Self-Styled Quackery and Petty Grievances

I worked a double last night, or more accurately, a one and a half. Twelve hours of loading footage and eating a post-Halloween, 50% off bag of Starburst. Today I woke up at 9pm and quickly realized that everyone I knew was doing something else. Ah, the benefits of working the graveyard shift!

I've started getting sick. Every day I wake up I can feel that pre-illness, scratchy-nasal-cavity sensation at the back of my throat. I have been successfully battling the onslaught of a sore throat by chain-smoking. This is part of a holistic medical breakthrough I discovered in college. In those days, when I would feel the sickness developing I would just get really drunk, the theory being that you get the germs in your body drunk as well, thereby impeding their efforts to sabotage your immune system.

By coating my throat with a film of nicotine and tar I have hindered the ability of said germs to implant themselves and begin their work. Crazy you say? Perhaps. But, to quote George Bernard Shaw, "All great truths begin as blasphemies"!

In other news, my latest pet-peeve is the existence of inner pockets in most of my pants. Is this a new phenomenon? I don't remember these existing before. But every pair of pants I've bought in the last year has an extra little piece of fabric sewn in at the base, creating a tiny pocket where loose change and keys inevitably get stuck. I hate being at the checkout counter and struggling to retrieve change from there. I always have to pull the pocket from my pants, turn it inside-out and try desperately to fish those nickles and dimes out.

Why even bother paying with change when I can just break a bigger bill you may be asking? Because when my Grande drip coffee at Starbucks costs $2.05, I don't want to be stuck with even more loose change in that cursed extra little pocket.

These are the things that bother me.

This is how exciting my life is.

I recently stopped being strictly vegetarian. Not because I wanted to eat meat again, but because I'm tired of having my eating habits scrutinized. When you're a carnivore, nobody says to you, "Hey, you know there's no meat in that minestrone soup you're eating, don't you?" But when you are classified as a "vegetarian", it seems that everyone is focused on your failure. They seem to revel in finding ways that meat or meat by-products were involved in the making of your meal. "You know those fries are cooked in lard?" And often, people confuse the idea of living a predominantly vegetarian existence with being a vegan or an environmental terrorist. If people find out you don't eat meat they always want you to justify why you don't eat meat. They want to know the reason you are unlike them. Most people I know who don't eat meat could care less about saving the world or challenging people on animal rights. It is always the meat-eaters who get upset and want to start a conversation about the issue when confronted with another's vegetarian lifetsyle.

I still believe that a vegetarian diet is healthier*, and in many ways cheaper. And as much as I say I don't care, I suppose I have some moral issues with the way we harvest sentient creatures for food. But if I steal a chicken finger from you at a meal don't berate me. They are tasty. And I'll sleep better knowing I didn't contribute financially to the slaughter myself.


*I know that the idea of having a "healthy" diet is in direct contrast to my prescribed method of illness prevention as described above, but so be it. I'm a walking contradiction. Deal with it.