read the original post and then subsequent comment and not come away with the sense that you have a particular image of vegetarians in your head as demanding, judgmental, food hating killjoys who are harder to get along with than "accepting" religious fundamentalists. Some are like this, but then so are lots of people when it comes to food and diets of all kinds. Vegetarianism is like anything else between two people with different tastes and preferences. People work it out if they want to.

Dr. Crazy said...

Point taken that people work it out if they want to. i suppose the issue for me with the food/religion thing is that both (to me) are lifestyle choices, and one you wouldn't need to work out every single day and the other you would.It's not so much an issue of religious fundamentalism being kosher for me and those laid-back vegetarians not. For me, it's more something like if you have somebody who's religious to the extent that they go to church once a week but don't bug me about going or don't care what I do faith-wise vs. somebody who's a vegetarian who doesn't care that I eat meat but doesn't do it himself, it's going to be more of an issue for me on a regular basis to be with the accepting vegetarian. That's right, it's MY issue. Not that the vegetarian is unaccepting, but it would bother ME that the vegetarian has requirements surrounding food that mean that I either have to accommodate him, if I want to share food with him, or that we would lead separate food lives, or that we would have to constantly negotiate stuff surrounding food. If it makes my veggie readers feel better, I would discriminate against a picky meat-eater in the same exact way. So what if you don't care what I eat - if you turn up your nose at something that I make - whether your reasons are political, personal, health-related, whatever - I'm going to be irrationally pissed off. And yes, it's irrational.

I suppose the thing that I find interesting is that people have resisted a characterization of vegetarians as anything but accepting while nobody has peeped a thing about the fact that I just said no to a guy who goes to church for no other reason than that he goes to church. Isn't it possible for church-going Christians to be accepting, too? In fact, isn't that what most of them (us? as I am a christian, too) are supposed to believe in?

(I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, and I don't mean to alienate readers. I'm an academic - OBVIOUSLY I'm friends with vegetarians - my point is that I wouldn't want to be in an intimate relationship with one where I know it would be an issue for me and that would cause me to get (again, irrationally) pissed off at the person. Is that wrong? Oh, and I think some of my resistance here is defensive in part because I think the tendency is often that women conform to their mate's personal habits in relationships, and this is one of the deal-breaker things for me that I don't want to change.

Shaun Huston said...

I suspect that you either have fewer devoted Christians as readers or that vegetarians are simply (overly?) sensitive to people assuming that all of us are judgmental (could be both/and rather than either/or). I have been in more than one situation where simply telling someone you're a vegetarian, after being asked mind you, not volunteering the information, causes them to get all apologetic or defensive about eating chicken, steak, or whatever, and I've done nothing but answer a question.

As it happens, I'd probably reject someone who emphasized their church going as well. So, who to date or not date isn't so much the issue as the re-presentation of vegetarians embedded in the initial message and follow-up. I'm repeating myself now, so time to quit.

Tree of Knowledge said...

I'm veg, but rather than jumping on that bandwagon, I'd like to offer some advice about that headache of yours (even though this is the day after you had it). I have had migraines since I was 10 and have tried pretty much everything--for "at work" headaches, close your office door, turn off the lights and lay down (on the floor if need be) for ten minutes and just breathe-don't think. It won't necessarily make the headache go away, but it makes it easier to finish the day, and teach. Also, a bit of lavendar and mint oil on your temple is nice--again, it doesn't actually end the headache (at least not mine), but it is distracting and soothing. And take painkillers, lots and lots of painkillers.