A Fine Collop Reduction

During my most awkward period of budding, I was the female version of a 97-pound-weakling. I had sprouted rather earlier than my male counterparts and, measuring in then at the same height as I am currently (some twenty years later), was something of a sixth-grade Amazon sans any discernable fibers of muscle tissue. I managed regardless to convince everyone that I was hard-core by launching creative scenarios in which the illusion of my strength was preserved without actually doing anything. It was easily believable, what with my unfathomable height and all. Until the President’s Challenge.

Oh, the horrors of the President’s Challenge. In 1993, while then-new President Clinton was eating his Big Macs in his baggy gray sweats, I was being forced through the rigors of a prepubescent physical fitness challenge given by The Man himself.  Or, at least, through his Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition. Or, at leaster, that’s what my Physical Education instructor said was happening to me.

During this challenge I was humiliated in front of my whole class by my radical lack of any strength whatsoever coupled with the shivering vibrations of my scrawny forearms as they tried, without success, to haul my stringy form up to the level of a chin-up bar . . . even though my instructor was holding up my legs.

But those were the days of flexible adolescence, when bending myself into a circle in any direction was no great achievement. When I wake up in the current era, it takes me a good hour to limber up. Everything snaps and crunches, and bending at a degree tighter than 90 causes me to lose my breath and go crimson. My collops rise out of my waistband like the lid of a flesh colored mushroom, and my buttocks, once so rounded and pert, press together like oversized cookies too close on the baking sheet. Revulsion.

In order to combat the slow demise of my aging body, I decided to self-flagellate myself back to a youthful pinnacle of fitness via P90X and the rigors of Tony Horton.  “C’mon boys and girls,” he calls to me from my Panasonic.  “Make the last three reps hurt!” And I try, joints squeaking and grinding, a Tin Man calling for oil. Alas, instead of death by mortification, I now have a direct view of the stippling of my thighs while downward dogging. Inverted thus, I nearly asphyxiate under the unfortunate gravitational pull dragging my flubber gut into my esophagus. My “soft landings” from plyometric leaps are thunderous, elephantine clishmaclaverings that rattle the light fixtures and cause God-only-knows what complaints from the gentleman residing beneath.

Nevertheless, I persist. I can now wrap my fingers around the bottoms of my feet in a straight leg stretch, and can, with the aid of a chair, do pseudo pull-ups that would make my 6^th grade companions less likely to verbally skewer me for my pathetic weakness. Thus far, the regimen has been recipe for a fine collop reduction, though I shan’t yet chance the Princess Leia metal bikini. Till then, I shall do as Tony Horton says, and “Bring It.”

The Collop In Question

Battling the Bees

It’s Bee Season again. I am not talking about the sweet-looking, fuzzy, bumble variety drunkenly careening across the sky with oversized bodies and tiny wings that look about as useless as T-rex forearms. I’m not talking about the useful kind that make delicious golden honey and pollinate my plants. What I’m talking about are despicable atrocities of un-bee-coming size: the Carpenter Bees. 

These shiny-bottomed nightmares are, for lack of a better word, freaky! Not only do they stare at me unrepentantly from their monstrous compound eyes… Not only do they hover in mid air about a foot from my face, rubbing their hairy front legs together like a criminal eyeing easy prey… Not only do they slam full speed into whatever of my body parts happens to get in their way hard enough to bruise, they are also easily the size of my thumb from the tip to the second knuckle! Despite the fact that more than one person has told me, independently of others, that I have “carnie man hands,” this is one huge bee-yotch.

Apparently, the ones that swarm around my balcony searching for appropriate locations at which to bore new tunnels with their hideous chomp-chomp-chomping are, in fact, beeyotches, since male bees, like many male humans, just hang out at home and impregnate people. Typically I am pro-female and rail against every variety of attack on women. Not so during Bee Season.

The mysterious disappearance of the American bee notwithstanding, I find it very difficult not to wish the curse of colony collapse disorder upon these backward beasts who wear their skeletons on the outside.  I have spent many an afternoon earning tennis elbow by swatting away these colossal and colossally unnerving fiends with my tennis racket. They make a fantastic thwacking sound and fly in long, graceful arcs that would make an ancient architect scurry for his drawing pad. The connection of racket to bee is quite satisfying. It’s also quite useless, as these insects are extremely resilient and hardly ever even get wounded by my ferocious beatings!  In fact, most of the time they just sort of stall in mid air and turn right around as if nothing has happened, and come back to hover too close and stare at me, rubbing, always rubbing those forelegs, grooming before the feast I am afraid will be made of my face.

It occurs to me that these bees are a metaphor for my addictions, my personal struggles. It seems useless to bat them away, because they always come back, stare me down, and search for tender places to gnaw into, leaving deep, branching, scarring tunnels that could, if left unchecked, cause structural damage and collapse. So I’ve got to. I’ve got to get out that tennis racket, and beat those addictions over their heads, and knock them and knock them away, because if I don’t they’ll take over and breed.  And if I just keep standing out there with that racket, if I just keep taking the swings, every once in a while I’ll hit one with such power that it gets cut right in half over the strings and will fall, lifeless Goliaths, at my feet. And then, I will be free.

Oh, it’s Bee Season all right. But I’m armed and ready.

Photo by Paul Choate, found here.

ILVTOFU

It’s true. I do. I really, really love tofu.  But I won’t be able to put it on my license plates!  At least, not in Colorado, according to Odd News for today.  And that’s really too bad, because I bet that would make even the grimmest prisoner-for-life smile a little  as he stamped out the letters on that license plate. “Heh heh,” he’d growl to himself, “This person loves to expletive me!” And then, after pondering which of his perky, junkie ex-girlfriends it could be (discounting, of course, the one for which he was serving time after doing in), he’d probably tell his fellow inmates all about it, unless he was trying to shank them.  I’m not even going to worry about the high volume of stereotypes worked into that paragraph. I’m just going to wail a bit.

First of all, has our society really become so perverted that the first thing popping to mind when we see a plate reading “ILVTOFU” is a sexual pronouncement? When I first read the headline, “Colo. Rejects ‘ILVTOFU’ license plate,” I didn’t get it. What was the big deal? Some Birkenstock-wearing granola out there loves her some tofu! And then I read the article.

Here’s what I think happened. This nice woman, who probably belongs to PETA and voted against the right to bear arms, filled out her application for vanity plates like a good, law-abiding citizen. Joe Blow at the DMV received this application. He summarily glanced at it to ensure its completeness, and then, just as his slender fingers were poised to drop it atop his towering stack of paper, he caught sight of the vanity proposal.

“Holy expletive!” he probably shouted, drawing the attention of his fellow cubicle dwellers, most of who’d been distracted from their fiercely competitive Bejeweled sessions by his outburst. “You won’t believe this expletive!”  He then most likely folded the application into a tidy paper airplane – not the lame kind that you or I make, with narrow nub wings and overlong bodies that almost immediately go into tailspin, but the kind that government lifers know how to make, the kind with upturned wingtips and complicated noses and that sail for office miles and never get caught in anyone’s hair or take out eyes – which he sailed across the room for all the payroll on perpetual coffee break to check out. They, in turn, probably texted their significant others and tweeted their hilarity and status updated with mobile uploaded images immediately.

Technological Ebola --> One disappointed vegan.

Sadly, most people are idiots, and no humor is so easily found as the no-no kind. But this is not the first time an organization has had to hedge its bets. This type of response is the reason why there are warning labels on baby strollers that say “Remove infant before folding,” and “This product does not enable you to fly” on Superman costumes. To be fair, I needed that last warning on my enormous umbrella after watching Mary Poppins for the umpteenth time.

The brainwashing power of Disney aside, could we just clean up our acts already? Stop with the child prostitution rings and the drug running and the theft of stuff you wish you had (like my bicycles in ’94 and ’98) and the putting of plastic bags over babies’ heads and the swallowing of iPod Shuffles! If we could just get past our incredible inanity, perhaps we could all sit back and enjoy a bit of mirth at the prominent love one has for one’s tofu.

Cited article:

“Colo. rejects 'ILVTOFU' license plate” Odd News. Upi.com, 08 Mar. 2012. Web. 08 Mar. 2012. <http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2009/04/08/Colo-rejects-ILVTOFU-license-plate/UPI-46031239221493/>.

The Personal Space Infringement of Restaurant Ferns

Some days are Diner Days. Usually, Diner Days are the ones when you sleep in a little bit late, get moving a little too slowly, and make pathetically feeble efforts at doing something productive or workout-related before giving up. The purpose of a Diner Day is to reinforce the laziness with which you began it, so that for the remainder you can feel comfortably vindicated about doing not much, even if that means you sit on the couch for several hours watching movie trailers over your husband’s shoulder.

Possibly the most intriguing benefit of Diner Days is the freedom to be a completely vile and judgmental human being without observation, a freedom afforded to sneaky listeners like myself by the glorious invention of plastic, fern-like restaurant foliage. These beauties line the booths and the open windowsills between “smoking” and “nonsmoking” sections, and while they offer absolutely no protection from secondhand smoke or of sound insulation, they deliver something even more magical: the illusion of privacy.

Restaurant ferns impart upon Diner Day-ers all the forbidden appeal of skulking about behind corners and listening with an ear pressed against a glass at walls without having to leave the comfort of your own sticky, pleather booth! Also, it’s impossible for someone to accuse you of eavesdropping (or fern-dropping, for that matter) in a diner, as long as you don’t stare and are wise about your uncontrollable guffawing at the speaker’s expense.

Alas, restaurant ferns bring with them a cost. Never dusted, they drop particles made of other people’s skin and ash into your food, unbeknownst to you. They allow crawly things, with too many legs for comfort, to scurry in and out carrying bits of your horridly delicious meal. Worst of all, restaurant ferns have absolutely no sense of personal space!

I was taught, by an obsessive-compulsive germaphobe at 6^th grade summer camp, that one’s full wingspan in diameter around one’s entire body is one’s Psychological Circle and that no one must ever infringe upon this space without invitation.  Having slept on the bunk above this girl, and having had to climb the access ladder next to her face, I was constantly wreaking her wrath in compulsive multiples of three.

Therefore, I learned at an early age to be conscientious of people’s space.  So when a grimy, spider filled restaurant fern pokes me in the cheek with its plastic-sheathed wire skeleton, I am unhappy. I get a little uncomfortable when I witness vapors of leftover Marlboro breath floating Burton-like from between the false-spore-dotted fronds, too close to my clothing. I dislike their oily sheen and faintly eye-stinging aroma left over from too many Tabasco splashes and greasy, prodding fingers. Restaurant ferns are jostled by passers-by and shift to teetering precariousness, threatening at any moment to drop full into my omelet.

Thus, the joy of exploding into wheezing shush-laughter at a neighboring diner is cut off savagely by the hacking coughs wrought from too quickly inhaling puffs of unknown entities loosed from the pot by your last attempt to surreptitiously move the fern just half an inch that way.  (These coughs, however, can typically be quelled by great gulps of back-burner coffee, against which nothing stands a chance.)

All in all, Diner Days must be revered as the luxury of childless couples, since people blessed with children are regularly awakened by them at ungodly hours because of loud suspicious noises, long suspicious silences, or hair raising perceptions of being watched, the latter of which are generally met with the heart-stopping shock of opening eyes to a child no more than two inches away, who is grinning suspiciously. Furthermore, couples with children have to think about things like health, growing bodies, and feeding young bellies before crankiness sets in.  (Sometimes wives have to think about that last one, too.) So don’t chastise yourself the next time you struggle out of bed, creaking and groaning like an oak in high wind. Treat yourself to a Diner Day and be prepared to feel a whole lot better about yourself.

Morphology of the Jigsaw Life

Thursday is my birthday. On that day, I will be firmly embedded within my fourth decade, a thought that causes me to age with every firing synapse: old, old, old.  As I approach this birthday, I have begun to reflect upon the different periods of my history, and how they have locked together in the untidy muddle of Me that I have created.  My Etch-A-Sketch lines are messy and indistinct, and as I cogitate on the years I see just how frequently I’ve been turned over, shaken, and wiped mostly clean, the ghost of previous lines remaining, hairline fractures of the fragile eggshell in which I live: a map of the jigsaw lines of my life. 

As little as five years ago, I had different values and goals – some of which I’ve met, and some I haven’t. I had different friends. I lived in a different place, with different expectations, and struggled with different weaknesses. Few of the things I valued then do I still value now. I can’t even remember why they were important to me then, and I care little to think too hard on them, but they cling to me still, vestiges of a past almost forgotten. They are a collection of vague and colorless memories that float around like specks of dust in a ray of sunlight.

I am veiled by these scraps of my past. I am too close to them to see clearly how they’ve affected me, but I know I’ve changed by my measurement of the changes in others. It’s extraordinary to observe people I knew as teenage potheads transform into lawyers and mothers and NGO volunteers. It’s almost incomprehensible to witness valedictorians and full-ride scholars dropping out of school and leaving jobs with drinking problems, drug addictions, and complete expiry of all motivation.  I rejoice with those who have made leaps and bounds into their better futures, shrug my shoulders when those people who have always been superstars accomplish yet another amazing feat, but I cannot wrap my mind around the people who have fallen so far. How can they have changed so much? Do they not feel the loss of their ideals and dreams? And then, I think back over the changes I’ve undergone, and I wonder:  am I the kind of person at whom you shrug your shoulders, because you have always expected me to achieve what I have, or am I the kind at which people gape, rubber-necking at the train-wreck I’ve made of my life?

Life isn’t, as so many believe, abstract, pointless, or purposeless. There is an image in there somewhere, probably obscured by multiple erasures and heavy lines and scribbles of confusion and circles back and away from the same temptations that kept us from adding depth to the true picture, leaving us flat and feeling incomplete.

In the jigsaw life, all the pieces have a place, though different in shape and size and color. You may struggle with a piece, wondering where it belongs and how much attention you should pay to it before realizing it has a flat edge and belongs on the outer periphery. Some pieces you try to force in, but in the end you become aware that they belong to someone else’s puzzle and not to your own at all. And so often we think we are working on the whole picture, but we’ve become narrow and focused on making a single piece perfect, not realizing that while our backs are turned, all the other pieces are loosening and falling out.  We forget that there is no such thing as done, that we have to keep working on all the same pieces we’ve been working on for the entirety of our lives so that the lines match up when the pieces abut. We might not be aware that we’re screwing up while we’re doing it, that our flailing hands and arms are smashing to bits pieces that were perfectly positioned. Worse, sometimes we do know we’re spoiling it, but we don’t pay attention because it seems like such a small piece that’s being sullied, an outside piece, an unimportant piece. Come to discover later, that was a cornerstone piece, which had been keeping the chaos under control. 

And then there are the ugly pieces. Weird shapes and bilious colors and aggressively frightening outlines that darken the picture and distort it until it is almost unrecognizable. Pieces that are so worn thin that they are frail and weak and threatening to collapse, compromising the existence and stability of sound pieces, endangering them with the menace of falling into the dark abyss of absence and loss. We try to get rid of these pieces only to find that we cannot separate ourselves from them. They are inextricably intertwined into the fabric of our self hood, their rooty tendrils latched onto so many other bits so that if we force one out, they will all go down together. And so we try to camouflage them, to cover them with other pieces, to paint over them with better colors. The more we do this, the more slipshod and bungled our puzzle becomes. 

In the blessing of hindsight, we see that nobody’s puzzle is a perfect square. Our puzzles are better than some, and some are three-dimensional morsels of magic and luck that we covet from afar. In hindsight we can see clearly the mess we made on our life’s canvas, as if we were painting in the dark. The colors are wrong, the lines are a mess, and in some places you can’t even see a picture at all. But the beauty of the jigsaw life is its morphology. You can never be finished while you are alive, and so you can never be a failure. Sometimes you can’t choose which pieces come into your life or the effect these new pieces have on the overall image. The morphology may be out of your control but you can always choose how to fit the pieces in. You can keep searching for new things to put into the puzzle to make it richer. You can keep throwing things out to make it simpler.  You can borrow pieces from others until you find your own; you can pick and choose shapes to fit in. Spouse shapes, art shapes, starlight walk shapes, flying-kites-at-the-beach-instead-of-going-to-work shapes. They grow and shift and nothing stays in the same place; pieces that used to be front and center get moved to the side, their absences refilled with baby-shaped pieces, job-shaped pieces, and short-term marathon training-shaped pieces. The outer edges aren’t as clear cut as we think they should be, and though we often kick pieces out and attribute them to other, less important side puzzles, there is always one more, just one more piece missing. Just one thing that will make us better, just one more thing we need to be our best.  And this is as it should be. 

The Spouse-shaped piece.

© Heidi Tauschek 2012

Start With a Question

As prevalent as ever, Facebook made multiple appearances in news headlines this week. But this time, the headlines were not about just how much Mark Zuckerberg is worth in stocks, or how many billions of people are now Facebook users.  This time, the articles were about how Facebook has affected human relationships. Or, more appropriately, how Facebook has allowed humans to become even more wretched, uncensored, and uncontrolled than ever before.

The articles to which I am referring are Facebook “defriending” led to double murder, police say and Dad punishes Facebook post with 8 bullets to daughter’s laptop. The titles of these articles pique interest and draw readers in, as they were intended to do. It’s darkly entertaining to read about messed up people doing messed up things to other people who are far, far away from me.  Kind of pathetic – I know. Especially because something even darker is writhing beneath the surface of these seemingly comical pieces.

Nobody can deny the convenience that the Internet has brought to our daily lives. Certainly nobody can deny the ease with which social networking sites have allowed us to keep in touch with people far more easily than ever before (regardless of whether we should be maintaining contact with said people).  Also the truth: commenting on a status update or posting a message on someone’s “Wall” or “Timeline” is not the same as speaking to him. It’s not even the same as dropping a post card in the mail. I will even go so far as to say that social networking is, in actuality, anti-social behavior that does more harm than good.

Our addiction to the time-suck of social media sites has caused us to lose our ability to successfully navigate true social interactions. We awkwardly stumble through introductions and invitations, fail miserably at presentations, fill out sentences with insipid noises such as like, uh, you know, um, and just whatever sound slips out. Our vocabulary has been reduced to profanity and acronyms. We have lost our ability to work for reward or wait patiently because good things take time, and are left feeling lost, lonely, deserted, and unloved.  We turn to our websites, which proudly tell us how many friends we really have, and then sit alone in our rooms, stare at our computer screens, and feel lonelier than ever before. 

The feeling of anonymity that indirect communication provides brings with it feelings of empowerment and entitlement. We feel alone because we are alone; as a result, we write things we wouldn’t dare say if surrounded by a group of people. Our words are unedited, unchecked, and often unimportant, but when one is alone and lonely, one feels that everything must be said. To an electronic machine having no emotion or ability to respond. If I don’t say my piece to your face, I don’t have to deal with your possible range of reactions, and so I am safe in my cowardly bubble, far away from you and your judgment. Furthermore, we read posts without knowledge of the writer’s mood and intonation, and often read them far differently than intended, depending on the state of our internal emotions at the moment, which colors our understanding of the words and can spark discord immediately. But the bubble protects me again - if you don’t hear me say it, I can always argue that you “just misunderstood,” and can twist my meaning into whatever I need it to be in order to wriggle out of trouble. I don’t have to commit to an emotional style of delivery, and so I don’t have to deal with the consequences of my actions anymore.  Moreover, the speed of the Internet has made us impatient, which makes our feelings of entitlement dangerous. Why hasn’t ______ responded to my post yet?   Why hasn’t _____ RSVP’d to my event?  I can see that _____ is online, but he hasn’t tried to chat with me. Are we breaking up?

When I was young, teenagers would get their older friends to drive them by their love interest’s house just to see what was going on (find out who else’s car was in the driveway). Jealousy that could not be contained was dealt with in lunchroom fights and bathroom stall make-up sessions.  Now, however, we skulk about spying on one another, judging one another, reading everything about one another, and never once actively pursuing the building of a real relationship. Only now, instead of punching someone at lunch (not condoned!) and making up shortly thereafter, people are haunting one another anonymously, making vicious stabs with words, and publicly ending relationships in a way that humiliates the person on the slower end of the continuum.  This type of behavior, apparently, gets people killed.  And gets things shot.

On some level, I can understand that Scorned Dad wanted to make a clear stand to Rebellious Daughter to remind her who was the boss. She is, after all, living in his house, under his support, and therefore by his rules. And I can understand how Jenelle Potter, humiliated and defriended publicly for reasons unbeknownst to the rest of us, could feel like she wanted to kill someone. But there is a difference between feeling uncontrollable anger and actually sending your daddy to slit some throats to reclaim your honor, and there is a difference between posting an eight-plus-minute video of yourself condemning your child’s behavior for literally millions of people to view instead of talking to her yourself.

The problem is that we don’t ask questions anymore. What is written on the Internet must be the truth. If you don’t “Like” my post, then you must dislike it. If you “defriend” me for any reason, you must be trying to publicly insult me, and it couldn’t have anything to do with a broken relationship. In order to repair broken relationships, Internet or otherwise, you have to start speaking to one another again. Really speaking. So instead of sending out a hit man to take your heartbreaker off the list of the living, instead of pumping eight rounds into an electronic tool that, when used properly, can really help your child excel in school, why not start with a question? You could go with, “Have I done something to upset you?” Or, you could try something as simple as, “Why did you delete me from your Friends List?” It could make all the difference in your life. Literally.

Cited:

Ghianni, Tim. Facebook “defriending” led to double murder, police say. Reuters, 9 Feb. 2010. Web. 12 Feb 2010. <http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/09/us-murders-facebook-tennessee-idUSTRE8182JY20120209>.

Sullivan, Bob. Dad punishes Facebook post with 8 bullets to daughter’s laptop.  Digital Life on Today, 10 Feb. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2012. <http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/10/10373426-dad-punishes-facebook-post-with-8-bullets-to-daughters-laptop>.

Verbosity

They call it verbal diarrhea, a ramshackle collection of excessive, empty words used purely with the intent to impress -- the usual consequence of which is alienating people who don’t appreciate undue bombast. Prolix leads to exhaustion, boredom, disgust, disinterest.  But the alternative is terseness. Terseness is a special kind of clarity and conciseness, but it can feel rude.

Terse replies cause more problems than verbose ones do.  How many of us have been left puzzled by a person’s concise and snappy remark? How many of us have gone home feverishly inspecting our actions to identify whether we’ve offended someone and therefore deserve the shortness received? Furthermore, how many of us have accidentally caused pain to another with an abrupt rejoinder – pain that could have so easily been avoided if we had just taken an extra five seconds to use those “excessive, empty words” to give our answer a gentler landing?

For a generation that communicates more than the sum of all prior generations, we have certainly managed to lose the art of politeness. Our Internet-sucking, news-ticking, 147 character feed attention spans are thirty seconds or less, and we can’t spare any of our precious focus or time to just give a little extra to our fellow man. What’s really sad is this “little extra” didn’t use to be extra. It used to be required, and you gave it, if you wanted people to know you were not a beastly little urchin. But today, it is verbosity, it is pomp, it is loquaciousness, it is tooting your horn, it is boring.

To that, I say with concision: GARBAGE.

Near the Mississippi Riverfront in St. Louis, Missouri. 

© Heidi Tauschek, 2011

Vegeterraneanism: Day 4

No, I spelled it right. I’m not a vegetarian. I am a devout lover of bacon. But lately, I have converted to vegeterraneanism, which I roughly translate to mean “eater of vegetables of the earth but having no beef (ha!) with meat of the air and sea.”

The thing is, I’ve been listening to my 71 year old Garden Goddess tell hideous stories of hormone-filled chickenlings that are nothing but one giant, globulous breast. In my mind, these appear as malformed beaks and watery eye spots bobbling gelatinously atop slug like torsos. Yikes! While we take three hours to play a single round of Phase 10, Garden Goddess tells me tales of diseased cows having basketball-sized dead zones in their bodies - nerveless area of blackened mush, caused by hormone injections.  She tells of “meat dust,” left over after sawing apart frozen carcasses, swept up and added to the grinder to mix in with the rest of your weekend barbecue. She tells me my cellulite is caused by my body’s inability to flush meaty chemical sludge from my system, so it camps out around my thighs instead.

Not so, you’re saying. Blame cellulite on all those commonly accepted causes, like eating too many French fries or wearing underpants with too tight elastic. I am deaf to your logic.  My cellulite, so lovingly referred to by my delightful high school students as “orange peel syndrome” and “hail damage,” is out of control. It cauliflowers up from my overwhelmed viscera and explodes in lumpy clouds around my once-firm quadriceps. It is now visible through fitted slacks, chafes when I jog in hot weather, and causes me to wear bathing suits with built in skirts.

I start to think there is something to what she is saying.

I don’t actually have a problem with earthmeat. Not in a conscientious objector sort of way. I have absolutely no problem with running outside, rifle in hand, and shooting and then devouring my dinner. Obviously, this scenario is fully dependent upon my ability to attain the Hunter’s Trifecta: 1) remain upright after rifle reports; 2) actually hit targeted creature (the odds of which, if it is alive at the time of targeting, are astonishingly high against me); and 3) actually be able to lug its lifeless weight back to my home.   I just don’t want to be packed full of the stuff that makes little girls achieve menarche at age 8 and become so top heavy that they need surgeries just so they can walk upright.

Many people believe their childhoods were rosy. I, like them, certainly see my past in a much rosier light, now that the excruciating awkwardness of adolescence is at such a distance. In my warped version of the world, I flourished in a place of purity where superfood was rare. Growing up in Alaska meant we fished. A lot. My father hunted. We canned everything, made our own jams and jellies from berries in our yard, and grew our own potatoes and hardy vegetables. This leads me to the conclusion that I was perhaps not as pumped full of growth hormones and chemicals as others.  I am, after all, stunningly average in height and frame (though this may be a side effect of vitamin D deficiency, or due to the fact that both of my parents are the runts of their litters). I matured at an insufferably slow pace. Embarrassingly slow, even! But I’ve blocked this all out now, and only remember snapping ends off of fresh snow peas, and raspberries so ripe they fell into my waiting palms.

So now, thanks to distorted memories and the terror of the Garden Goddess’ yarns, I am mired within Day Four of Vegeterraneanism. Current meals consist of cheese and tortillas, cheese and crackers, bagels with cream cheese, and ice cream. Obviously, my distress over foodzilla has not traveled far enough to prevent me from consuming milk products, which come from hormonally buffered cows, and according to some, has high volumes of udder puss within. (Point of issue: I could clearly use a new cookbook.)

This is a social experiment of sorts. How will people who have known me to be a lifelong-bacon-loving-over-eater react to the new me: a bacon-loving-but-non-partaking-over-eater? It is also an exercise in self-discipline. Will I forgo earthmeats altogether? I can’t say for sure that I am quite that dedicated to the cause.  Ask me in a few weeks and I’ll let you know if I’ve strayed from my veggie terrain.

Spouseling holds our dinner. At Eckert's Farm in Belleville, IL. © Heidi Tauschek, 2011.