It’s ten times harder to get a serving or bartending job here than almost anywhere else . . . but anywhere you go, the service is mediocre at best.

Photo by foodistablog.

Despite my nine years of vegetarianism, I have never been all that into animals. My reasons for going vegetarian were initially selfish–I didn’t like the taste of meat, I thought it would make me lose weight. (I was 12; give me a break.) Later, my reasons evolved to slightly less stupid ones–wanting to improve my karma, wanting to do something good for the environment to counter the fact that I always forget to turn out the kitchen light when going to bed. But still, animal rights were never a big thing.

This is probably why I’ve never freaked out upon discovering that something I eat contains animal products. Gummi bears, McDonald’s fries, broccoli cheddar soup–I’ve just stopped eating it, shedding no tears for all the little ponies or piglets that died for my previous (ignorant) sins. I’ve never been the kind of vegetarian who throws fits about the edge of the steak touching the edge of my portobello mushroom on the grill, or sends the salad back to the kitchen if I find one tiny piece of bacon in it. If I don’t know about it containing meat, and I can’t taste it, it doesn’t bother me.

But I have always found myself in the minority among vegetarians and vegans, which is why I thought I’d pass along this article: A blogger tests the food at several vegan restaurants in Los Angeles and discovers that almost half of them test positive for animal products in their ingredients. It’s worth a read. The conclusions of the testing make it pretty likely that this is not restricted to Los Angeles–that it is, in fact, probably going on in your local restaurants as well.

My reaction: the bottom line is that of course it’s inexcusable for restaurants to represent their food as something it’s not, and if a restaurant is doing that, it deserves to be exposed . . .

BUT

. . . being a vegetarian or vegan or anyone who chooses to restrict their food gives you a certain illusion of control over what you eat. The problem with this is that unless you grow and prepare all your own food, it’s exactly that–an illusion. If you eat food outside of your home–and this goes for vegetarians and meat-eaters both–then you are handing that control over to someone else, and this means you aren’t always going to get exactly what you want or ask for. And at least until everyone in the food-prep process is replaced with an automaton, it’ll probably stay that way.

Here’s a partial list of where things can go awry:

1) With you: You can mis-read the menu, or fail to read it entirely. (I’m still upset about the time that I chomped on one of my friend’s stuffed mushrooms at the Olive Garden. Guess what it was stuffed with? Clam! I don’t mean to be a six-year-0ld, but grooooossssss.) Or something may be common knowledge among vegetarians–that most cream- and cheese-based soups served at restaurants contain meat broths, for example, or that refried beans at many Mexican restaurants can contain animal lard–but that you may not be aware of yet.

2) With your server: Yes, most servers are too moral to lie about whether or not an item contains meat out of laziness or busy-ness (or, if they are too lazy or busy to check, they at least hedge their bets and say it does contain meat so vegetarians won’t order it). Note that this says “most.” It’s been known to happen. Also, if your server is not a vegetarian, and especially if they’re not a very experienced server or working at a higher-end restaurant, they may not be aware of things like “broth” or “rennet” or “casein” or “gelatin.” They may assume that a food item that appears to have no visible animal bits in it probably doesn’t have any animal products in it.

3) With the kitchen staff: In many cases, when a server doesn’t know whether or not a menu item contains animal products or by-products, their first recourse is to ask the cook. The problem with that? Sometimes the cook doesn’t know what’s in it any more than the server does. Except at top-end, independently owned restaurants, there’s likely at least one thing on any restaurant’s menu–and probably many things–that are delivered entirely or partially pre-made, especially soups, desserts, and sauces. And because there’s limited storage, many of these items are immediately taken out of their original packaging (with the nutritional information on it) and distributed into new containers. By the time it’s on your plate, the nutritional information is long gone and can’t be consulted.

Also–this should be obvious–unless, it’s a solely vegan or vegetarian restaurant, cross-contamination happens. When a kitchen gets busy, it’s inevitable that a little piece of this can get stuck in a little piece of that. The cook preparing your spinach & walnut salad is the same guy preparing your date’s chicken caesar, and no, he’s not washing his hands in between. Your bean burger is cooked on the same grill as the regular burgers; your french fries are cooked in the same deep fryer as the buffalo wings. (To be fair, there are some restaurants that make a point to avoid cross-contamination as much as they can. They are, however, the minority.) No, you can’t ask them not to do this. If you can’t handle this, you’d be better off sticking to your own kitchen, or at least to restaurants that observe the same food restrictions that you do.

Last, the language barrier can make it tough. English is not the native language of most cooks in the U.S. Depending on the kitchen, “veganism” may be beyond communication.

4) With the restaurant management: If a restaurant or chain is intentionally misleading about what ingredients they put into their menu items, they can get slapped with a lawsuit, so they rarely intentionally lie. But they can also get hit with a lawsuit if they label an item as vegetarian or vegan and a later test proves it isn’t, which is why so few restaurants (especially chains, who have bigger pockets and are thus bigger targets) are reluctant to clearly demarcate “vegetarian” from “non-vegetarian” items on their menus. This facilitates assumptions on the customer’s part (see #1).

5) With the food manufacturer: If you read the article linked above, you’d have seen that, while evasive employees and management may have contributed to the non-vegan vegan food, in most cases, restaurants weren’t knowingly serving animal byproducts. They were getting their food straight from manufacturers (often overseas), who were either knowingly or unknowingly contaminating it, mislabeling it, or mistranslating the ingredients. And the bottom line? “Over 50 percent of processed foods for vegetarians contain meat.” Ostensibly, even more vegan products would contain animal byproducts.

So even prior to the food’s arrival at the restaurant, you’ve got a 50/50 chance that what you order will be meat-free. And that’s before you calculate in the human error at the actual restaurant. Take from that what you will.

Out of all the celebrity couples out there, I spend the most time contemplating Mandy Moore and Ryan Adams’ relationship. Not that I spend that much time contemplating any celebrity relationships, really, besides theirs. There is something so endearing and yet baffling about that pairing to me, I just can’t leave it alone.

Today, in the car, A. and I were listening to “Dear Chicago.” Just as Ryan Adams was singing the line, “I think the thing you said was true: I’m going to die alone and sad,” I interrupted.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of funny that he used to be so depressed and drunk and strung out all the time, and now, not only is he off the drugs, but he’s married . . . and not only is he married, but it’s to Mandy Moore?”

“I guess,” A. said.

“I bet he gets embarrassed playing his songs at concerts sometimes ’cause they can be so maudlin and raw, and he just can’t relate to his old alcoholic self.”

“Probably.”

“I bet he and Mandy sit around listening to his records sometimes, at home, and she makes fun of how much he likes to sing about being miserable and getting drunk, and then he makes her watch the video for ‘Candy’ over and over and reminds her that she has no room to judge.”

“Probably.”

“You want to know what my favorite thing about Mandy Moore and Ryan Adams’ being a couple is?”

“What?” he asked.

“That if you combine their names to get a celebrity couple nickname, like Brangelina . . . they’re Randy Madams.”

(He finally laughed.)

Photo by cell105.

1) It’s summer. Summertime is for drinking beer on patios, not staying inside, online.

2) In accordance with my vow to re-design my sleeping schedule, I’ve been limiting my post-midnight computer time. It turns out I can only write when everybody else is asleep.

3) I’ve been focusing on novel-writing instead. We’ll see if this lasts.

4) A. and I have been busy. In the last month’s worth of weekends, we’ve:

• hiked six and a half miles at Eagle Creek and had pizza and beer with some of my visiting friends
• went down to Eugene to grill & drink with some of A.’s friends, and
• spent an entire weekend cleaning in preparation for my parents’ visit.

This week, I:

• took my parents to Powell’s, the International Rose Test Garden and the Japanese Garden, Forest Park, a Portland Beavers game, and the Oregon Zoo
• spent three days on the coast with A. and my parents (two days hiking, two breweries, too much windy beach time, a lot of their eating seafood and my eating whatever paltry veggie options a seafood restaurant can scrounge up)
• had dinner al fresco with some long-lost third or fourth cousins and their adorable, big-eyed daughters
• saw Three Sisters performed, lapsed into a coma induced by too much melancholy
• went hiking along the Columbia River Gorge, saw 80 percent of its waterfalls, watched salmon swimming upstream at the Bonneville Dam, had dinner in Hood River

I slept twelve hours last night to recover. And in the next few weeks? A.’s old college roommate, a bartender from our old bar, and A.’s parents will all be making trips to visit. I best catch up on my sleep now.

I don’t miss my hometown when I peruse their Craigslist missed connections for nostalgia’s sake and find things like this, entitled “Social: your sorority, my frat – m4w – 20 (Upstairs Brats*)”:

“I really wanted to talk to you, but shit, its hard to talk to someone as cute as you. I realize this took place in like April, but still, I felt like we had a little tiny connection. You had this crazy orange/yellow dress thing on, it looked really exotic, maybe cuz our theme was ‘Into the Wild. It looked amazing on you. You seemed to sit by yourself a lot, then out of nowhere, you started dancing like you had a fever and the only medicine was more dancing. I so wanted to dance with you but awkward Evan kept stepping in and then doing NOTHING! I don’t know what frustrated me more, the fact that he cut me off, or that he failed miserably every time he did it. Anyway . . .  I noticed you walking like a week later, thought about stopping but didn’t. I was the tall guy who stood behind you awkwardly on the dance floor for a while. If you want to talk, reply . . . “**

Oh. I see.

* Super-fratty bar
** Edited slightly for clarity

Photo by Timothy Lloyd.

An entire wall in my parents’ living room is devoted to my dad’s record collection. Yes, records, what The Kids These Days call “vinyl”–not CDs, although he has those by the hundreds too, a collection constantly in flux. He orders new CDs, makes room in tucked-away boxes for those he likes, sells those he doesn’t. But the shelves, heavy squares stacked two or three high, are reserved for records, a mostly static collection after forty years of sifting and winnowing, evaluation and barter.

He has all the classics that make my vinyl-collecting friends drool. His tastes are broad: rock, jazz, and blues are his favorites, but there is also space for zydeco, tejano, folk, a little big band, reggae, Motown, old-school country. There is some labyrinthine organizational system that only he can decipher; every time I think I’ve got it (“All the British Invasion artists are in the same place!”), something throws me for a loop and I give up again.

Now that my taste has matured beyond the stuff made by boys who wear girls’ pants and girls who don’t wear pants, my musical preferences and my dad’s have begun to converge. We trade CDs. My friends occasionally run into him at shows.

As a result of my father’s long-running love for rock history, my musical education is 27 years in the making–nine months before I was born, because it began in the womb. When I was yet to be born, kicking my mother in the stomach, my parents quickly figured out that playing Eric Clapton would put me to sleep. (Still does, actually.) At four, my favorite song was “Octopus’s Garden.” At seven, it was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Oh, That’s Good, No, That’s Bad.” At nine, there wasn’t a Supremes song I couldn’t lip-synch to. At 15, I wrote a ten-page term paper on the history of punk. At 16, I saw Bob Dylan live and went to a jazz concert at the Village Vanguard. At 17, I watched Monterey Pop. For my 21st birthday, my dad took me to all the south-side Chicago blues clubs that he had gone to when he was my age and just learning to like the blues.

All of this resulted in something that both surprised and disappointed my dad: ultimately, my taste in music is pretty bad. I know a lot about music. I enjoy a lot of great bands. But when it comes to the bands I genuinely love, that I rock out to in my car . . . they range from mediocre to bad.

My friends–the ones who set their hearts on learning rock & roll despite parents who listened solely to 1986 arena rock or Sandi Patty–learned early how to work for it. To read and read, to seek out and listen. I never learned how to do that. Great music was just there, always, in the background. I picked up the Beatles and the Stones via osmosis, but after that, there was still, always, something new. I’d be studying at the kitchen table, doing laundry, writing a blog entry, when suddenly it struck me that the noise in the background was less noise, more music–good music. “Dad, what is this?” Thelonius Monk, Louis Prima, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Hank Williams–they came to me without effort.

That was the good part. But here is the sad part: it robbed me of so many of those moments where you discover a great band, where you feel like you’re the first person to really love and understand them even when they’ve sold 100 million records. I love the Who. I love the Kinks. But I never got to discover the Who. I never got to discover the Kinks. They’ve always been there. I never got to discover Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix or Patsy Cline. Trying to recapture those moments, I turned to musical genres my dad barely touched–pop, hip-hop, musicals, punk, emo. The artists I discovered on my own, the ones I now have the deepest connections to, mostly hail from those less respectable genres.

Here’s the funny part, at the end of it all: aside from our taste in music, my dad and I are near-identical. We are obsessive self-educators, we have the same drive for adventure paired with extra-cautious natures. We both watch movies more compulsively than for enjoyment. We have the same political views, the same bad eyesight. We speak Spanish. We like the same wines (Spanish reds) and the same beers (Sierra Nevada). We spend too much time online. We’re neurotic about our weight but still love food. We read the same books. There is very little of my mother in me, save for our anxiety and pale skin. Everything else is my dad. But when it comes to music, the thing he loves the most–more than Sierra Nevada and Casablanca and Russ Feingold combined–that’s where we part.

Photo by bee boxes.

It starts like this: I crawl into bed, but just as I’m about to fall asleep, I get this tingly feeling in my lower legs. It grows and deepens until I feel like a million tiny bugs are crawling around under my skin. Twitching and wiggling helps relieve the antsiness, but it also wakes up my boyfriend and makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. So I get up and walk around and eventually read a book or watch a movie or play on the internet until I’m so tired I’m half-asleep in my chair. Only then–usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 A.M.–can I actually fall into my bed and pass out without fighting the overwhelming urge to squirm.

Fact: Restless legs syndrome is the one medical condition that people inevitably single out when trying to prove that doctors over-pathologize normal, everyday conditions in order to sell more medication. Restless legs? they scoff. I mean, come on. How does that affect your health in any way? How bad can it possibly be?

Fact: People who say things like this are idiots.

*

I’ve been trying to fix my sleep schedule. I sleep too little, too much, at the wrong time of day. This has been a problem for me since high school, when my parents were alarmed that, despite the fact that I could never get up in the mornings and spent seven hours at school, two at track practice and two more at play rehearsals, I was never exhausted enough to fall asleep before 1 or 2 A.M. They took me to a doctor who mentioned it might delayed sleep phase syndrome–a fancy name for the fact that my night-owliness was not personal preference or laziness but a result of my circadian rhythms being inherently fucked–but mostly just told me to lay off the caffeinated soda. My sleep patterns only deteriorated once I got to college–during my freshman year of college, they gradually evolved into two four or five hour naps, one just after dinner and the other around 5 or 6 A.M., depending what time I had to be up for class. I pulled regular all-nighters, regardless of whether or not I had a paper to write or an exam to study for. My sleep patterns only normalized when I was waiting tables 30 hours a week in addition to going to school. Running around on campus and at work for twelve hours a day, I wore myself out so much that I could finally fall asleep as soon as my homework was done.

My stress level has been really high lately. I’m trying to modify my daily routines–sleeping, eating, drinking, running–trying to mold them into patterns that decrease my anxiety instead of upping it. But I’m starting to think I have the deck stacked against me here.

Turner Classic Movies is airing a 1973 Katharine Hepburn interview. I love watching her talk outside of the movies. She just kicks her feet up on the table, spews no bullshit, and never doubts herself.

“When I set out in my 20s I understood very little but I understood this much: Any educated white person in America is privileged, and no one is going to allow us to starve. We can’t even starve if we want to. People keep inviting us to dinner to talk about Robert Lowell.” – Cary Tennis

Photo by Lisa Brewster.

Why I Threw Out My Scale, or Body Image Issues Aren’t Interesting to People Who Don’t Have Them (So I Won’t Be Offended If You Don’t Read This)

Like every other 18-year-old going off to college, I spent one of those August weekends at Ikea, picking out cheap dorm decor. Unlike most other 18-year-olds going off to college, one of the things I bought was a scale. Since it was from Ikea, it cost three dollars and probably was not the most accurate model on the market, but it served me well through all of college and approximately six different kinds of disordered eating. (Name it and I’ve probably done it–compulsive overexercise, ED-NOS with anorexic features, bingeing, fasting, orthorexia. I’m like the hipster snob of eating disorders–I’ve tried everything; I’ve had eating disorders that most people haven’t even heard of . . . before they were cool.)  I would eat normally for a few months and gain a couple pounds; then I would try something new to lose them. No matter how positive my intentions were, how healthy I thought I was being, the end result was inevitably that I ended up with an increasingly hostile relationship to food and my body, always eating less and working out more than I should have been. And still never skinny.

Thanks to my Ikea scale, until this year I’ve never not known what my weight was.

I weighed myself at least once a day. I went through periods where I weighed myself 20 times a day. The number on the scale determined if I was going to have a good day or a bad day, because no matter how many other things happened over the course of the next 12 hours, that number was in the back of my head. In theory, it determined whether I was allowed to eat normally or not, but most of the time, both a number that was higher than I expected or one that was lower than I expected encouraged me to restrict. If the number was too high, I had to cut back on my food intake because I was too fat to eat like a normal person. If the number was on the low side, it was encouragement to not eat anything else.

This relationship with my scale exhausted me. I always felt too old and too smart for that kind of obsession, which only served to make me feel more stupid and immature for continuing to buy into it.

So when we moved, I got rid of it.

At first, this made me anxious. In the back of my head, I had this creeping fear that I was getting fatter and fatter, that I was somehow going to gain a hundred pounds without even noticing it. But when my pants still fit me three months later, I relaxed a little, and started to focus on what I was doing with my body.

Anybody who weighs themselves too often knows that the scale isn’t a terribly accurate indicator of the direction your body is heading. You can eat nothing all day but gain weight because you drank too much tea. You can do a hard workout, burn 700 calories–and gain weight because your body’s retaining water to repair all your overworked muscles. You can eat half a pizza, drink wine all night, and wake up three pounds lighter the next morning. And two people who weigh exactly the same number of pounds can look entirely different (not to mention have completely different fitness levels) based on how their body is shaped and their body fat percentage. Weighing yourself all the time is a distraction from the factors that are actually important–what you eat, what your body can do, how your clothes fit.

In the absence of numbers, I have different measuring sticks. Instead of eating pizza and praying that I lose weight . . . I just have to eat salads. (Or eat pizza and own it.) I have to keep working out instead of just going balls-to-the-wall for two weeks and quitting, because without the scale, I don’t get any feedback until I can read it on my body–my triceps getting stronger, my biceps getting bigger, my stomach getting flatter. That takes time.

Because I don’t have a scale anymore, I can do full-out push-ups for the first time in my life instead of the knees-down girly ones. I can even do one-handed push-ups. (Okay, only one or two at a time! But it’s still pretty bad-ass.) I run more often, I eat more vegetables, my abs are tighter. Instead of focusing on shrinking myself until I hit an arbitrary number, I just focus on running longer and faster, doing more repetitions, eating better and better. That little number in the back of my head that used to determine my day is gone.

I’m not saying that getting rid of the scale fixed everything. I’m not saying that my body image issues are completely gone. But what I’ve learned is that I couldn’t even start to work on them until I stopped weighing myself.