If it wasn't for the sheer tastiness of aged cheddar, steak, yogurt, honey, ribs, poutine, sushi, shui mai, goat cheese, pork chops, lasagna, calamari, milk chocolate, and Kraft Dinner (what? It's delicious), I could totally be a vegan.
But, seeing as how I enjoy eating all those things, I really don't think veganism is in the cards. Now, I'm not like my friend Dan, who eats one vegetable (peas) and otherwise survives on pepperoni pizza, pepperettes, potatoes, and pasta. It's actually just dawned on me that Dan might be playing an elaborate joke on the rest of us by claiming not to eat vegetables. The truth is, he doesn't eat foods that don't being with the letter P. Huh. Tricky, Dan! Very tricky! I'll bring you a plum or a pear and test my theory.
Okay, enough of that sidebar; back to the vegans. I am all for harm reduction and conscious eating. This is the same reason I don't eat cat-kebabs: I'm conscious of the fact that it's gross. By the same token, so is pea soup. And Clamato. See? It's possible to say, "I choose not to eat things based on the fact that I think they're yucky, and not as some part of some elaborate lecture to the rest of you." It's easy. If someone made me pea soup, however, I would eat it. I'm polite. If someone made me a cat-kebab, I would...question my relationship with that person. But I think my point has been made.
Vegan feels like a scold and a fad. It seems to be one of those early-twenties tricks that the whole going-to-India demographic pulls, like, you know, going to India or wwoofing. Snore. I prefer to have my self-consciousness raised in a way that doesn't insult the hostess as I systematically reject the entire dinner-party menu. "Is there butter in that? Because I can't really eat butter and HYUCK!," that last part being where I use my fighting skills to render them incapable of speech and further douchebaggery. (Special move? Spatula attack.)
Vegans: you can, in fact, eat butter. You can also eat sushi, and pork chops, and delicious Kraft Dinner. You choose not to. So when someone is cooking for you, don't be a prick. Eat the damned soup, even if it's made with chicken broth. Will you die if you eat an egg? If you won't up and die, just eat the damn egg. Stop telling me how good Fresh is (it's not, seriously). Knock it off with the lectures about reducing impact and footprints as you jangle your car keys at me. Or, worse, wave your Air India boarding pass in my face. I hate hypocrisy, especially coupled with the earnest humorlessness that hippies, wwoofers, and vegans often specialize in.
I'm not going to feed you cheese or honey or chicken breast. In fact, I'm not going to feed you at all. It stresses me out too much to be that focused on food. Vegans are often hospitable and lovely to be around, but seriously, dudes, I can't have The Vegan Talk anymore. So let's just call it a day with that, okay? Fellas? Ladies? No more talking about Nayonaise or factory farms. Let's keep the kitchen out of the living room from now on.
Showing posts with label sandwiches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sandwiches. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Gone (Digital) Native
Liz, my smart, funny and well-read friend, was doing some intellectual name-dropping the other day and brought up the concept of the "digital native," a person for whom the internet is a given. Always has been. The digital native, who I imagine wears a banana skirt made of yellow cell phones, has never known life without personal computers, has had an email address since they could read, and uses Facebook, MySpace, and all the other online mansions to house their digital lives.
This is opposed by the digital immigrant, who remembers when telephones were attached to the wall, whose first response to a witticism isn't "Dude! Facebook status!" and who probably wears a babushka fashioned out of the last phone book ever printed.
Liz and I, being in our mid-twenties, fall right on the cusp. I've had an email address since I was 13, but I remember being totally fascinated by SimCity (especially when I purposefully made a disaster happen, like blowing up the 13 nuclear plants I built in downtown Little Sisterville) as a novelty. Now, a dozen years later, SimCity has been transformed into The Sims, a game where you literally play at being a human being. Nothing will ever be the same.
Most defenders of digital culture tell each other that the internet brings people together, and that it allows access to previously unattainable information. This is true: thanks to Google Earth, I now know what the roof of the West Edmonton Mall looks like. I can also use a borrowed cellphone to drunkenly call my sister from Michigan at three in the morning after having "a bad feeling," something impossible to do before she had listed her phone number on Facebook.
So, a mixed bag. I don't hate the internet. That would be like hating chairs, and I'm sitting in a chair right now. But Liz also brought up an interesting point: those Twitter and Facebook prompts? The ones that are all curious what you're doing? The only true answer to those is, "I'm updating my status." When I'm writing a new Facebook status, I'm not "going to Guelph" or "making green curry." I'm writing a new Facebook status. Pedantic? You bet. I am a pedant, and the internet is full of us.
But the world is full of people like me: we willfully avoid some of the technologies that seem faddish or garish. Granted, the same demographic that doesn't own cellphones (me) also can't drive (me) and don't have the internet hooked up at home (also me). I realize that, despite crunchiness in the Big Three these days, cars have gone past "flash-in-the-pan." The internet is the same way.
It's just wild to contemplate how much things have changed in the last 20 years. When I was in kindergarden, we all looked like we were from 1967: wholesome, and a little bit dazed. Cell phones were the size of a mattress, and personal computers were for sultans. In 2009 - and god, doesn't that sound like the future? - it's possible to jam a cellphone in your ear, carry a computer in your pocket, and call anyone, in the world, always. It's possible to call Bell Canada and yell at a robot ("Emily," who will pause, as if wounded, if you sigh "fuck off" into the phone). You can take photographs you will never actually hold. You can fall in love through email. If fax machines weren't some horrible outdated punchline, someone could probably fax you a sandwich.
None of this is bad, per se. It's just weird. It's a major cultural shift: a thousand webpages begat a million Facebook users begat a billion Twitter posts. It's biblical in its epic scale, and makes me wonder if our epoch's grand contribution to society - our Great Pyramids, our 1492 - is going to be LOLcats and Facebook stalking.
Oh, I know there's more to it than that (and I'm fully aware that I'm sounding very "you kids get off my lawn" despite being 25 and writing this on a computer), but I sometimes think that when you add too many blocks to the Jenga tower too quickly, the whole damn thing comes a-tumblin' down. The last couple decades have a distinct tinge of OHMYFUCKINGGOD colouring the edges, and I wonder: is it the computers, or is it us?
This is opposed by the digital immigrant, who remembers when telephones were attached to the wall, whose first response to a witticism isn't "Dude! Facebook status!" and who probably wears a babushka fashioned out of the last phone book ever printed.
Liz and I, being in our mid-twenties, fall right on the cusp. I've had an email address since I was 13, but I remember being totally fascinated by SimCity (especially when I purposefully made a disaster happen, like blowing up the 13 nuclear plants I built in downtown Little Sisterville) as a novelty. Now, a dozen years later, SimCity has been transformed into The Sims, a game where you literally play at being a human being. Nothing will ever be the same.
Most defenders of digital culture tell each other that the internet brings people together, and that it allows access to previously unattainable information. This is true: thanks to Google Earth, I now know what the roof of the West Edmonton Mall looks like. I can also use a borrowed cellphone to drunkenly call my sister from Michigan at three in the morning after having "a bad feeling," something impossible to do before she had listed her phone number on Facebook.
So, a mixed bag. I don't hate the internet. That would be like hating chairs, and I'm sitting in a chair right now. But Liz also brought up an interesting point: those Twitter and Facebook prompts? The ones that are all curious what you're doing? The only true answer to those is, "I'm updating my status." When I'm writing a new Facebook status, I'm not "going to Guelph" or "making green curry." I'm writing a new Facebook status. Pedantic? You bet. I am a pedant, and the internet is full of us.
But the world is full of people like me: we willfully avoid some of the technologies that seem faddish or garish. Granted, the same demographic that doesn't own cellphones (me) also can't drive (me) and don't have the internet hooked up at home (also me). I realize that, despite crunchiness in the Big Three these days, cars have gone past "flash-in-the-pan." The internet is the same way.
It's just wild to contemplate how much things have changed in the last 20 years. When I was in kindergarden, we all looked like we were from 1967: wholesome, and a little bit dazed. Cell phones were the size of a mattress, and personal computers were for sultans. In 2009 - and god, doesn't that sound like the future? - it's possible to jam a cellphone in your ear, carry a computer in your pocket, and call anyone, in the world, always. It's possible to call Bell Canada and yell at a robot ("Emily," who will pause, as if wounded, if you sigh "fuck off" into the phone). You can take photographs you will never actually hold. You can fall in love through email. If fax machines weren't some horrible outdated punchline, someone could probably fax you a sandwich.
None of this is bad, per se. It's just weird. It's a major cultural shift: a thousand webpages begat a million Facebook users begat a billion Twitter posts. It's biblical in its epic scale, and makes me wonder if our epoch's grand contribution to society - our Great Pyramids, our 1492 - is going to be LOLcats and Facebook stalking.
Oh, I know there's more to it than that (and I'm fully aware that I'm sounding very "you kids get off my lawn" despite being 25 and writing this on a computer), but I sometimes think that when you add too many blocks to the Jenga tower too quickly, the whole damn thing comes a-tumblin' down. The last couple decades have a distinct tinge of OHMYFUCKINGGOD colouring the edges, and I wonder: is it the computers, or is it us?
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