Vegan

So, I'm five days into this vegan experiment, and I've stayed
strong... But this plant diet is fucking boring. I miss the flavor,
texture, and flexibility of meat. Plants are great... But I can't make
seitan myself... With meat, I don't need extruders and factory stuff
to produce a sliceable block, I just need some herbs and some fire or
smoke. I think of I stayed vegan indefinitely I would lose two of my
greatest loves: cooking and eating.

And health benefit or not, I'm not losing those two things. I'll
probably bring meat back into my diet sparingly, and try to still have
vegan meals quite often. Hopefully that will aid my gym visits and
ensure my fitness and health for a long time to come.

Still feeling sick

After an unfortunate early morning wake-up from snorri, it was pretty hard to try to sleep in. I took some nighttime cold medicine, but that seems to be working against me now.

We played some ultimate frisbee this afternoon, but that just about drained me. Off to the couch to try once again to recover.

Thankfully, i have the next two days off...

artsncrafts

reading f's post on crafts and being a craftsman just reminded me of how much i'd love to work with my hands and my head. creating things is such a rewarding experience, that nothing else really compares in the work world. staring at a finished product is an amazing feeling.

whether it's art, useful items, or simply constructing ikea, i get a rush from crafts. now, from this admission, you'd be right to wonder why i do not engage in these activities very often. and, for my part, i wonder that too. from childhood, i've always been much more of a consumer: wearing costumes lovingly constructed by mema, reading long tomes that paint fanciful worlds, watching with rapt attention movies and shows about heroes and myth. but, i also carved ducks, wrote awful little stories, drew comics, sketched whatever i saw, built forts incessantly, and plotted out extensive games and adventures.

maybe that part of me is still laying dormant, waiting to wake up from whatever hibernation it is resigned to in light of my consumeristic/american workforce life.

today i told f that the only reason i can see for going to work lately is just to find out if i got a promotion or a different job inside this company. that's not a very good reason...

maybe at some point f and i can get some impetus, take a leap, and see if we can make things work as craftspeople. now is the time i suppose, for risky endeavors, as we don't have children, or any specific responsibilities to anyone.

time will tell... but we both really, really hope to one day count our "work" as a pleasure and "creation" as our job.

...preferably the sort of job that lets us explore the globe...

that is all

this is my favorite person in the whole world.

after almost 2 weeks of being married, i couldn't be happier with how things turned out for us. there were times where i thought it would all end in flames... but today, i feel like we can keep growing closer as we grow old.

pretty sappy, but then, i don't really do well at pretending to be otherwise.

on another topic- photography with my new holga is turning into an interesting challenge. i'm very used to taking crappy photos with my digital camera, but so few things are manual on a phone, that having to choose my shutter speed by holding it open manually, and loading film *just right* so that it gets taken in by the film advance thingy... well, suffice it to say i won't have any worthwhile holga photos for a while.

when i graduated high school, i got an analog SLR as a gift from my dad. he was an avid photographer for a while, and took some crazy awesome black and white shots during his business trips around america. he even developed all his own film (pretty impressive compared to my camera fumblings/walgreens photo cd development). but, after a few years of use, i sold my nikon n65 to a girl on craigslist, in order to buy food. in retrospect, i'm a little sad that i sold that camera, along with many other treasured belongings... but i definitely needed to eat. i recently found quite a bit of film from that era in the trunk of my now dead sentra. so, every time i develop one awful holga roll, i get to find out what i took photos of many years ago. should be a cool thing.

the first two rolls contained shots of a david bazan concert and a clinic concert. i don't know exactly when i took these photos, but if i had to guess, probably 2004 or 2005. hopefully, at some point i can take decent photos with the holga, match in some way the effortless shots i took with that n65. we'll see.

until then, i'll just keep snapping quick shots with my n79, and trying not to fail too hard with the holga.

all the while, f will take beautiful photos that put me to shame...

i think i married the best girl in the world.

married...

well, the wedding week ate my blog output.
that... and my new addiction to yelp reviews.

here's my review of the dobie mall. i hate that place.

things haven't really changed much since f and i got hitched. we still share a bed, a house, and a life... i guess she's going to change her name soon? that'll be just about the only difference.

we got some pretty sweet gifts from people that attended, and generally it was really fun.
the honeymoon was also great, but those details stay with me...

the only utter shit thing, is that at work i'm about to end up back in the world of phone answering. i really hoped that this time i'd actually get hired into the department that i keep getting loaned out to. unfortunately, it looks like that isn't the case. the only weird thing is, i've had 0 communication with my old boss about moving back, so i have no idea when or if that is happening. technically my "rotation" is over today, but from what i've heard (again, absolutely nothing) i may as well just come back here on monday and do my fun job.

we'll see.

i really hate job ambiguity.

i do have a job interview with the same company this wednesday for an exciting (or at least different) position, so all hope is not lost. but, it is very frustrating to feel like i'm in a shitty limbo situation, where my real hope is just that the stupid red tape forgets about me, and i can just keep doing what i'm doing right now.

we're going to dallas this weekend, so that should be fun-ish.

chinese wedding banquet on saturday, and i guess hanging out on sunday.

f got walgreen's to print out some pictures for mema, since her printer is a small step forward from the days of rock and chisel, so we'll drop by her house to give those to her.

i'd say in general these days i feel really scattered. it's a little cliche to talk about multiple lives, but between work, f, and awful family shit, i feel pretty disjointed. luckily, f is really good about being there with me and for me about family shit, but work stuff necessitates that i go it alone. i think she'd agree that it would be great to have each other around all day at work for support, especially since we both feel so damn isolated and lonely in our stupid cubicles, but we are living the typical american life of, "kiss the wife and kids (cats?) goodbye, head off to work, and don't come home till dinner."

if i haven't been clear before on the topic, the typical american life/dream is an utter pile of fucking dogshit.

we watched that new michael (i'm fat and confused) moore film, Capitalism: A Love Story last night, and it bummed us both out pretty bad. the level of frustration we feel, knowing that this country could be so much better, and also knowing just how impossible it will be for any change to occur as long as the financial juggernauts still pull all the strings is almost a final blow to us ever wanting to be a part of this lame nation. during our post-film conversation, i talked about how nations don't really have identities or differences anymore, since they're all filled with multi-national brands/corporations/crap. as a friend said recently, "it really sucks when you're walking around france or italy, and you keep seeing mcdonalds..."

another conclusion i made is that the american leaders/corporate ceos learned a thing or two from the last revolution. whereas the british were too stubborn to let america pretend it governed itself, while actually doing all the real governance, the media+government these days is fantastically good at making everyone believe we're going to get our change™/public option/financial success, and that we are a democracy/republic... and this illusion is what keeps us from revolting. i really have to admire the seeds that were planted to achieve this goal, even as i end up daily watering the same sick plant of autocracy/aristocracy/twisted-fake-capitalism.

the movie made another interesting point about how as american citizens, we all seem to desire democracy, and yet we willingly/lovingly go to jobs where the rule is at best meritocracy, and at worst, a brutal dictatorship. what would happen if we demanded democracy in the workplace? what would change if we expected actual decision-making power at our jobs?

i may never find out. the chances of f and i running off to some small country and living on a farm/a small urban area are growing.

especially now that f's parents might be moving to another country themselves.

alright, well, enough ranting for today... back to yelp...

Hard to believe

Wow. My wedding is almost here... It's a bit hard to wrap my head around the fact that i'll be a married man. I'm pretty stoked about seeing my out of town friends and family, but the time sure did sneak by.

F and i had a really good talk with grant's dad today. It was mostly a continuation of a conversation from earlier in the week, but it's great to get to tickl to a couple who've been married for almost 30 years.

It will be a bit hard to work this week with saturday taking up most of my attention, but i've gotta savor it as much as possible since i'll be back to shit phone work come 1 november.

Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

As a side note, i can't possibly think of any person in the whole world i'd rather spend my life with than f.

I love you f. And i can't wait to have you as my wife.

This is the beginning of an exciting life.

odd

i just found out that safari might not support the blink tag.
that's kind of nice...